Helping Adults to Grow Up: A Practitioner's Guide to Stage Climbing

This book presents Stage Climbing, an innovative seven stage developmental model as a new tool to help practitioners recognize cognitions, attitudes and behaviors-- typical of different life stages and thus levels of maturity-- in order to select the most effective treatment interventions with adult clients. It is the first book to integrate cognitive behavioral (CBT) concepts into the entire human development spectrum for any area of life that clients choose to work on. It demonstrates how resistance to change can reflect thinking and behavioral patterns that are characteristic of earlier developmental stages. It also presents a model of maturity along with treatment strategies and action steps to motivate change, as well as reactivate a client's natural and organic maturation process. Practitioners at all levels from diverse disciplines and modalities will learn to assess how, why, and where clients are "stuck" developmentally.

This volume offers practitioners, who treat individuals, couples and/or families a psychologically integrated road map that guides clients to take responsibility for living their best life, by removing self-created obstacles which prevent this from occurring naturally. The integration of the most robust aspects of psychodynamics, developmental psychology, and cognitive behavioral therapy will help the field continue to evolve, by providing state of the art interventions to help clients make mature and healthy changes in their lives. All mental health practitioners, regardless of their therapeutic orientations can use the strategies in this book to assess the underlying core belief patterns of clients at each life stage, and apply appropriate interventions to challenge self-defeating beliefs, and proactively work on agreed upon desired outcomes.