Books
Essential Readings on Relationships and Conflict
Renewing Your Relationship: 5 Necessary Steps
by David Olsen and Erin Belanger-Freeh
Renewing Your Relationship: 5 Necessary Steps is a practical, easy-to-read workbook for couples interested in working together on their relationship as well as individuals attempting to understand their most intimate connections. In fact, couples therapists David Olsen and Erin Belanger-Freeh base Renewing Your Relationship in the most fundamental component of relationships: the self. Step one is changing oneself and one’s role in a relationship.
Turning Conflict into Intimacy
by David Olsen and Erin Belanger-Freeh
No one likes conflict, and most people believe that the key to a healthy marriage is less conflict. In reality, conflict is a necessary part of all relationships, and conflict handled well can increase intimacy. This book sets out to achieve three primary goals that all culminate in achieving one final goal:
- Help couples understand their unique conflict styles
- Help couples understand what goes wrong in their conflicts, and
- Help provide couples with practical skills for handling conflicts creatively, so that
- Couples can experience increased intimacy.Whether couples read this book together, or whether individuals in a relationship read it, developing these skills will help any relationship.
The Couple’s Survival Workbook
by David Olsen and Douglas Stephens
With more than 55 years of experience between them, master couple’s therapists David Olsen and Douglas Stephens know where most relationships go awry. Based on their knowledge of those danger zones, they have created targeted, practical exercises that help you successfully navigate those areas. The goal is to turn problems or potential problems into opportunities for greater communication and intimacy.Olsen and Stephens also know that often only one half of a couple is ready to make real changes. The Couple’s Survival Workbook is designed to work even if your partner isn’t committed to the process. By skillfully changing yourself, you’re likely to find your whole relationship improving.Whether you’re a therapist seeking practical, effective exercises for the couples you work with clients or you are part of a struggling couple looking to make your relationship work, The Couple’s Survival Workbook can help.
Saying No to Say Yes
by David Olsen
Saying No to Say Yes: Everyday Boundaries and Pastoral Excellence is an essential guide for pastors seeking to avoid the dual pitfalls of entanglement in congregational drama and burnout. It provides pastors concrete guidance on how to draw boundaries that facilitate community engagement while still maintaining the crucial distance that fosters enduring leadership.
The Spiritual Work of Marriage
by David Olsen
Statistically speaking, about half of all first marriages fail. The Spiritual Work of Marriage comprehensively discusses an issue that is central to addressing committed relationships and intimacy-the difficult, and yet very common, spiritual work that exists within marriage. This insightful guide goes deeper into ways to improve marital intimacy by explaining its spiritual dimension and describing a variety of spiritual themes that every couple deals with and must resolve. The book contains practical case study material, questions for group discussion, and a series of spiritual and theological theories tied to powerful marital dynamics.
Integrative Family Therapy
by David Olsen
Pastoral counselors, therapists-in-training, and clergy are usually introduced to one method of family assessment and treatment, which works better in some situations than in others. Integrative Family Therapy introduces the major schools of family therapy, proposes a tested model that integrates the various approaches, and illustrates how this model functions both for assessing and treating family problems. Seven central concepts are discerned as a way of understanding the various family therapies as a group. Then the major family therapy theories are discussed, including cognitive, family life cycle-developmental, interactional-communication, multigenerational, object relations, problem solving, and structural family. After examining their deep structures, an integrated model of six discrete moments is presented and illustrated. Charts direct the reader through the model and illustrate how the model is employed by means of several case studies.
Wounded Pastors
by Carol Howard and James Fenimore
You’re not alone in your ministry. And you don’t have to suffer in silence. Ministry is a stressful vocation, with unspoken expectations, projected anxieties, and conflicting demands. After the pandemic caused a sudden shift to online worship and factions fighting over when and how to return to in-person worship, pastors have been leaving congregational ministry at even higher rates than usual. The emotional fallout of burnout and abuse at the hands of parishioners is something pastors carry for years, whether they stay or leave the congregation.
Seasoned pastor Carol Howard Merritt and psychotherapist and former pastor James Fenimore join their expertise to offer validation, support, and guidance for pastors who have been hurt by the church. With wisdom that can come only from experience, they describe and define aspects of struggle and pain readers may have difficulty articulating or claiming for themselves, and they offer compassionate, informed guidance on how to find healing. A systems approach to conflict sheds light on the dynamics of church conflict and how clergy can tend their own well-being amid leadership challenges. The final chapter helps readers consider their overall vocational path based on what they’ve experienced and decide whether they can remain in congregational ministry or need to pursue a different line of work.