"Basic Councelling Skills" - Richard Nelson-Jones

"Basic Councelling Skills" by Richard Nelson - Jones is a manual for helpers.

Helpers are considered people who use counselling as their second set of skills along with their main profession (nursing, finances, education etc).

I bought this book for two reasons: to help me learn how to behave with clients and how to deal with some senior family members (communication with whom reminds me of a counselling session rather than anything else). 

The book itself seems to be formal, concise and complete textbook for serious helpers. It has 29 chapters divided into short sections and covering many important aspects of counselling. After the end of each chapter there are questions and exercises for practicing in pairs. 

The book covers everything from greeting the client to how to dress, think and talk when being with the client. It discusses gender, race, culture, age, disability and sexual orientation as well. It covers recording and supervising the sessions. It also informs on any formal education needed in counselling (United Kingdom), where to go and which courses to do. It has an appendix with lots of recommended counselling literature to read on.

This manual is a guide and a textbook that should be worked with from time to time. It has so much information that is difficult to absorb in one read. The manual also focuses on self-help and can be used for work with oneself. However, this work doesn't teach psychology per se. 

I would definitely recommend this book for everyone who works with clients and needs counselling skills. No matter what is your level, this is a great guide to show you the way. 

"Tarot and Psychology" - Arthur Rosengarten, Ph.D.

"Tarot and Psychology" by Arthur Rosengarten is a 290 page work on tarot through the eyes of a clinical psychologist. "In this book, I will lay the groundwork for approaching Tarot as a tool of significant psychological and spiritual usefulness and discuss its relevance to contemporary psychology" - Arthur Rosengarten.

I have read this book in two attempts. At first I read the two thirds of it and after 6 months, I read the remaining third. 

The author writes in a very scientific way and this book is packed with references, names and quotes. It mentions Freud, Jung, Rachel Pollack, Rider Waite, synchronicity, I Ching and many other things. 

To be honest, it was a very difficult and confusing read for me. It seemed that the author was beating around the bush and never really getting to the point. I lost my patience a lot of times while reading this book. It was interesting in its own masochistic way but, in my opinion, the complicated vocabulary wasn't necessary (unless the book was actually meant for professional psychologists and psychotherapists). 

An excerpt:

"An important trend for the past four decades has been the steady shift away from Freud's emphasis on instinctual wishes including the conflicts and defenses connected to those wishes, towards the increasing importance placed on the development of self and object representations (images), particularly at the pre ego developmental stages between 18 to 36 months of age ("on the road to object constancy"). Later in this book we will observe how a Tarot reading can be used to elucidate such representations through spread cluster interpretation, as we have already suggested in the previous chapter. Tarot applied in this framework can function as an adjunctive tool, a focusing technique of sorts, whose usefulness will depend on the phase of treatment and the therapist's specific intent." (Arthur Rosengarten, p. 68)

I did enjoy some of the findings and ideas within this book. It had a very interesting study-experiment in the end of the book about how does tarot really work and what is synchronicity. I think I actually was looking for a book that would talk about that and I think it answered to my question, that we don't yet have technology to measure synchronicity and cause of events where there is no visible connection between the outcome and the cause (just because it's invisible it doesn't mean it's not there). 

Also I loved tarot reading samples provided at the end of the book done with domestic violence victims and prisoners. That was a study that wanted to see if there would be a pattern of tarot cards fallen to people when the same problem is discussed (domestic violence). So that experiment actually revealed that some cards would come out more often to the people dealing with similar challenges in life (so there is a pattern and not a coincidence).

The author also provides a very good and accurate list of all tarot card meanings in the appendix of the book, including a phrase, traditional meaning and a proverb.

So, overall it was a very hard and heavy read for me but I found the things that I was looking for.

"Telepsychics" - Dr Joseph Murphy

"Telepsychics" by Joseph Murphy is a great classical self-help book. It is written in an easy language and is about how one can use their mind to change one's reality. 

It's based on the New Age (and some scientists') beliefs that thought is energy and we create what we think. It is similar to Abraham Hicks, Louise Hay, Blavatsky and other authors. 

The book is 222 page long and it is packed with information. The information is pretty rare and super modern. The author talks a lot about visualization, healing, prayer, desire, black magic (that it doesn't exist, only God exists), protection, faith, psychic phenomena, spiritism, ghosts, material success, how to find your soulmate, how to protect yourself from black magic, how to achieve your dreams and similar things. The book is well packed with solutions for the most difficult problems one might have.

I think it's a must read for everyone and should be in the bookshelf of every home. I especially recommend this book for everyone who feels discouraged, depressed, scared or lost in their life. I honestly think this book might help to feel more hopeful and even protected by higher forces. 

The only thing that I didn't like about this book were the psalms from the Bible. I am not a religious person so every time I see references to the Bible, I feel put off. However the author wasn't forceful about it and said many times that our religious beliefs don't matter. God is one.