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This qualitative study identified protective practices that mitigate risks of vicarious traumatization (VT) among mental health therapists. The sample included six peer-nominated master therapists, who responded to the question, "How do you manage to sustain your personal and professional well-being, given the challenges of your work with seriously traumatized clients?" Data analysis was based upon Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber's (1998) typology of narrative analysis. Findings included nine major themes salient across clinicians' narratives of protective practices: countering isolation (in professional, personal and spiritual realms); developing mindful self-awareness; consciously expanding perspective to embrace complexity; active optimism; holistic self-care; maintaining clear boundaries; exquisite empathy; professional satisfaction; and creating meaning. Findings confirm and extend previous recommendations for ameliorating VT and underscore the ethical responsibility shared by employers, educators, professional bodies, and individual practitioners to address this serious problem. The novel finding that empathic engagement with traumatized clients appeared to be protective challenges previous conceptualizations of VT and points to exciting new directions for research, theory, training, and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

This qualitative study was designed to identify protective practices that mitigate risks of Vicarious Traumatization (VT) among trauma therapists. The sample included six peernominated experienced therapists, trained at the masters or doctoral level, who self-identified as having managed well in this work. Narrative data was collected through interviews with individual co-participants, who were asked, "How do you manage to sustain your personal and professional wellbeing, given the challenges of your work with seriously traumatized clients?" Data analysis was based upon Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber's (1998) typology of narrative analysis, with a primary focus on thematic content analysis within and across participants' narratives. The research findings yielded twelve major themes that describe protective practices engaged by exemplary trauma therapists: countering isolation (in professional, personal and spiritual realms); developing mindful self awareness; consciously expanding perspective to embrace complexity; openness to the unknown; sustaining and renewing hope; active optimism and problem solving; holistic self-care; maintaining clear boundaries; invoking imagery, metaphor, and ritual; exquisite empathy; professional satisfaction; and creating meaning. The novel finding that empathic engagement with traumatized clients appeared to be protective challenges previous conceptualizations of VT and points to exciting new directions for research and theory, as well as applications to practice. Participants also described experiences of vicarious post-traumatic growth. The findings confirm and extend previous recommendations for ameliorating VT and underscore the ethical responsibility shared by employers, educators, professional bodies, and individual practitioners to create time and space to address this serious problem. Participants recommend opportunities for regular supervision, support and validation (including group-based interaction), self-care (including 111 personal therapy, as needed), and developing self-awareness within and beyond the workplace.They think taking care of the caregivers is an organizational responsibility as well as a personal one. Although the research design precludes generalizing from the data, the knowledge generated herein may be helpful to others in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work, psychiatric nursing, and related health care disciplines, at the levels of education, training, and practice.

This article explores key aspects of the termination process in a 16-session treatment protocol of accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP). AEDP theory and its empirical support are described; interventions used throughout termination are demonstrated with verbatim clinical exchanges; and potential challenges faced during termination are addressed. Congruent with AEDP's healing orientation, termination is reframed as completion and launching: Although treatment ends, the change process begun in therapy can continue, as does the therapist's care for the patient. AEDP interventions during termination include (a) relational strategies to foster connection and undo aloneness; (b) the highlighting of patient resilience and the celebration of growth; (c) affirmative work with defenses around loss; (d) coregulation of patient's emotional experience; (e) experiential, bodily-rooted affective strategies to process and transform negative emotions; and (f) thorough exploration and processing of ensuing, vitalizing positive emotions and in-session experiences of change-for-the-better (i.e., metatherapeutic processing), to expand these and promote enhanced well-being and flourishing. Therapists aim to (a) elicit and process emotions related to the completion of treatment; (b) celebrate patients' affective achievements; and (c) convey trust and confidence in an ongoing transformational process, predicted to yield not only diminishment of symptoms and suffering but also upward spirals of flourishing. AEDP suggests that in providing patients a new, positive attachment experience of togetherness as therapy ends, termination offers a unique opportunity to disconfirm patients' earlier attachment-based expectations, revise inner working models, and help patients grow in self-confidence as they face, accept, and thrive in the wake of loss. Clinical Impact StatementQuestion: This article explores how accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) therapists help patients achieve an integrative and generative end of therapy experience in a 16-session AEDP treatment protocol. Findings: Emotionally engaged AEDP therapists use interventions to process the complex, often painful feelings related to the completion of treatment, celebrate the patient's affective achievements, and convey trust and confidence in the change process begun in therapy, which need not end with the completion of treatment. Meaning: The 16-session AEDP treatment offers patients a new experience of emotion in connection, through a shared ending, predicted to be facilitative of attachment security and enhanced confidence and self-efficacy. Next Steps: Future research will further elucidate how the termination process in 16-session AEDP restructures patients' inner working models and yields ongoing change and upward spirals of flourishing that extend well beyond the end of the finite treatment.

When Ulrich, Duke of Württemberg, regained his ducal throne in May of 1534, he immediately took steps to institute the Reformation in Württmberg. Probably because of his own divided loyalties, he asked both Lutherans and Swiss-Reformed Protestants to come to Württemberg. From the outset, however, their mutual opposition, combined with determined Roman Catholic resistance in some areas, led to difficulties beyond Ulrich's expectations. The ducal commissioners for the Reformation in the southern half of Württemberg was Ambrosius Blarer, the reformer of Constance and a firm ally of both Martin Bucer and Zurich. Part of his responsibility was the University of Tübingen, a center of particularly strong Roman Catholic opposition to the Reformation. Blarer appealed to Duke Ulrich for assistance, asking for the Basel Greek scholar Simon Grynaeus, another Swiss partisan. Ulrich, however, took far more dramatic steps to reform the University of Tübingen. Under instructions from Ulrich, Chancellor Knoder and Erhard Schnepff, Blarer's counterpart in northern Württemberg, wrote to Philip Melanchthon, requesting that he return to his homeland to teach in the University of Tübingen, his alma mater.