Morley D. Glicken

Dr. Morley D. Glicken grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, the son of a labor organizer and poet. Both his parents immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe shortly after World War One. He graduated from the University of North Dakota with degrees in Social Work and Psychology and holds an MSW degree from the University of Washington in Seattle and the MPA and DSW Degrees from the University of Utah. Dr. Glicken trained with Albert Ellis and Bob and Mary Goulding, among others.

He has been on the faculties of a number of universities including Arizona State University, The University of Alabama, and The University of Kansas. He was Dean of the Worden School of Social Service in San Antonio, Texas, the Executive Director of Jewish Family Services in Tucson, Arizona and the founder and original director of the Master of Social Work Program at California State University, San Bernardino.

Dr. Glicken is the author of over 50 professional articles and 16 books. His latest book, "Treating Worker Dissatisfaction During Economic Change" will be published by Elsevier in late 2012. His recent articles on job dissatisfaction and worker burnout can be found at careercast.com.

Dr. Glicken lives in Tucson, Arizona where he directs the Institute for Personal Growth, a Teaching, Training and Research Institute providing a range of services including workshops on mental health issues, Internet counseling, and consultation. The website for the Institute for Personal Growth is: morleyglicken.com. He is an avid tennis player and film buff. His next book will explore the use of cognitive therapy with children.

Blogs on the the following two books may be found at the at:

1. "Evidence-Based Practice with Troubled Children and Adolescents," which may be found at: http://www.morleyglicken.com/BlogChildrensBook.htm

and

2. "Evidence-Based Practice with an Aging Population," which is available at: http://www.morleyglicken.com/BlogOlderAdults.htm

Both blogs will be updated frequently with new information readers interested in children, adolescents and older adults will find helpful in understanding all three populations. Both books on evidence-based practice present the most current research and treatment effectiveness studies available plus case studies and personal stories. Readers interested in Evidence-Based Practice will find the books helpful in understanding the notion of best evidence and how it applies to mental health issues. Both books will be of interest to mental health professionals and to non-professionals.

Preface from Several Recent Books By Dr. Glicken

1. Learning From Resilient People: Lessons We Can Apply to Counseling and Psychotherapy (Sage, 2006)

(Available from Sage Publications and Amazon.com)

This book is about the way resilient people navigate the troubled waters of life's traumas. It is a book for all readers not just people working in mental health.

While a number of researchers believe that resilience is the key to understanding how people successfully cope with traumatic life events and why they often come out of a crisis stronger and more certain of their goals and directions in life, the concept of resilience is still fairly new. While we think we know what it means to be a resilient, we know far less about why people are resilient, or how their resilience functions across the life cycle and through difficult life events.

This book continues the development of ideas found in two other books I've written, one on the Strengths Perspective (Glicken, 2004) and the other on Evidence-Based Practice (Glicken, 2005). In both books I've argued for a knowledge-guided approach to practice that focuses on client strengths. Much of what I've found in the research for each book leads me to believe that there is demonstrable evidence that many people are resilient and that positive and deeply supportive approaches to counseling and psychotherapy can improve our treatment effectiveness.

In addition, I've found that self-help groups led by highly talented and resilient non-professionals show great promise in improving the social functioning of group members through a focus on affirmation, unconditional acceptance, and positive reinforcement-- conditions not always found in the work done by professional helpers. And there is strong reason to suggest that natural healing, the internal processes that many people use to deal with addictions and other life problems, is very often effective in coping with a range of emotional problems. Most people stop smoking, lose weight, and stop using substances on their own. Focusing on why they do so well when others don't and applying their approaches to coping with life difficulties might lead to breakthroughs in the way we treat a range of troubled clients.

This book uses a variety of stories from resilient people I met at professional and social functions that had stories of personal resilience. The stories were then compared to the existing research on resilience to confirm or reject current beliefs about resilience. This approach combines the objective with the more subjective and, of course, the stories included are single events and generalizing to other populations of people experiencing similar traumas may be difficult. Still, there is much to be learned from a wellness model and proving or disproving theories of resilience becomes more likely when the bulk of the more than 40 stories included in this book agree or disagree with existing research.

Unlike popular notions of resilience that describes resilient people as super human, many of the people whose stories are included in this book are people who usually function well but sometimes function less well in times of severe crisis and stress. Resilient people aren't always admirable or necessarily good people. They slip and slide and go forwards and backwards in life. For the most part, however, they do very well given the seriousness of their traumas. Like many of us who grew up in families that were overwhelmed with life problems, I learned about resilience from my blue-collar, immigrant parents. They dealt with illness, lack of finances, social isolation, and the bigotry of people against immigrant Jews in ways that modeled resilience to all of us in my family. But being resilient and surviving serious life problems, while still achieving at a high level, isn't done without a price and the reader will note throughout this book that resilience is defined as successful social functioning. It doesn't mean that resilient people are necessarily happy people. Some readers will take exception to this belief feeling that truly resilient people must necessarily be happy and self-fulfilled.

Not everyone is resilient, of course, and the brave and resolute among us must often fight the daily battle of survival against all odds and often in deep anguish. So that we don't forget the many among us who suffer because of the harm done to them by others, this book is written for the abused and neglected children who show amazing resilience in their lives and who learn to deal with sorrow in ways that astonish and instruct us. Their example should motivate all of us to open our minds and our hearts to new ideas, new helping approaches, and to making a commitment to do the very best we can for the many special people we are so privileged to help.

2. Retirement for Workaholics: Life After Work in a Downsized Economy (Praeger, 2010)

(Available from Praeger Publishers and Amazon.com)

Like me, many of you have worked very hard at jobs that have given you pleasure. It's not easy to think about retirement when so much of your life has been spent working. Even though you may have other interests, stopping work because you've been downsized or because you're quite frankly burned out isn't easy, particularly if you've neglected other areas of your life and now find yourself without the pleasures of a rich family life and outside interests when you have the free time that retirement provides.

This is a book for those of you who need some help in approaching retirement even though you haven't taken the time to plan or develop some of the skills necessary to retire happily. It needn't be a time without work, and as a dedicated but happy workaholic, I'm aware of how silly and unusable many retirement books are because they aren't really geared to the type of person you are and are likely to continue to be once you retire.

As an academic and mental health professional but also an older adult man who knows a lot about the complexities of retirement, I want to offer you information grounded in the realities of age, experience, and the inclusion of research on workaholism and retirement. I also want to include stories from workaholics about how they transition into retirement after years of mind-numbing work at the expense of personal happiness and family life.

I hope you will find this book helpful, and while I use the term workaholic and work-addicted, I don't want to characterize anyone who works hard as dysfunctional. We make the world work and without us, nothing would get done.

3. Mature Friendships, Love, and Romance: A Practical Guide to Intimacy for Older Adults

(Available from Praeger Publishers and Amazon.com)

This is a book for older adults who want to resolve issues of intimacy, romance, friendships, and developing positive relationships with their children and family members. It is a serious book because the subject is a serious one. Love is life sustaining. Romance is just as vital to older people as it is to younger people ,and loneliness, as we age without good friends and positive relationships with our families and children is everything it's cracked up to be.

As I began researching what others had written about older adult relationships, I found that almost all of them were about sex. The few books I found on relationships with families and children were often full of psychobabble and silly advice. How serious can books be with titles like: The Juicy Tomatoes Guide to Ripe Living after 50; How not to become a little old lady; Juicy Tomatoes: Plain Truths, Dumb Lies, and Sisterly Advice About Life After 50; Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty, and I could go on.

I'm an older adult and I think I know something about every aspect of what this book will cover from my own life experiences. I've also been a social work practitioner working with older adults and a professor of social work involved in training graduate students to work with older adults. From these experiences I can tell you that relationships are tremendously important to people as we age. As a result, I promise I won't approach the need for healthy and life enhancing relationships in a frivolous way.

I hope you will find this book a wealth of information, written in an easy style, and filled with stories from older adults about their relationships, good and bad. The stories come from real older people who have something to say. I've asked them to write honestly about themselves and not to give pat answers to tough life problems. You will find some of the stories very moving with positive outcomes, and others touching, but hurtful. I want you to experience a range of stories. Perhaps you will find a story that is close to the issues you're dealing with and it will help you resolve some of your relationship problems. If not resolve them, at least understand them better.

Men are as concerned about relationships as women but from the wealth of books written for older adult women you wouldn't think men exist or have concerns about their relationships with others. They do and I've tried, in the stories written by men and the research I've presented to make this book relevant to men and to women.

I believe that the last third of our lives can be our best years. The people who come into our lives have potential to be the very truest friends we'll ever have. The people we love deeply can add happy and productive years to our lives. In writing this book I'm also aware that many of us have troubled and hurtful relationships with others and I promise to write this book mindful of Bertrand Russell's words that we should all have "unbearable sympathy for the suffering of others," particularly those of us who write books to help others.

4. Treating Worker Dissatisfaction During Economic Change (With Ben Robinson; Elsevier, 2013)

In the current economy, companies and public organizations are expected to respond quickly to changing market needs and ever decreasing funding to stay vibrant. What that means is that organizations constantly reorganize---not just every year but sometimes as frequently as every 6 months. Workers live in a constant state of change that includes new processes, new procedures, new bosses, and new organizational structures where they are often measured on goals that were typically set before the changing economy and then, never modified. As a result, there is very little loyalty to workers who may have been valued in the past. The new emphasis in the workplace is on “what have you done for me lately?” This changing dynamic in the workplace has undoubtedly increased worker dissatisfaction, lowered morale, and often led to burnout in workers who were previously satisfied with their jobs and productive.

To understand how the new dynamic in the workplace has affected workers and productivity, the book will focus on the most current research evaluating worker difficulties as a result of the changing pressures in the workplace and what can be done by workers, managers, HR Professionals, and therapists to reduce the stressors that often result in workers who feel demeaned, misused, overworked, and under constant pressure to perform.

Part one of the book sets the stage with a discussion of the current economic climate and how it impacts the public and private sectors, how organizations react to it, and how the new work climate affects employees. Part Two of the book lays out the most current research on what organizations and workers can do to improve the workplace, reduce stress, and improve worker coping skills and performance. Case studies and guidelines will be used extensively throughout the book. A website will include instruments to measure and provide strategies that address worker satisfaction, morale, loss of compassion, and burnout.

The authors are social work educators who have managed large organizations and have years of experience as therapists and managers dealing with workplace problems. We write this book because of our concern for the American workforce, which is often underpaid, overworked, under appreciated and, when it comes to unionized workers, ridiculed. We also write the book for managers who often work under tremendous pressure that affects their personal lives and are as subject to stress, unhappiness at work, and burnout as the workers they manage. Downsizing, letting people go, firing workers you’ve known for years…by any name it’s hurtful and all too common in this time of world-wide economic upheaval.

Not everyone who works suffers from many of the problems we discuss in the book, which makes it all the more important that we remember the large number of unemployed workers in America, the many workers who toil in dangerous workplaces, the older workers who get downsized and have no hope of ever finding a new job, the workers whose unemployment has run out, and the new graduates who face unfulfilling futures doing work which neither excites nor inspires them. Their anguish should motivate all of us to open our hearts and minds to new ideas, to new treatment approaches and, in Bertrand Russell’s words, to have “unbearable sympathy for the suffering of others.”