Ending the Sex Wars: A Woman’s Guide to Understanding Men

Dr. Morley Glicken wrote Ending the Sex Wars: A Woman’s Guide to Understanding Men (iUniverse, 2005) to help women understand the often strange and perplexing behavior of the men in their lives. There’s no reason men might not read it as well since the book is written to help men and women get along better. If it’s true that we have a sex war going on, then all of us lose by not making peace and getting on with the pleasant task of loving and enjoying each other.


Click here to read Chapters 1 and 2.


To purchase the entire volume, click here.

Using the Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice: A Positive Approach for the Helping Professions

The idea that people can resolve serious social and emotional problems by focusing on the strengths in their lives is an elegant concept, but one at odds with many current notions of psychotherapy that focus on what's wrong with people. The strengths perspective is interested in showing how the day-to-day work that most of us do to keep ourselves going, even in the midst of crisis, is the basis for a more effective way of helping people. Furthermore, the strengths perspective suggests that even without the help of trained professionals, many people in deep despair show resilience and actually resolve their problems by using the positive influences of family, community, support networks, religious and spiritual beliefs, and a philosophy of life that not only guides them through moments of deep sorrow but actually enhances and improves their social and emotional lives. According to Dr. Morley Glicken:

While the focus of Using the Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice is to show clinicians how to use the strengths perspective, it is also to suggest that much is to be learned from the amazingly resilient people who navigate the troubled waters of life’s traumas. Many social and emotional problems that currently require a trained mental health professional can be resolved when people use the natural resources in their lives. All too little is known about resilience, but from a strengths point of view, it is the key to understanding how people cope with life difficulties and how they often come out of a crisis stronger and more certain of their goals, desires, and directions in life.

In the strengths perspective, the worker allows the client to involve the helper in a journey of understanding. That journey is defined by a sense of astonishment by the helper that the client would allow him or her to view his or her often-painful inner world. It is a world of hurt and sorrow coupled, to be sure, with a world of heroism, bravery, loving devotion, sensitivity to others, a helping impulse, and the amazing moments in time when even the most hardened and destructive among us reach out to others and act in ways that can only fill us with immense joy at the unpredictability of the human spirit. It is an approach to helping that uses what works for people to dominate the discussion of how those in difficulty can get better. For the depressed client who struggles with the urge to give up, every day must be an act of bravery to bathe, dress, take care of family, work, pay bills, and nurture children, spouses, and loved ones. Most of that behavior suggests an extraordinary effort to cope that is, from our perspective, moving and heroic. The pathology model would view that behavior in no specific way, choosing instead to focus on feelings of depression and the difficulty in making emotional progress. The strengths perspective would wonder what prompts the person to do as well as he or she does. It would ask what internal and external mechanisms propel the person to get on with life even if the struggle is often more than he or she can take.

I believe that as the client begins to appreciate what is good, functional, and positive about him- or herself, the mechanisms used to achieve success in one area of life will transfer over to those areas of life that are more problematic. It seems to me, then, that the essence of the strengths perspective is the belief that focusing on what is good about the client will provide more real gain than focusing on what is bad. And while this is more easily said than done, this book is about helping people get well who are in serious social and emotional difficulty. By getting well, I mean living with an absence of internal emotional pain and providing the society we live in with the benefits of these people’s talents and abilities. A practice approach that fails to encourage socially responsible behavior fails, in my view, to truly help people.

This book is written for the brave and resolute among us who fight the daily battle of survival against all odds, and who often win. But it is particularly written for my daughter Amy and for my sister Gladys, who are the best example I know of people who use the strengths perspective every day of their lives—and who are wise, caring, and loving people as a result.

Learning From Resilient People: Lessons We Can Apply to Counseling and Psychotherapy

This book is about the ways resilient people navigate the troubled waters of life’s traumas. 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 than before the crisis.  Although we think we know what it means to be resilient, we know far less about why some people are resilient, or how their resilience functions across the life cycle and through multiple life events. All of these issues will be discussed at length in this book, which continues the development of ideas found in two other books by Dr. Morley Glicken—Using the Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice: A Positive Approach for the Helping Professions (Pearson, 2004) and Improving the Effectiveness of the Helping Professions: An Evidence-Based Approach to Practice (Sage, 2005)—who explains:

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 researching each book leads me to believe there is demonstrable evidence that many people are resilient and that we can learn about how they cope with traumas and apply those successful approaches to people’s lives.

Instead of writing a purely research-oriented book, I’ve tried to combine the current research with stories resilient people have shared with me about the traumas they’ve successfully dealt with. I’ve then compared their coping strategies with the existing research. Although Chapter 1 describes the way stories from resilient people are analyzed, the process of gathering stories about resilience needs to be explained. I asked people at professional and social functions, friends, colleagues, and people I met randomly who had stories of resilience to send them to me. The stories were to contain the traumas experienced by the storyteller, when they were experienced, what the storyteller did to cope with the traumas, and why the storyteller’s coping approaches seemed to work. The stories were then to be compared to the existing research on resilience to confirm or depart from current beliefs about resilience. The coping strategies that were clearly identified by storytellers and seemed consistent throughout the book would then be summarized in a series of suggestions for clinical practice.

This approach combines the objective with the more subjective. Although the stories included are single events, and generalizing to other populations of people experiencing similar traumas may be difficult, there is much to be learned from a more subjective approach. Proving or disproving theories of resilience becomes more likely when the bulk of the more than 50 stories included in the book agree or disagree with existing research. This approach also answers more fundamental questions about resilience throughout the life span and the ability of resilient people to cope with multiple traumas. Since I have included interviews with many of the people whose stories appear here, the reader has an opportunity to obtain additional information about resilience not necessarily included in the stories.

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. 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. 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 to remember the many among us who suffer because of the harm done to them by others, this book is written for the abused and neglected, the homeless and the hungry, the victims of terror, the immigrants who suffer indignities to the body and to the spirit, the children who grow up with violence, and to our fellow citizens who live with unimaginable social and emotional pain. Their anguish should motivate us to open our hearts and minds to new ideas and, in Bertrand Russell’s words, to have “unbearable sympathy for the suffering of others.”

Evidence-Based Practice With Emotionally Troubled Children and Adolescents

Dr. Morley Glicken is the author of Evidence-Based Practice with Emotionally Troubled Children and Adolescents (Elsevier, 2009) and a number of other professional books whose objective is to improve the effectiveness of the help social workers provide to a variety of clients. This book on evidence-based practice with children and adolescents comes from a deep sense of concern that not only are we misdiagnosing children by giving them adult diagnostic labels; we’re also using untested, sometimes dangerous medications for children who could benefit from the kind and helpful support and behaviorally significant services provided by human service professionals. Says Dr. Glicken:

I’m also very concerned about the youth of America, particularly those most at risk. I hope you share that concern, and I challenge you to think about children in a more positive and hopeful way so that you use your bully pulpits as professionals and as nonprofessionals to develop new and exciting approaches to work with America’s youth.

Although I wrote this book for human service professionals, I think interested nonprofessionals and parents will benefit from reading it. I don’t think you’ll find it difficult at all to understand.

In my book I cover the many diverse problems affecting children and adolescents and the treatment approaches with best evidence of effectiveness. Because research on children and their emotional problems is often scant or flawed, it’s fine if your own experiences suggest other paths to follow. Let me know what works in your practice with children.

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

Dr. Morley Glicken and the professionals at the Institute for Personal Growth invite you to contact us about issues pertaining to older love. Those issues are discussed in detail in a book by Dr. Glicken titled Mature Friendships, Love, and Romance: A Practical Guide to Intimacy for Older Adults, available on Amazon.com and through Praeger Publishers. If you would like to learn more about what true love means for older adults and how to be wise in your decisions involving mates, please e-mail Dr. Glicken or contact him at (928) 592-4698 for a free consultation and to find out about the programs and workshops offered through the Institute for Personal Growth. To find out more about Dr. Glicken's past experiences as a scholar, writer, and practitioner, click here. This is what Dr. Glicken says about mature love in his book:

When I think of mature love I think of two people who feel comfortable with one another. They can talk, plan, touch, be intimate, and carry positive feelings for each other through disagreements and times of stress. They protect one another from the fear of being alone and from actually being alone during a health crisis. They know each other’s emotional blind spots and accept each other for who they are, not who they wish their partners were. They are grounded in the present. Instead of bringing up past experiences that involve other people, they focus on the here and now rather than the then and there. They don’t make unrealistic demands on each other but use gentle persuasion to help their partners see blind spots that may sometimes interfere in the relationship.

When times are tough in the relationship, as they sometimes are, people in a mature relationship play fair. They don’t use tactics that hurt the relationship irreparably just for the sake of winning. They think of themselves as “us” rather than “me and you.” They appreciate the talents and abilities of their partners and encourage and support growth. In a mature relationship there are no stars but instead two partners who work and play together rather than two separate people living their own lives.

Mature love means equality. It means that while one person may do better in certain areas of the relationship or have special skills, when everything is tallied up, the contribution to the relationship is equal. Mature love means that time is spent understanding the special abilities of each partner so that those abilities serve to strengthen the relationship. Mature love means never using sarcasm or embarrassing a partner in public. And unlike in Love Story, mature love means saying you’re sorry every 5 minutes, if necessary. In a mature relationship, apologizing should come easily, and it should always come from the heart.

If you’ve had children by someone other than your partner, mature love means treating the children of your partner as if they were your own—with love, tenderness, and concern. It means never criticizing your partner’s children because it’s hurtful and there are better ways to share your feelings. Mature love means understanding that you and your partner have the need to be alone with your own children and that giving your partner and his or her children the time and space to be together, even if it means a week or more without your partner, is part of the responsibility of being an older adult in a loving and tender relationship.

Mature love means that both of you are involved in keeping the relationship vital and interesting. This doesn’t mean that you have to hop around the world or be on the go all the time. It means that relationships become stale in time if two people aren’t equally involved in activities that are fun, challenging, and memorable. The mate who always plans while his or her partner goes along is not taking responsibility to keep the relationship alive. Passive people add nothing to relationships.

Mature love means that you plan to be with your partner through sickness and ill health. No fudging on this one. Mature love means that you’ve anticipated the many things that can happen to older people and you’ve made a commitment to your partner, and to yourself—a sacred vow, really—that no matter what, you’ll be there for him or her. Otherwise, you’re just playing at love and you have an exit strategy. That isn’t mature love; it’s adolescent love. It’s the type of love that results in breakups, divorces, hurt feelings, and broken hearts. It has no place in the world of mature love. Unless you make a pledge to your loved one that you’ll be there for him or her, no matter what, you can’t call your relationship mature or loving. If you have an exit strategy you should call the relationship exactly what it is: temporary, uncommitted, and separate.

Mature love is based in reality. Most of us, after a certain age, don’t walk along the beach hand in hand watching the sunset and then have drinks over a candlelit dinner before making love while listening to the waves roll in. Sometimes, of course, but you can’t do that every night or think of love as something out of a bad romance novel. Mature love is based on deep feelings of affection and warmth, not walks along the beach. I think most of us know that, but unfortunately too many older people base their notions of love and romance on the popular culture rather than the wisdom of older men and women whose relationships have lasted and prospered.

Most of all, mature love means that you can become old together and not worry about your loved one becoming emotionally and physically detached because he or she no longer finds you interesting or attractive. Mature people recognize that aging is an equal opportunity employer; as you age and you want your loved one to continue finding you attractive, your partner has the same need. Flirting, carrying on relationships behind your mate’s back, or having secret friendships is hurtful and just not part of a mature relationship. There are rules of civility that apply in mature love. If you can’t accept the rules and you still think of yourself as an older adolescent, you will not be able to call a relationship mature or loving.

In summary, as my daughter Amy wrote, “Many of us are overwhelmed with our daily workloads and feel unable to make long-term, far-reaching changes in our close relationships. But I believe that each of us has a gift that we can use to make our relationships better than they are. The task is simply to discern what our gifts are and to utilize them. Because, in the end, we are each our own Tooth Fairies, taking what has been lost and giving gold in return.”