Coping With Crises

This is a book for anyone who works with people in crisis. It can equally well be read by their clients, since it aims to give the reader a basic understanding of crisis and to relate this to their own experience. Indeed, everyone reading this book will fall into one of three categories: those who have had a major life crisis, those who are currently facing one, and those who are going to have one. For this reason, much of Coping With Crises is written to help you understand your own crises as well as other people’s. Professional help should go hand-in-hand with the person’s own resources; the aim is to ‘enable’ rather than ‘disable’ the person’s own coping mechanisms. The skilled helper is not the one who ‘takes over’, but rather the one who helps others to help themselves. To do this, you need to understand the psychology of coping and of how people seek and accept help.