Staying Attached

Gill Gorell Barnes works as a family, marital, and couple therapist in private practice and consults to other therapists of different modalities. For ten years she worked as Consultant to Family Court Proceedings in the UK Family Courts, both as therapist and expert witness. She has written a book on family life in transition following divorce, as well as a book on working with children and parents and a research project on stepfamilies. She has also written a number of publications that focus on working with highly acrimonious post-divorce relationships.

"This book is a significant contribution to the literature on fathers. The vexed and challenging issues family therapists face in working with fathers, where there is some level of alienation, isolation, and/or violence and/or mental illness, are discussed from a clinical, theoretical, and research perspective. I feel this is a generous book in that Gill Gorell Barnes describes both her experience and development as a psychiatric social worker and family therapist, who has been practicing since the 1960s and has been teaching and publishing since the 1980s. Rarely are we given a text that reflects the work of a professional career. The book also makes reference to the significance of Gill Gorell Barnes’s own father in her own emotional development. She describes this as being ‘an inner guide to believing in the potential nurturing capacity of men’ (p. xxv). However, she also is not naive about the dangers of violence and patriarchal thinking that severely interfer and restrict thoughtful relationships." --Sally Young, Child and Youth Mental Health Service, Children’s Health Queensland, Queensland in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy

• Series Editors’ Foreword , Preface , Introduction , The changing social context for fathering in the United Kingdom in my lifetime: the family and fathers remembered following the Second World War , Attachment theory, child development research, and mothers’ and fathers’ connections with children in everyday life , Becoming a father in non-live-in fatherhoods , Getting connected after a long absence—fathers re-entering their children’s lives: conflicts of interest, belief, and attachment , Fathers, children, and conflicts in family arrangements following divorce , Processes that alienate one part of the family from another , Fathers, stepfathers, and complex families , Violence in couple and family systems: anxious attachment and disorganised love, power, and control , Working with couples: developing skills in managing unregulated emotion , Working with fathers within family court proceedings: disorganised attachments and violent outcomes , Mental illness, fathers, and families , Reconciliation and forgiveness