Marti Straus, PhD, has recently returned from a very productive sabbatical.
She has landed not one, but two book contracts during this time. The first is a workbook currently titled In It Together: The CO-Regulation Workbook for Traumatized Kids and their Caring Adults (she is writing this with the help of her research assistant, 4th year student, Brooklyn Alvarez). It is chock full of collaborative activities and strategies that can help adults stay calm and connected when their traumatized children and teens are struggling and falling apart. A publisher, PESI, better known for CE presentations and conferences but expanding rapidly into the workbook world, is publishing it.
The second contract is for a co-authorship of the third edition of The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning to Listen can Improve Relationships by Mike Nichols, with Guilford Press, a book that has sold over 150,000 copies to date. Her contribution to the revision will be the addition of a couple chapters and some sections that address the impact on listening of technology, politics, and power differences.
She has written the feature article coming out in the July issue of Psychotherapy Networker Magazine for an issue honoring the 25th anniversary of Mary Pfeiffer’s Reviving Ophelia. Her piece is entitled: Parents These Days: The Miracle of Full Adult Attention in a Distracted, Beeping World. In it, she discusses doing family therapy in the age of the smartphone and makes the case that parents are every bit as distracted as their teens.
She has also been working with a friend and colleague who is a professor of peacebuilding and conflict transformation to develop an intervention/training manual for families torn apart by the post-Trump political divide. Their unwieldy working title is: Peace in the Family: A Guide to Bridging Political Divides at Home… High Anxiety, Political Rifts, Blood Ties, and New Opportunities to Understand the People You Love (So that Maybe Thanksgiving Can Be Better this Year).
She traveled a bit, giving talks and consulting, including conducting two workshops at Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in Washington, DC, leading parent/staff trainings on stress and regulation for three different schools around New England, keynoting at the VT NAMI conference in Burlington, and consulting with an agency in the Albany area about reducing the use of restraints in their residential program for traumatized adolescent girls.
