Helping Adults to Grow Up - A Practitioner's Guide to Stage Climbing

This book presents Stage Climbing, an innovative seven stage developmental model as a new tool to help practitioners recognize cognitions, attitudes and behaviors-- typical of different life stages and thus levels of maturity-- in order to select the most effective treatment interventions with adult clients. It is the first book to integrate cognitive behavioral (CBT) concepts into the entire human development spectrum for any area of life that clients choose to work on. It demonstrates how resistance to change can reflect thinking and behavioral patterns that are characteristic of earlier developmental stages. It also presents a model of maturity along with treatment strategies and action steps to motivate change, as well as reactivate a client's natural and organic maturation process. Practitioners at all levels from diverse disciplines and modalities will learn to assess how, why, and where clients are 'stuck' developmentally.
This volume offers practitioners, who treat individuals, couples and/or families a psychologically integrated road map that guides clients to take responsibility for living their best life, by removing self-created obstacles which prevent this from occurring naturally. The integration of the most robust aspects of psychodynamics, developmental psychology, and cognitive behavioral therapy will help the field continue to evolve, by providing state of the art interventions to help clients make mature and healthy changes in their lives. All mental health practitioners, regardless of their therapeutic orientations can use the strategies in this book to assess the underlying core belief patterns of clients at each life stage, and apply appropriate interventions to challenge self-defeating beliefs, and proactively work on agreed upon desired outcomes.


Michael S. Broder, Ph.D. is a psychologist, author and acclaimed expert in CBT, specializing in high achievers.
Dr. Broder was trained and supervised in the 1970s by the late Dr. Albert Ellis at the Institute for Rational Emotive Therapy in New York City (which later became the Albert Ellis Institute), where for two years (2003-2005) he served as Executive Director to oversee its difficult transition to the post Albert Ellis era. 
He has trained many thousands of psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals worldwide, in various applications of CBT/REBT and couples' therapy. He has also served as chief psychologist for the Philadelphia Police Department, president of the Media Psychology Division (Division 46) of APA; and as a radio host in Philadelphia, New York and nationally for NBC Talknet.
Michael has made countless radio and TV guest appearances, including Oprah and The Today Show; been featured in Newsweek, Time, USA Today, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and many others. 
He is presently an adjunct professor at Villanova University and a faculty member of the International Institute for the Advanced Studies of Psychotherapy and Applied Mental Health.
Dr. Broder earned his Ph.D. at Temple University. Throughout his career he has presented his work at over a hundred professional conferences and university settings, in addition to more than twelve hundred presentations in settings as diverse as Esalen Institute and The Beck Institute as both a popular speaker and CE workshop/seminar leader. 
He has written eight books, including Seven Steps to Your Best Life, the bestselling- Art of Living Single, The Art of Staying Together, Secrets of Sexual Ecstasy and Can Your Relationship Be Saved? How to Know Whether to Stay or Go. Michael's many audio programs include Positive Attitude Training, Self-Actualization: Reaching Your Full Potential, The Help Yourself Audiotherapy Series, and  23others. He has also written numerous articles and book chapters for both lay and professional readers.