Skovholt and Rivers capture the essence of basic counseling skills in this new revolutionary text. They present an approach to skill development that revolves around the four core areas: exploring client concerns, promoting client understanding, charting a new course, and working for positive change.

Helping Skills and Strategies is a thoroughly practical guide. A consistent structure within chapters makes it easier to assimilate complex information. Hypothetical therapy dialogues—key strengths of the text—demonstrate how to use the skills described in the chapters in clinical situations. The test leads students step-by-step in developing helping skills.

The broad range of material covered, the authors' skills in linking chapters conceptually, the skill-building exercises, plus the clear, simple writing style make this book an exceptional foundation for introductory classes on professional helping. It is an excellent all-in-one text for the beginning skills course in all the human service, education, and health professions—counseling, social work, psychology, family therapy, nursing, and pastoral counseling.

Special Features

• Hypothetical dialogues at the end of each chapter showing skills for effective helping
• Exercises at the end of each chapter that let readers engage in role playing to practice skills discussed in the chapter
• Cultural concerns are woven throughout the text
• Includes step-by-step ideas for skill development

Contents

Part 1: Introduction
1. Introduction to Professional Helping
2. Diversity, Culture, and Helping

Part 2: The Helping Process
3. Beginning, Maintaining, and Ending the Helping Process

Part 3: The Helping Relationship
4. The Context for Helping: The Special Relationship Between Helper and Client

Part 4: Exploring Client Concerns
5. Exploring the Unique World of the Client
6. Nonverbal Exploration Skills
7. Verbal Exploration Skills

Part 5: Promoting Client Understanding
8. Striving Toward Honest Understanding
9. Skills for Promoting Client Understanding

Part 6: Charting a New Course
10. Setting Goals
11. Identifying Actions

Part 7: Working for Positive Change
12. Taking Action
13. Evaluation

Part 8: Helping Issues, Aspects, and Topics
14. Ethical and Legal Issues in Helping
15. Professional Challenges, Motives and Rewards

352 pages
2007/paperback/ISBN 978-0-89108-327-6
$56.00

This insightful book is packed with examples of core skills and techniques. The text shows how to do intakes, how to pace clients, and how to use probing to gather client information. Most importantly, the book illustrates how to use specific interventions, such as directives, reflective questions, and narrative techniques.

You’ll find dozens of examples and hands-on practice ideas. Individual Counseling shows how to make connections between the counseling skills students learn and the actual implementation of those skills. It includes helpful hints for dealing with client rambling, ways to handle confrontation, how to write case notes, and much more.

Special Features

• Includes helpful hints for beginning counselors
• Shows journal writing samples and describes why they are important
• Details strategies for case conceptualization
• Outlines helpful hints and intervention techniques

Contents

1. Challenges of Learning Counseling Skills
2. Intake and Professional Disclosure
3. Basic Empathy: Reflective Listening
4. Basic Inquiry Skills
5. Helpful Hints for Beginning Counselors
6. Advanced Skills: Influencing Skills
7. Intervention Techniques
8. Termination Skills
9. Case Conceptualization: The Covert Skills

224 pages
2002
paperback/ISBN 978-0-89108-288-0
$38.00