Building Strengths and Skills : A Collaborative Approach to Working with Clients

This is a much-needed practice book that demonstrates how helping professionals can emphasize their clients'' resilience, strength, and capacities, rather than focusing on pathology or deficits. It offers an integrative practice model for both asses... Read more

This is a much-needed practice book that demonstrates how helping professionals can emphasize their clients'' resilience, strength, and capacities, rather than focusing on pathology or deficits. It offers an integrative practice model for both assessment and intervention that interweavesstrengths-based (specifically solution-focused therapy and motivational interviewing) and skills-building (cognitive-behavioral) approaches. In the strengths-and-skills-based model, helping professionals assume that clients possess the necessary capacities to solve their own problems, transformingthe therapeutic relationship into a collaboration focused on bolstering motivation and resources for change. When these resources are exhausted or when deficits become a substantial barrier, then practitioner and client work to develop an individualized skills-building plan. A wide range ofexamples, written by Jacqueline Corcoran with experts from different fields of practice, clearly demonstrate how the model can be applied to individuals and families struggling with behavior problems, depression, substance abuse, anxiety, violence, and abuse, so that both strengths and skillsmaximize the client''s success. This innovative, dynamic resource is a must have for practitioners across the helping, social service, and mental health professions. Less