What is it that makes some therapists so much more effective than others, even when they are delivering the same evidence-based treatment? This instructive book identifies specific interpersonal skills and attitudes--often overlooked in clinical training--that facilitate better client outcomes across a broad range of treatment methods and contexts. Reviewing 70 years of psychotherapy research, the preeminent authors show that empathy, acceptance, warmth, focus, and other characteristics of effective therapists are both measurable and teachable. Richly illustrated with annotated sample dialogues, the book gives practitioners and students a blueprint for learning, practicing, and self-monitoring these crucial clinical skills.
Philosophically rich and highly practical, this book offers therapists a transtheoretical, transdiagnostic perspective that identifies the process of change that underlies all effective psychotherapy models.
Doug Sprenkle - Awarded the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA) 2010 Award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Research and Practice! Grounded in theory, research, and extensive clinical experience, this pragmatic book addresses critical questions of how change occurs in couple and family therapy and how to help clients achieve better results. The authors show that regardless of a clinician's orientation or favored techniques, there are particular therapist attributes, relationship variables, and other factors that make therapy specifically, therapy with couples and families more or less effective. The book explains these common factors in depth and provides hands-on guidance for capitalizing on them in clinical practice and training. User-friendly features include numerous case examples and a reproducible common factors checklist.
An in-depth look at a much misunderstood practice, offering a fresh viewpoint on how this science can be a universally effective route to our better selves.
Helping beginning and experienced therapists cope with the myriad challenges of working in agencies, clinics, hospitals, and private practice, this book distills the leading theories and best practices in the field. The authors provide a clear approach to engaging diverse clients and building rapport; interweaving evidence-based techniques to meet therapeutic goals; and intervening effectively with individuals, families, groups, and larger systems. Practitioners will find tools for addressing the needs of their clients while caring for themselves and avoiding burnout; students will find a clear-headed framework for making use of the variety of approaches available in mental health practice.
Prescriptive Psychotherapies describes a prescriptive approach to psychotherapeutic treatment. At the heart of this prescriptive model is the patient X therapist X treatment interactionist view of the question ""Which type of patient, meeting with which type of therapist, for which type of treatment will yield which outcomes?"" The diagnostic, research, and therapeutic implications of this viewpoint are examined. Attention is also devoted to the question of how prescriptive psychotherapy research might be most advantageously conducted to yield prescriptive information leading to increasingly successful treatment outcomes. This book is comprised of 15 chapters and begins by explaining the value and development of prescriptive psychotherapies and suggesting a schema for both conceptualizing and generating investigations that may yield progressively more useful psychotherapeutic prescriptions. The next chapter considers the views of others regarding issues bearing upon the prescriptive process, particularly the role of diagnosis. The treatment and research implications of psychological testing are then explored, along with the role of assessment in behavior modification. Several of the key issues in the process of achieving effective application of the integrated insight-behavioral approach to psychobehavioral counseling and therapy are also examined. Examples of clinical prescriptions of prescriptive psychotherapies are given, including psychoneuroses, psychophysiological disorders, and sexual deviations. This monograph is addressed to both clinicians and researchers concerned with the conduct and effectiveness of psychotherapy.
Grounded in over 50 years of outcome research, this comprehensive textbook focuses on outcomes management and the principles and core strategies for delivering competent and effective therapeutic practice. Applicable to all settings and models, the text illuminates four foundational principles of therapeutic practice: a strengths-based framework, collaborative practice, clinician effectiveness, and routine and ongoing outcome-oriented clinical work. The book presents strategies for identifying, evoking, and using client strengths to promote behavioral health. It focuses on the importance of client engagement during initial interactions and describes advanced listening and attending strategies for strengthening the clinical alliance. A chapter titled “Matching and Classes of Interventions” examines important processes for increasing client fit and improving treatment outcome. Clinical dialogues, vignettes, sample questions, anecdotes, practice exercises, printable forms, and online resources help to reinforce content. An appendix provides additional insights into outcome measures, graphs, and charts covered within the book, and a robust instructor packet includes an instructor’s manual, PowerPoint slides, a test bank, and student exercises. Key Features: Describes current research and practice strategies for tracking therapeutic effectiveness Underscores the fundamental principles and core strategies for delivering effective therapy Provides specific, evidence-based ways to improve the benefit of therapy and therapist effectiveness Presents strategies for identifying, evoking, and using client strengths to promote behavioral health Delivers proven methods for monitoring client progress Includes clinical dialogues, vignettes, sample questions, practice exercises, printable forms, and online resources Provides instructor’s manual, PowerPoint slides, and test bank, as well as a free digital ebook
Handbook of Effective Psydwtherapy is the culmination of 15 years of personal interest in the area of psychotherapy outcome research. In my view, this is one of the most interesting and crucial areas in the field: it has relevance across disparate clinical disciplines and orientations; it provides a measure of how far the field has progressed in its efforts to improve the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic inter vention; and it provides an ongoing measure of how readily clinicians adapt to scientific indications in state-of-the-art care. Regrettably, as several of the chapters in this volume indicate, there is a vast chasm between what is known about the best available treatments and what is applied as the usual standard of care. On the most basic level there appears to be a significant number of clinicians who remain reluctant to acknowledge that scien tific study can add to their ability to aid the emotionally distressed. I hope that this handbook, with its many delineations of empirically supported treatments, will do something to remedy this state of affairs.
More people are in psychotherapy than ever before. Yet most of them have no idea of the vast differences between the hundreds of various schools of therapy. Therapy Breakthrough is the first book to clearly explain the theories and practices of the two big camps: Psychodynamic or PD therapy and Cognitive-Behavioral or CB therapy. PD therapists believe that emotional problems are caused by hidden forces in our unconscious minds, forces that cannot be observed directly and that resist being uncovered. CB therapists, by contrast, maintain that the roots of people’s emotional and behavioral disturbances can be identified by direct questions, and these problems can then be tackled by straightforward techniques. Therapy Breakthrough is written from the standpoint of CB therapy. Using psychological research, philosophy, and common sense, it argues that PD therapy is founded on mistaken theories of the mind, and explains how to apply CB methods directly to your own problems.
