Collaborative Therapy

Collaborative Therapy: Relationships and Conversations That Make a Difference provides in-depth accounts of the everyday practice of postmodern collaborative therapy, vibrantly illustrating how dialogic conversation can transform lives, relationships, and entire communities. Pioneers and leading professionals from diverse disciplines, contexts, and cultures describe in detail what they do in their therapy and training practices, including their work with psychosis, incarceration, aging, domestic violence, eating disorders, education, and groups. In addition to the therapeutic applications, the book demonstrates the usefulness of a postmodern collaborative approach to the domains of education, research, and organizations.

Collaborative Therapy and Neurobiology is the book many clinicians have been waiting for: an integration of twenty years of scientific and therapeutic cutting-edge ideas into concrete clinical practices. Interpersonal neurobiology and the development of exciting new technologies that allow us to better understand the brain have provided us with an enriched perspective on human experience. Yet, many clinicians wonder how to use this knowledge, and how these discoveries can actually benefit their clients. In particular, what are the concrete practices that each field uses to help clients overcome the issues in their lives, and how can these fields build on each other’s ideas? Could minimally developed concepts in each field be combined into innovative and powerful practices to foster client wellbeing? This book offers a collection of writings which provide theoretical food for thought, research evidence, and most importantly hands-on, concrete clinical ideas to enrich therapists’ work with a variety of clients. Illustrated with numerous transcripts of conversations and clinical stories, the ideas in this book will stimulate the work of people interested in renewing their practice with new ideas.

Many textbooks teach the practice of counselling to new learners by relying on basic ideas generated before the 1970s and grafting more recent developments onto this foundation as optional modalities. David Pare avoids this trap. He does not assume that the world has not changed or that innovative ideas that demand attention are not constantly being produced. Neither does he dismiss the foundations of counselling laid a generation or two ago as irrelevant. Instead he weaves into them new emphases drawn from the most creative practices of recent decades and makes them relevant to students learning the basics of practice. Specifically, ideas drawn from the turn to meaning are placed alongside well-established traditions of counselling.

In this engaging guide, Matthew Selekman presents cutting-edge strategies for helping children and their families overcome a wide range of emotional and behavioral challenges. Vivid case material illustrates how to engage clients rapidly and implement interventions that elicit their strengths. Integrating concepts and tools from a variety of therapeutic traditions, Selekman describes creative applications of interviewing, family art and play, postmodern and narrative techniques, and positive psychology. He highlights ways to promote spontaneity, fun, and new possibilities—especially with clients who feel stuck in longstanding difficulties and entrenched patterns of interaction. The book updates and refines the approach originally presented in Selekman's acclaimed Solution-Focused Therapy with Children.

For an endeavour that is largely based on conversation it may seem obvious to suggest that psychotherapy is discursive. After all, therapists and clients primarily use talk, or forms of discourse, to accomplish therapeutic aims. However, talk or discourse has usually been seen as secondary to the actual business of therapy - a necessary conduit for exhanging information between therapist and client, but seldom more. Psychotherapy primarily developed by mapping particular experiential domains in ways responsive to human intervention. Only recently though has the role that discourse plays been recognized as a focus in itself for analysis and intervention. Discursive Perspectives in Therapeutic Practice presents an overview of discursive perspectives in therapy, along with an account of their conceptual underpinnings. The book starts by setting out the case for a discursive and relational approach to therapy by justaposing it to the tradition that that leads to the diagnostic approach of the DSM-V and medical psychiatry. It then presents a thorough review of a range of innovative discursive methods, each presented by an authority in their respective area. The book shows how discursive therapies can help people construct a better sense of their world, and move beyond the constraints caused by the cultural preconceptions, opinions, and values the client has about the world. The book makes a unique contribution to the philosophy and psychiatry literature in examining both the philosophical bases of discursive therapy, whilst also showing how discursive perspectives can be applied in real therapeutic situations. The book will be of great value and interest to psychotherapists and psychiatrists wishing to understand, explore, and apply these innovative techniques.

Presenting an innovative framework for tailoring cognitive-behavioral interventions to each client's needs, this accessible book is packed with practical pointers and sample dialogues. Step by step, the authors show how to collaborate with clients to develop and test conceptualizations that illuminate personal strengths as well as problems, and that deepen in explanatory power as treatment progresses. An extended case illustration demonstrates the three-stage conceptualization process over the entire course of therapy with a multiproblem client. The approach emphasizes building resilience and coping while decreasing psychological distress. Special features include self-assessment checklists and learning exercises to help therapists build their conceptualization skills.

This book examines a collaboration between traditional Māori healing and clinical psychiatry. Comprised of transcribed interviews and detailed meditations on practice, it demonstrates how bicultural partnership frameworks can augment mental health treatment by balancing local imperatives with sound and careful psychiatric care. In the first chapter, Māori healer Wiremu NiaNia outlines the key concepts that underpin his worldview and work. He then discusses the social, historical, and cultural context of his relationship with Allister Bush, a child and adolescent psychiatrist. The main body of the book comprises chapters that each recount the story of one young person and their family’s experience of Māori healing from three or more points of view: those of the psychiatrist, the Māori healer and the young person and other family members who participated in and experienced the healing. With a foreword by Sir Mason Durie, this book is essential reading for psychologists, social workers, nurses, therapists, psychiatrists, and students interested in bicultural studies.

Praise for the first edition "Finally, a social work practice text that makes a difference! This is the book that you have wished for but could never find. Although similar to texts that cover a range of practice theories and approaches to clinical practice, this book clearly has a social work frame of reference and a social work identity." --Gayla Rogers, Dean of the Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary The major focus of this second edition is the same; to provide an overview of theories, models, and therapies for direct social work practice, including systems theory, attachment theory, cognitive-behavioral theory, narrative therapy, solution-focused therapy, the crisis intervention model, and many more. However, this popular textbook goes beyond a mere survey of such theories. It also provides a framework for integrating the use of each theory with central social work principles and values, as well as with the artistic elements of practice. This second edition has been fully updated and revised to include: A new chapter on Relational Theory, and newly-rewritten chapters by new authors on Cognitive-Behavioral Theory, Existential Theory, and Wraparound Services New critique of the Empirically Supported Treatment (EST) movement Updated information on the movement toward eclecticism in counseling and psychotherapy A refined conceptualization of the editors' generalist-eclectic approach