Essential Topics For The Helping Professional

The professional helper should be a teacher, a mentor, a motivator and a guide when assisting helpees find solutions to their life situations. Most clients have within themselves the answers to most if not all of their life situations; quite often, what they need is someone to assist them in sifting through and evaluating the various possible responses for a situation. This revised and expanded new edition continues the theme of the first edition in providing a basic understanding of the various kinds of helping relationships and characteristics that an effective helper must possess. An overview of the major issues the United States has encountered, and to some degree successfully overcome with the involvement of the helping professional, is presented. Part I covers personal skills that a helper should possess such as understanding self, understanding human behavior, cultural differences, disabilities, religion, and resources. Part II discusses the impacts of the changing roles of helping professionals, roles in cultural evolution, and future challenges for helpers. Part III provides an analysis of theoretical views for helping relationships. A discussion of the theories are provided to enable helpers develop their own professional approaches to helping clients. Other topics include understanding individual and family counseling, preparing the helper to provide the best professional and ethical services possible, a sound understanding of human behavior, how to conduct the helping relationship from the standpoint of process, establishment of goals, and the implementation of these goals. The Professional Helper will be a beneficial text to all counseling students, as well as students in social work, human resources, psychology, sociology, and human relations.

Current Topics in Counseling provides a comprehensive but concise overview of critical professional topics and treatment issues. Students in helping profession programs including counseling and psychology learn skills and techniques, but often feel unprepared to deal with the specific and difficult issues clients bring to them. This book gives students an overview of eight critical issues (sexual abuse, eating disorders, self-mutilation, suicide, substance abuse, grief and loss, sexual minority concerns, and trauma and violence), including a definition and description of the problem and sections on prevalence, developmental issues and patterns, assessment strategies, treatment options, counselor issues (with a special note for school counselors), ethical concerns and additional resources. Each chapter includes an authentic case study as well as exercises that encourage students to extend their understanding.

Providing a guide for beginning counselors, this work gives the techniques to use in clinical situations. It shows characteristics of good helping relationships; details verbal and nonverbal skills; includes evaluation and ethics; explains helping theories and research; and explores client concerns.

Improving the Effectiveness of the Helping Professions: An Evidence-Based Approach to Practice covers the use of research and critical thinking to assist helping professionals make the most effective choices in treating clients with social and emotional problems. The use of evidence-based practice (EBP) comes at a time when managed care and concerns over health care costs coincide with growing concerns that psychotherapy, case management, and counseling may not be sufficiently effective ways of helping people in social and emotional difficulty. The book provides an easy-to-read, inclusive approach covering EBP with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and terrorism, bereavement, substance abuse, mental illness, and problems experienced by older adults, among others.

Written specifically for non-clinical undergraduate students, but also relevant to graduate studies in helping professions, Skills for Helping Professionals, by Anne M. Geroski focuses on helping students develop the skills they need to effectively initiate and maintain helping relationships. After exploring the literature identifying critical components of helping relationships and briefly reviewing developmental and helping theories, the text covers such topics as the helping process, self-awareness, and ethics in helping, and then focuses on specific helping skills such as listening and hearing, empathy, reflecting, paraphrasing, questioning, clarifying, exploring, and offering feedback, encouragement, and psycho-education. The final chapters focus on individuals in crisis and helping in groups.

A brief primer of essential helping skills for students and professionals in the helping professions, this book contains a brief chapter on theory that provides an overview of the language used in therapy as well as the various approaches used.

This straightforward guide for new and practicing supervisors emphasizes the attainment of skills necessary to effectively supervise others in a variety of settings. Topics covered include the roles and responsibilities of supervisors, the supervisory relationship, models and methods of supervision, becoming a multiculturally competent supervisor, ethical and legal issues in supervision, managing crisis situations, and evaluation in supervision. User-friendly tips, case examples, sample forms, questions for reflection, and group activities are included throughout the text, as are contributing supervisors’ Voices From the Field and the Authors’ Personal Perspectives—making this an interactive learning tool that is sure to keep readers interested and involved. *Requests for digital versions from ACA can be found on www.wiley.com. *To purchase print copies, please visit the ACA website. *Reproduction requests for material from books published by ACA should be directed to [email protected]