The Beginning Psychotherapist S Companion

Filling in the gaps from students' lack of experience and confidence, The Beginning Psychotherapist's Companion, Second Edition is a supportive and empathetic guide, addressing real-world concerns and providing essential insights not taught in textbooks. With a reassuring and clear writing style, Willer offers practical suggestions and clinical examples to address the professional development and emotional concerns of the beginning psychotherapist. She guides readers through structuring the first session, making clinical observations, and establishing a therapeutic alliance. Through the use of culturally diverse clinical vignettes, Willer discusses the foundations of ethical practice, including informed consent, confidentiality, documentation, and setting boundaries. The reader is guided on how and when to refer clients for medication and other health care. Crisis management principles are detailed, including suicide and violence risk assessment, child abuse, elder abuse, intimate partner violence, and rape. Willer also provides professional advice on contemporary concerns such as social networking, online searches of clients, the psychotherapist's internet presence, and other important emerging challenges. Comprehensive, practical, and thoroughly updated, The Beginning Psychotherapist's Companion, Second Edition is the ideal resource for students and early career psychotherapists.

As a guide for beginning psychotherapists who are just starting their first clinical training experience, it is also valuable for career therapists given that many topics in the book are not covered in current textbooks. The book provides vital information that each beginning therapist should know before starting to see the first client. Current best practices regarding informed consent, confidentiality, HIPAA and boundaries are discussed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Initial Expectations--Professional responsibilites. -- Preparations. -- The initial interview. -- Consultations. -- Giving a staffing report. -- Beginning therapy: feedback and contracting. -- Conducting the session. -- Some more sophisticated therapy skills. -- The client in crisis. -- Termination. -- Record keeping. -- Cotherapy. -- Children and families.

Problems and Solutions is a concise guide for beginning psychotherapists who have mastered basic theory and technique and are now preparing to run psychotherapy sessions. It has one simple premise: a direct and clear therapist will have a more positive impact on a patient. Finding that equilibrium between theory and practice, Martin Kantor uses a practical no-nonsense approach to identify specific therapeutic problems and offer effective, doable solutions. Problems are those faced by all therapists and solutions, while very specific, are not bound to any particular school of thought and easily adaptable to different psychotherapies. Word-by-word emphasis is placed on what to say as well as what not to say. Specific guidance is given on handling symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, and obsessions. Geared to beginning psychotherapists, Problems and Solutions also offers the advanced therapist an opportunity to reflect on his/her ingrained notions and habits. With more than twenty years of experience in training psychotherapists, Dr. Kantor has written a guide that is both unique and inviting. He offers problem/solution guidance in an elementary and concrete form. His intent is the development of a therapy technique which is direct, open, and understandable. Kantor covers: patient selection, disorder detection and diagnosis, treatment goals, advantages and disadvantages of different treatment modes, technical proficiency, long term therapy, defense mechanisms, transference and countertransference. He also gives extensive attention to the avoidance of common therapeutic errors and the treatment of special situations, such as schizophrenia, specific age groups, and symptoms with a physical caste. Time is also given to basic questions such as the length and frequency of sessions, fees, and office appearance.

Students and recent graduates of counseling and human services programs will consider The Counselor’s Companion an indispensible tool to enhance professional practice, knowledge, and skill. The text is a reference-style resource that provides a bridge across the gap between the classroom and the challenges of the practice.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In all models of therapy, the initial interview is a significant component: It sets the tone, structure, direction, and foundation of treatment. In brief therapy, the opening moves are even more important because there is less time later to correct errors or change direction. This volume provides practitioners with an up-close view of exactly what expert brief therapists do at the beginning of treatment and why they do it. Each author describes his or her particular orientation, presents annotated transcripts of actual initial sessions, and responds to pointed questions from the editors about their cases. Following an introduction by the editors, the first section of the book covers initial sessions in therapies for individuals. These include the rational-emotive approach, a one-session intervention, an interpersonal psychodynamic model, neurolinguistic programming, and the I-D-E (interpersonal-developmental-existential) approach. Beginning cognitive-behavioral therapy with depressed or drug abusing adolescents is covered, and a directive approach strongly influenced by the work of Milton Erickson is presented. The next section addresses methods and strategies for working with couples and families. Chapters on marital therapy cover an integrative approach that combines an intra- and interpersonal focus in marital therapy, a cognitive-behavioral approach that is based on principles of social learning and social exchange theory, emotionally focused therapy, and an approach that utilizes reflective conversation. A solution-oriented model, "the possibility paradigm," for helping families amplify their strengths is delineated, as is a strategic MRI-style model for working with an individual family member, and a structural approach for creating familial change. An ideal companion to Budman's THEORY AND PRACTICE OF BRIEF THERAPY, this illuminating and unique casebook is essential reading for all clinicians who need to learn more about time-effective models. Offering a comparative view of a variety of models, it is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate students.