Becoming an Effective Therapist

by Jon Carlson, Len Sperry, Diane Hjos

This text is part of a unique learning system-consisting of a text, a video, and a student workbook-designed to develop and enhance the core skills and strategies necessary to become an effective... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0205322077
• ISBN13: 9780205322077
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Pearson
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A helpful, mostly comprehensive guide for beginning therapists

I am a psychologist, and the college counseling office where I work recently purchased this book to assist our supervision of practicum students. I believe that this book will prove to be ideal for that purpose, as it covers the scope of the therapy process from initiation to termination. The book focuses mainly on four perspectives of psychotherapy: psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, experiential/humanistic, and systems. While not comprehensive, the theories and interventions associated with each of these approaches certainly provide an excellent base of knowledge for the beginning therapist. Parts II and III of the book, which focus on engagement and assessment, are presented largely from an orientation-free point of view. Instead, the authors utilize in-session examples combined with learning exercises to build therapeutic skills. Part IV centers around interventions, including Cognitive and Behavioral, Psychodynamic, Interventive/Solution-Focused, and Systematic/Psychoeducational. Each succinct chapter does a nice job summarizing some of the major therapeutic techniques of the approach with continued use of in-session excerpts to highly the various interventions. Of course, although some material is beyond the scope of this book, I felt that failing to mention Bill O'Hanlon in the Solution-Focused chapter was a glaring omission. The final sections of the book address maintenance, termination, and practical/ethical issues. The book ends with a chapter on "The Effective Therapist in Action," which provides a case presentation of a short-term therapy experience (about 1 month duration). In this chapter, the reader is encouraged to consider various questions about the therapist's work with a client. As these questions are intended to provoke thought and stimulate discussion, no answers are given, but I think that more guidelines on exactly HOW to formulate opinions in response to these inquiries might have been helpful. Overall, the authors pack quite a bit of helpful information into this book, and I believe it would serve as an extremely effective resource to new therapists as well as useful refresher for more seasoned practitioners.