Building Strengths and Skills: A Collaborative Approach to Working with Clients

by Jacqueline Corcoran

This is a much-needed practice book that demonstrates how helping professionals can emphasize their clients' resilience, strength, and capacities, rather than focusing on pathology or deficits. It offers an integrative practice model for both assessment and intervention that interweaves strengths-based (specifically solution-focused therapy and motivational interviewing) and skills-building (cognitive-behavioral) approaches. In the strengths-and-skills-based model, helping professionals assume that clients possess the necessary capacities to solve their own problems, transforming the therapeutic relationship into a collaboration focused on bolstering motivation and resources for change. When these resources are exhausted or when deficits become a substantial barrier, then practitioner and client work to develop an individualized skills-building plan. A wide range of examples, written by Jacqueline Corcoran with experts from different fields of practice, clearly demonstrate how the model can be applied to individuals and families struggling with behavior problems, depression, substance abuse, anxiety, violence, and abuse, so that both strengths and skills maximize the client's success. This innovative, dynamic resource is a must have for practitioners across the helping, social service, and mental health professions.

Genres: Counselling

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Jacqueline Corcoran was born in England, but has lived in the U.S. for most of her life - in Boston, California, Michigan, Texas, and now in the Washington D.C. area with her husband, two children, and three rescue animals. She is a social worker, psychotherapist and professor (at the University of Pennsylvania), as well as an author. Her published work includes 17 textbooks, two non-fiction trade titles, and several novels.

Reviews

[Olwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Putting this one back on the shelf for now....will return to it later. Lots of valuable material here.