Advice and inspiration for the real-life challenges of being a mental health professional. Graduate school and professional training for therapists often focus on academic preparation, but there’s a lot more that a therapist needs to know to be successful after graduation. With warmth, wisdom, and expertise, Jeffrey A. Kottler covers crucial but underaddressed challenges that therapists face in their professional lives at all levels of experience. PART I , “More Than You Bargained For,” covers the changing landscape of the mental health profession and the limits and merits of professional training. PART II , “Secrets and Neglected Challenges,” explores important issues that are often overlooked during training years, including the ways our clients become our greatest teachers, the power of storytelling, and the role of deception in psychotherapy. And in PART III , “Ongoing Personal and Professional Development,” Kottler focuses on areas in which even the most experienced therapists can continue to hone their talents and maximize their potential, laying out effective tips to navigate organization politics, write and publish books and articles, cultivate creativity in clinical work, maintain a private practice, present and lecture to large and small audiences, sustain passion for the work of helping others, plan for the future, and much more. As honest and inspiring as it is revealing, this book offers therapists and counselors at all levels of experience key ideas for thriving after formal education.

Traditional training in counseling and psychotherapy makes minimal distinctions on the ages of the client and therapist in the treatment process. Therapy Over 50: Aging Issues in Psychotherapy and the Therapist's Life highlights how therapy is frequently a very different process for the older client and therapist. Specifically, this book explores: a) how therapists over 50 (or approaching that life transition) experience, struggle, and enjoy doing therapy in ways that are different from when they were younger (this includes their special challenges, adaptations, fears, and joys); and b) the landscape related to working clinically with aging clients, and those approaches and strategies that work best with this population. The text also includes both current research and classic literature on the subject of aging issues in therapy, as well as current excerpts from interviews the authors will conduct with some of the most notable aging figures in the fields of counseling, social work, marriage and family therapy, and clinical psychology. Therapy Over 50 ultimately deals with the inevitable and unrelenting changes that take place along with corresponding lost and reconfigured dreams as well as the approaches and strategies that are most effective for working with this population. With an optimistic tone, Kottler and Carlson promote a philosophy of positive aging and development for the therapist and client, thereby offering hope and inspiration for both parties

Advice and inspiration for the real-life challenges of being a mental health professional. Graduate school and professional training for therapists often focus on academic preparation, but there’s a lot more that a therapist needs to know to be successful after graduation. With warmth, wisdom, and expertise, Jeffrey A. Kottler covers crucial but underaddressed challenges that therapists face in their professional lives at all levels of experience. PART I , “More Than You Bargained For,” covers the changing landscape of the mental health profession and the limits and merits of professional training. PART II , “Secrets and Neglected Challenges,” explores important issues that are often overlooked during training years, including the ways our clients become our greatest teachers, the power of storytelling, and the role of deception in psychotherapy. And in PART III , “Ongoing Personal and Professional Development,” Kottler focuses on areas in which even the most experienced therapists can continue to hone their talents and maximize their potential, laying out effective tips to navigate organization politics, write and publish books and articles, cultivate creativity in clinical work, maintain a private practice, present and lecture to large and small audiences, sustain passion for the work of helping others, plan for the future, and much more. As honest and inspiring as it is revealing, this book offers therapists and counselors at all levels of experience key ideas for thriving after formal education.

There are certain assumptions about the practice of counseling that are accepted as "truths," beliefs that are so pervasive that they remain unchallenged by almost all practitioners of all persuasions and approaches. In this book noted authors Jeffrey Kottler and Rick Balkin cover a wide range of myths, misconceptions, and assumptions that have remained unchallenged or that have little research to support their efficacy. Topics covered include the sacrosanct "50 minute hour," how basic research is conducted and whether the results inform actual practice, why progress made in therapy often doesn't last, what social justice actually means, and what makes someone an effective therapist. Each chapter describes an issue, explores the way it operates in daily practice, and then presents empirical evidence to question or challenge its current use. In cases where there is little or no definitive research to support or refute the procedure, belief, or practice the authors present some critical questions that will at the very least encourage counselors to reflect on what they do and why.

For more than thirty years, On Being a Therapist has inspired generations of mental health professionals to explore the most private and sacred aspects of their work helping others. In this thoroughly revised and updated fifth edition, Jeffrey Kottler explores many of the challenges that therapists face in their practices today, including pressures from increased technology, economic realities, and advances in theory and technique. He also explores the stress factors that are brought on from managed care bureaucracy, conflicts at work, and clients' own anxiety and depression. This new edition includes updated sources, new material on technology, new problems that therapists face, and two new chapters: "On Being a Therapeutic Storyteller-and Listener" and "On Being a Client: How to Get the Most from Therapy." Generations of students and practitioners in counseling, clinical psychology, social work, psychotherapy, marriage and family therapy, and human services have found comfort and confidence in On Being a Therapist, and this Fifth Edition -- intended to be the author's last major update to the seminal work -- only builds upon this solid foundation as it continues to educate helping professionals everywhere.

This book is your essential introduction to relational counselling and psychotherapy. It maps out relational concepts and approaches by drawing on humanistic, psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioural and systemic modalities, using case material to demonstrate different ways of being a relational practitioner. The book shows you how to use relationally orientated skills, competencies, interventions and practices across the therapy process from beginning – middle – end. Content on the social context, on issues of power, diversity and difference, support your personal and professional development. Supported by case studies, recent research and a wealth of learning features, this book will support your development as a relational therapist

Bad Therapy offers a rare glimpse into the hearts and mind's of the profession's most famous authors, thinkers, and leaders when things aren't going so well. Jeffrey Kottler and Jon Carlson, who include their own therapy mishaps, interview twenty of the world's most famous practitioners who discuss their mistakes, misjudgements, and miscalculations on working with clients. Told through narratives, the failures are related with candor to expose the human side of leading therapists. Each therapist shares with regrets, what they learned from the experience, what others can learn from their mistakes, and the benefits of speaking openly about bad therapy.