Compassionate Therapy explores the characteristics of difficult clients and the nature of client resistance. Arguing that conflict can be a constructive force, it shows how practitioners can use the struggle to examine their own abilities, deepen their compassion, and improve therapeutic flexibility and effectiveness. It offers proven approaches to working through therapeutic impasses with difficult clients and blAnds professional development with personal growth.

This resourceful guide presents art therapy techniques for difficult clients where the typical therapist-client interaction can often be distant, demanding, and frustrating. Offering practical and theoretical information from a wide variety of treatment populations and diagnostic categories; and incorporating individual, group, and family therapy case studies, the text is filled with examples and over 150 illustrations taken from the author’s sixteen years of experience working with hundreds of clients. The author is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a Master’s degree in Clinical Art Therapy. The text comes with an accompanying CD-ROM which includes full-color pictures and additional material not found in the book.

This book is intended to help readers treat persons who are considered to be difficult clients. The approach is practical, with a minimum of theoretical assumptions and jargon, and can be integrated into almost all other approaches to treatment when therapy stalls. (Midwest).

How to warm up to the clients that stop you cold. Have you experienced the anger, fear, doubt, and frustration that most clinicians feel but rarely put words to? Have you ever overreacted to a client in session or found yourself overwhelmed by the work with that client in your caseload? Are you looking for tools to manage your most “difficult” clients? Chances are, you’re like all other clinicians: At times you play “tug-of-war” with those in your care. The Heat of the Moment in Treatment is for clinicians looking to explore, reassess, and transform the way they treat their most difficult clients. With carefully designed mindfulness-based exercises, self-assessments, and skill development activities, this workbook helps clinicians understand their own role in therapeutic interactions, as well as how to proactively respond to tough client behavior in ways that improve the prospects for successful treatment. Author Mitch Abblett acts as a sensitive, expert guide, laying out a roadmap for the toughest of clinical encounters that almost all therapists face, whether seasoned or just starting out. His use of relatable metaphors, rhetorical questions, and stories from his own experience allows readers to reflect upon their own psychotherapy practice without feeling like there is one right way to deal with challenging clients. The Heat of the Moment in Treatment will help clinicians move beyond assumptions and reactive impulses to their “difficult” clients. Readers will gain proactive clinical leadership skills, while learning how to expand mindful awareness of self and others to access compassion and empathy for any client—even when the “heat” of moment-to-moment interaction in session is hard to tolerate.

Annotation When a client seems unwilling to make the necessary changes, Hanna (counseling and human services, Johns Hopkins U.) suggests that therapists look for the seven precursors of change, including hope, the willingness to experience anxiety or difficulty, and the presence of social support, among others. If the client manifests these harbingers of change, he or she is in a good position for therapeutic success, regardless of the therapist's theoretical leanings. The author outlines the ways that these precursors work interdependently to produce change and offers tools and techniques to assess the presence of the precursors and implement them in therapy. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This thought-provoking book examines the clinical dilemmas faced by therapists who, for a variety of reasons, are working with involuntary or reluctant clients. These individuals often come to therapy through the judicial system but might also be problem employees or spouses persuaded to enter therapy by their mates. Under these circumstances, working together can be frustrating for both therapist and client. The typical therapist's skills of reflecting, probing, and supporting often fail with individuals who did not enter into therapy of their own accord--or who, once there, do not engage readily with the therapist. The inquiring approach to therapy, with its frequent questioning of the client, can have an unwelcome and intrusive quality for poorly motivated clients. Stanley Brodsky demonstrates how therapists can tailor their interventions to avoid impasses, build a firm alliance with the client, and help him or her develop more productive behaviors. Specifically, Brodsky proposes that therapists adopt a variety of techniques that largely avoid asking questions. Instead, he shows how therapists can make assertive statements about what is happening in the client's life, identify behaviors, and describe choices the client might make. Through the use of case material, the author demonstrates that interacting creatively with reluctant clients can lead to significant breakthroughs. The provocative ideas in this book will be welcomed by therapists and counselors who work with offenders, probationers, involuntarily committed patients and, more broadly, other clients who fail to make progress.