Although the impact that clients can have on therapists is well-known, most work on the subject consists of dire warnings: mental health professionals are taught early on to be on their guard for burnout, compassion fatigue, and countertransference. However, while these professional hazards are very real, the scholarly focus on the negative potential of the client-counselor relationship often implies that no good can come of allowing oneself to get too close to a client's issues. This sentiment obscures what every therapist knows to be true: that the client-counselor relationship can also effect powerful positive transformations in a therapist's own life. The Client Who Changed Me is Jeffrey Kottler and Jon Carlson's testimony to the significant and often life-changing ways in which therapists have been changed by their patients. Kottler and Carlson draw not only upon their own extensive experience - between them, they have more than fifty years in the field - but also upon lengthy interviews with dozens of the country's foremost therapists and theorists. This novel work presents readers with a truly unique perspective on the business of therapy: not merely how it appears externally, but how practitioners experience it internally. Although these stories paint a complex and multi-layered portrait of the client-counselor relationship, they all demonstrate the profound and unexpected rewards that the profession has to offer.

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).

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.

Mental health professionals spend their days helping others, but who is there to help them when stress and burnout threaten their own well-being? Filled with self-assessments, journaling exercises, and activities designed to facilitate renewal, growth, and change, this timely book helps clinicians help themselves with coverage of career threatening issues, such as fear of failure, loss of confidence, and the financial stress and loss of autonomy that many clinician's experience as a result of managed care and its constraints.

Why are we here? What is the meaning of existence? What truly matters the most in life? To even begin to answer these questions, we must start by exploring our own internal ideals, values, and beliefs. Presenting the unique perspective of respected analyst and author James Hollis, Ph.D., What Matters Most helps readers learn to appreciate (even be amazed by) events unfolding within, even as the external world creates constant struggles.

Resistant. Oppositional. Borderline. Mental health professionals commonly use such terms to describe patients who, despite expressing a strong desire to reduce their emotional distress, repeatedly reject or ignore their therapist's interpretations andadvice. When this continues session after session, both patient and therapist end up feeling stuck and frustrated.This book offers an alternative interpretation of patients' apparent resistance, termed pathological ambivalence, which is rooted in early experience, biological functioning, and psychological narrative. The concept of pathological ambivalence draws from several established theoretical perspectives in explaining why some people seem to sabotage their progress in psychotherapy and how some therapists become unintentional enablers.

Motivation is key to substance use behavior change. Counselors can support clients' movement toward positive changes in their substance use by identifying and enhancing motivation that already exists. Motivational approaches are based on the principles of person-centered counseling. Counselors' use of empathy, not authority and power, is key to enhancing clients' motivation to change. Clients are experts in their own recovery from SUDs. Counselors should engage them in collaborative partnerships. Ambivalence about change is normal. Resistance to change is an expression of ambivalence about change, not a client trait or characteristic. Confrontational approaches increase client resistance and discord in the counseling relationship. Motivational approaches explore ambivalence in a nonjudgmental and compassionate way.