Building Strengths and Skills A Collaborative Approach to Working with Clients [Hardcover]

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.

Contents
Part I. Introduction of the Strengths-and Skills-Based Model
Preface
Chapter 1. Solution-focused Therapy
Chapter 2. Motivational Interviewing
Chapter 3. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy by Jacqueline Corcoran & Joe Walsh
Chapter 4. Assumptions of the Strengths-and Skills-Based Model
Chapter 5. The Helping Process of the Strengths-and Skills-Based Model
Chapter 6. Learning the Model: Applications to a Hospital Setting
Part II. Application to Disorders
Chapter 7. Working with Adolescent Conduct Problems by Jacqueline Corcoran and David Springer
Chapter 8. Depression by Jacquell³I