Building Strengths and Skills: A Collaborative Approach to Working with Clients
Jacqueline Corcoran
Abstract
This book presents an approach to therapeutic contact with clients that capitalizes on people's resilience, strengths, and capacities. The helper works in collaboration with the individual to identify and amplify these capacities to resolve problems and improve quality of life. Clients are empowered to find their own answers and solutions that will fit their particular worldview and their unique strengths (De Jong & Miller, 1995). These principles are operationalized through solution-focused therapy and motivational interviewing. The helper also identifies areas in which clients can use educat ... More
This book presents an approach to therapeutic contact with clients that capitalizes on people's resilience, strengths, and capacities. The helper works in collaboration with the individual to identify and amplify these capacities to resolve problems and improve quality of life. Clients are empowered to find their own answers and solutions that will fit their particular worldview and their unique strengths (De Jong & Miller, 1995). These principles are operationalized through solution-focused therapy and motivational interviewing. The helper also identifies areas in which clients can use education on how to meet more effectively life's challenges. A focus on coping skills is represented by cognitive-behavioral therapy. These theoretical approaches are woven together for the purpose of maximizing a person's ability to enhance the strengths they bring and also learn new skills that can help them. The resultant strengths- and skills-building model is applied, throughout the book, to various problems and populations that helping practitioners may encounter.
Keywords:
strengths,
resilience,
solution-focused therapy,
motivational interviewing,
cognitive-behavioral therapy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2004 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195154306 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2009 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195154306.001.0001 |
