Working Alliance Skills for Mental Health Professionals

Working Alliance Skills for Mental Health Professionals is intended for students in counseling and for professional level practitioners interested in learning how to establish and maintain the working alliance. The book can also be targeted to the broader mental health care community, including seasoned clinical psychology professionals, training programs in counseling and clinical psychology, and students in social work.

Working Alliance Skills for Mental Health Professionals provides expert guidance to mental health providers who wish to develop and augment their skills and competence in this area of practice. Each chapter deconstructs a dimension of the working alliance in psychotherapy, defining and describing specific mechanisms and interventions that can help professionals establish an alliance with their clients. The book includes skills in nonverbal communication, ways to foster the working bond with diverse clients, goal and task setting strategies, and verbal and interpersonal therapeutic skills, as well as mechanisms for repairing ruptures and for fostering the working alliance through supervision. The authors provide "in session" examples of how each skill may be implemented, and highlight the use of interventions through clinical vignettes and masked clinical cases. Working Alliance Skills for Mental Health Professionals is ideal for use in training programs in counseling, clinical psychology, and social work. It may also be valuable to professional-level practitioners interested in honing their skills in optimizing the working alliance.