Main description:

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.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Working Alliance Skills for Health Care Professionals: Introduction
Jairo N. Fuertes, Patrick Mele, and Julian Rapaport

Chapter 2: The Working Bond in the Working Alliance
Andres Perez-Rojas, Jazmin Gonzalez, and Jairo N. Fuertes

Chapter 3: Therapist Technical and Interpersonal Skills in the Working Alliance
Timothy Anderson and Matthew Perlman

Chapter 4: Setting Goals and Tasks in the Working Alliance
Georgiana Shyck Tryon

Chapter 5: Agreement Communication to Solidify and Maintain Consensus
Jairo N. Fuertes, Michael Moore, and Chloe Pagano-Staltzer

Chapter 6: Clients' Experiences and Contributions to the Working Alliance
Robinder Bedi and Syler Hayes

Chapter 7: Multicultural Issues in the Working Alliance
Changming Duan

Chapter 8: Resolving Alliance Ruptures and Overcoming Treatment Impasses
Jerald Gardner, Lauren Lipner, Catherine F. Eubanks, and J. Christopher Muran

Chapter 9: Supervising the Development and Sustaining of the Working Alliance
Rod Goodyear and Hideko Sera

Chapter 10: Working Alliance Skills: Integration and Conclusions
Jairo N. Fuertes