Helping Skills: Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action

Hill (counseling psychology, U. of Maryland, College Park) offers a textbook on basic helping skills for undergraduate and first-year graduate students in counseling and psychotherapy. Her approach is based on a three-stage model of exploration, insight, and action and is grounded in client-centered, psychoanalytic, and cognitive-behavioral theory. It addresses the roles of affect, cognition, and behavior in the process of change. This edition has a revised approach that emphasizes the goals and tasks of the stages and the ability to traverse among them. It has a new chapter on skills for fostering awareness of challenges, has a revised chapter on attending, listening, and observing skills, and has new measures to test the training model. Open questions and self-disclosure material have been added into other chapters, new steps have been added in the insight stage, and the action stage has been changed. The volume does not provide information about counseling clients with serious emotional or psychological difficulties or the diagnosis or characteristics of psychological problems, and only touches briefly on cultural issues in each stage. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)