Applied Helping Skills: Transforming Lives

Highly practical and student centered, Applied Helping Skills: Transforming Lives, is an experiential text focusing on basic skills and core interventions. Although it has a consistent a big-picture perspective, this book emphasizes the role of counselors to make contact with their individual clients, to help them feel understood, and to clarify the major issues that trouble them.

Key Features and Benefits  

• Uses an authentic voice with humor, engaging prose, and practical examples to convey the excitement and satisfaction of doing helping work
• Delves beyond reviewing the actions of dynamic practitioners, to discuss how effective practitioners actually think and feel  
• Guides students through self-assessment exercises, reflective activities, and practical applications, allowing them to personalize and apply concepts while providing insight on how personal and moral choices affect clinical behavior  

Accompanied by high-quality ancillaries!

• An Instructor′s Resource CD is available to qualified adopters
• A Student Study Site is available

Intended Audience  
This upper-level undergraduate and graduate textbook is designed for courses covering basic helping skills in counseling, social work, psychology, family therapy, human services, and other related fields.

Leah Brew is Chair and Professor in the Department of Counseling at California State University, Fullerton. She teaches, presents and publishes in the areas of basic counseling skills and multiculturalism. Specifically, she has several publications and projects that have been centered on working with multiracial couples, families, and individuals. She collaborated on a project to establish Competencies for Counseling Multiracial Populations, which was endorsed by the American Counseling Association. She has a small private practice where she specializes in working with diverse clients who struggle with depression and anxiety and are survivors of trauma. She also supervises students at a community agency who are working toward their master’s degrees in counseling.

She is active in the profession of counseling in the state of California, and helped to obtain the Licensed Professional Clinical Counseling credential in California, the last state to license counselors. She was also appointed a gubernatorial position as the LPCC representative on the state licensure board, and has taken a leadership role in improving supervision requirements in the state. 

Jeffrey A. Kottler is one of the most prolific authors in the fields of counseling, psychotherapy, and education, having written more than 90 books about a wide range of subjects. He has authored a dozen texts for counselors and therapists that are used in universities around the world and a dozen books each for practicing therapists and educators. Some of his most highly regarded works include Creative Breakthroughs in Therapy, The Mummy at the Dining Room Table: Eminent Therapists Reveal Their Most Unusual Cases and What They Teach Us About Human Behavior, Bad Therapy, The Client Who Changed Me, Divine Madness, Change: What Leads to Personal Transformation, Stories We’ve Heard, Stories We’ve Told: Life-Changing Narratives in Therapy and Everyday Life, and Therapy Over 50. He has been an educator for 40 years, having worked as a teacher, counselor, and therapist in preschool, middle school, mental health center, crisis center, nongovernmental organization, university, community college, private practice, and disaster relief settings. He has served as a Fulbright scholar and senior lecturer in Peru and Iceland, as well as worked as a visiting professor in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Nepal. He is professor of counseling at California State University, Fullerton.