Extending Horizons in Helping and Caring Therapies: Beyond the Liminal in the Healing Encounter

This vital new book examines how healing encounters might further the horizons of practice and extend innovation in professional interpersonal relationships. Highly qualified contributors explore ways in which insights into individual, cultural and community meanings open further perspectives on human being and help clarify what can feel a confusing present and an increasingly unpredictable future.

Divided into parts on Personal and Professional Identity, Culture and Personal Context, Practice Research, and Clinical Practice, each chapter opens up thinking on crucial contemporary issues, informed by personal and clinical practice case-study examples and by findings from leading-edge research investigations, adding to the current literature on both theory and practice.

This book brings together voices from the margins, offering alternative practice perspectives that look beyond protocol and statistics-based therapy, emphasising the relational richness that informs professional interpersonal encounters in the support of mental health and wellbeing. It will be of immense value to counsellors and psychotherapists in training and practice, as well as for related mental health professionals and those with an interest in the caring professions.

Greg Nolan is Visiting Lecturer in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Leeds, MBACP Senior Registered Practitioner and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He has a teaching career spanning over 45 years and has research interests in the phenomena of micro-moments in practice and clinical supervision. He has published on therapeutic practice, clinical supervision and counsellor training.

William West is a Visiting Professor to the University of Chester and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Counselling Studies at the University of Manchester, where he was most noted for his interest in counselling and spirituality and for his work with doctorate and PhD students. He has published extensively and remains passionately interested in the overlap between counselling and religious pastoral care.