Helping the Client: A Creative Practical Guide

Clinicians, counselors, and managers wanting to improve or refine their counseling skills should look no further than Helping the Client. Drawing on his many years of experience as a therapists, consultant and teacher, John Heron introduces you to his model of six forms of helping behavior--a model which can be adopted by any practitioner offering face-to-face service with a client. He explores the contexts and issues associated with these six forms of counseling and, for each, describes a wide range of applications. Because of its comprehensive repertoire of interventions that can be adapted and selectively applied, Helping the Client is an essential resource for practitioners, professionals, and students in counseling, clinical psychology, management studies, social work, policing, and nursing. "This is a wonderful book and anybody involved in counselling or counselling training should have a copy. . . . Heron′s writing is clear, informed and his depth of counselling experience is evident. He tackles the immense and difficult issues of responsibility and power within a helping relationship with great sensitivity and insight. The final chapters relating to phases and sequencing and perverted interventions, I found most helpful. In addition, his outline program for training in six category intervention gives an easy to follow structure for running what I believe would be an extremely useful training course. . . . An excellent and inexpensive purchase." --Clinical Psychology Forum "It is a very positive guide, with no sense of limits to the possibilities if the client wants to be helped. . . . There are times when the writing is momentarily very poetic and moves my emotions as well as feeding my intellect. John Heron is very clear in defining his terms throughout the book, so what is lost in descriptive writing is a gain in clarity of meaning." --British Journal of Guidance and Counselling

John Heron founded the Human Potential Research Group at the University of Surrey, and later pioneered personal and professional development programs for doctors, as Assistant Director, British Postgraduate Medical Federation, University of London. He now runs the South Pacific Centre for Human Inquiry, New Zealand.