Helping Skills: Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action

The sixth edition of this seminal textbook offers an updated model for aspiring helping professionals to enhance their clinical skills.

Significant updates to this edition include: 

• new interactive features to improve student learning, including self-reflection exercises to help them cultivate their own values and perspectives as helpers and role-play activities for hands-on learning;
• updated case examples and reflection questions that reflect a broad range of diversity among clients and providers;
• a shift from a stage-based model to a more fluid, goal-based model of helping skills; and
• empirical updates that help students understand the importance of tailoring interventions to clients’ individual needs.

Clara Hill’s helping skills model consists of three main goals—exploration, insight, and action—in which helpers guide clients in exploring their thoughts and feelings, discovering the origins and consequences of maladaptive thoughts and behaviors, and creating positive long‑term change.

This easy-to-read guide synthesizes Hill’s extensive clinical and classroom experience with fresh, unique insights from coauthors Harold Chui and Judy Gerstenblith. They teach fundamental theory and provide students with clinical skills, challenge them to think critically about the helping process, and enable them to develop their own unique approach to helping clients.

Clara E. Hill, PhD, is a retired professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Maryland. Her awards include the Leona Tyler Award, the Distinguished Psychologist Award, the Distinguished Research Career Award, and the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award. Her major research interests are helping skills, the psychotherapy process, training and supervising therapists, dream work, meaning in life, and qualitative research. Dr. Hill has published over 250 journal articles, more than 75 book chapters, and 14 books, including Dream Work in Therapy (2004), and Consensual Qualitative Research (2012), and Meaning in Life (2018).
 
Harold Chui, PhD, is associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include the psychotherapy process and outcomes, training and supervising psychotherapists, multicultural counseling, and school mental health. He received the Bergin and Garfield’s Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Psychotherapy Research. Dr. Chui is president of the Society for Psychotherapy Research—Asian Area Affiliate, chair of the Science and Scholarship Standing Committee at the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, associate editor of Psychotherapy, and an editorial board member of the Journal of Counseling Psychology and Psychotherapy Research.
 
Judy Gerstenblith, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Albert and Jessie Danielsen Institute at Boston University. Her research interests include the psychotherapy process and outcomes, therapist training and supervision, the role of attachment in the therapeutic relationship, working with existential themes in therapy, addressing burnout and cultivating well-being in helping professionals, and the spiritual formation of religious leaders. Dr. Gerstenblith was chosen as the University of Maryland College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Emerging Scholar and has received multiple awards, including the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award.