Helping Skills: Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action

Clara E. Hill has revised and updated her textbook, Helping Skills. The volume teaches empirically supported, basic helping skills to undergraduate and first-year graduate students. Following Hill's three-stage model of helping (Exploration, Insight, and Action), the text presents an integrative approach that is grounded in client-centered, psychoanalytic, and cognitive-behavioral theory. Hill's model recognizes the critical roles of affect, cognition, and behavior in the process of change, filling a void left by textbooks that focus narrowly on the processes facilitating change.
Material new to this edition includes a revised Action stage, designed to enable instructors to incorporate the current thinking about this area; more attention to multicultural issues; and new measures to test the training model, which will allow students to evaluate their skills and level of confidence.
With her accessible yet instructive style, Hill instills enthusiasm for the process of learning to help others. She also encourages students' personal and professional growth with questions that challenge them to think about and discuss the process of becoming helpers and their reasons for doing so.

Clara E. Hill earned her Ph.D. at Southern Illinois University in 1974. She also began her career that year as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently still there as a professor and co-director of the Counseling Psychology Program. She has been the president of the Society for Psychotherapy Research; the editor of the Journal of Counseling Psychology; and the editor of Psychotherapy Research, the journal of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. She was awarded the Leona Tyler Award from Division 17 (Society of Counseling Psychology), the Distinguished Psychologist Award from Division 29 (Psychotherapy) of the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Research Career Award from the Society for Psychotherapy Research, and the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award from the Section on Counseling and Psychotherapy Process and Outcome Research of the Society for Counseling Psychology. Her major research interests are helping skills, psychotherapy process and outcome, training therapists, dream work, and qualitative research. She has published 161 journal articles; 34 chapters in books; and 7 books, including Therapist Techniques and Client Outcomes: Eight Cases of Brief Psychotherapy; Working with Dreams in Psychotherapy; Helping Skills: Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action, 1st ed. (with Karen M. O'Brien), Helping Skills: The Empirical Foundation , Dream Work in Therapy: Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action; Helping Skills: Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action, 2d ed. (American Psychological Association, 2004); and, with Louis G. Castonguay, Insight in Psychotherapy (American Psychological Association, 2007).