Therapeutic Communication: Developing Professional Skills

Written in a clear and concise style, this jargon-free text provides student clinicians with the practice principles and fundamental communication skills used to facilitate effective therapeutic communication with clients. Organized into discrete sections to highlight one skill at a time, each chapter follows a unified format including an overview of the skill (e.g., empathy, reflection, validation, etc.); rationale for use; exemplary dialogue between therapist and client demonstrating actual usage of the skill; tutorial commentary embedded in the dialogue example; dialogue debriefing; and suggestions for variations.

Key Features:  

• Delineates the multidimensional differences between social relationships and the realm of the professional clinician: Students are given direction in terms of applying standards such as boundaries, ethics, regulating self disclosure, legal aspects, and client self determination.
• Offers dialogue boxes and role play exercises: These resources illustrate the multiple uses of each skill and allow students to practice the skill sets presented.
• Discusses the process of balancing objectivity and empathy: Emotional dynamics are discussed along with transference, countertransference, self awareness, and termination.
• Provides a transcription of three 50-minute sessions: These transcripts demonstrate the essentials of clinical skill integration, short-term therapy, and termination.

Intended Audience:  
This supplemental text is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate clinical skills courses across the human services in the fields of Counseling, Social Work, Psychology, and Nursing. It is also an excellent resource for any professional dealing with clients in a clinical fashion.

Herschel Knapp, PhD, MSSW, has more than 30 years of experience as a health care professional in a variety of domains. In addition to his clinical work as a psychotherapist, primarily in hospital set­tings, he has provided project management for innovative interventions designed to improve the quality of patient care via multisite, health science implementations. He teaches master’s and doctoral courses at Yeshiva University; he has also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California, California State University, Los Angeles, and California State, San Bernardino.  Dr. Knapp has served as the lead statistician on a lon­gitudinal cancer research project and managed the program evaluation metrics for a multisite, nonprofit children’s center. His clinical work includes emergency/trauma therapy in hospital settings. Dr. Knapp has developed and implemented innovative tele­health systems, using videoconferencing technology to facilitate optimal health care service delivery to remote patients and to coordinate specialty consultations among health care providers, including interventions to diagnose and treat people with HIV and hepatitis, with special outreach to the homeless.

He created and implemented a nurse research mentorship program, providing research and analytic education, enabling nurses to design, implement, analyze, and publish the results of their quality improvement projects.

Dr. Knapp has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed health science journals and serves as a peer-reviewer for more than 20 science journals. He is also the author of other textbooks, including Intermediate Statistics Using SPSS (2018), Introductory Statistics Using SPSS (2nd ed., 2017), Practical Statistics for Nursing Using SPSS (2017), Therapeutic Communication: Developing Professional Skills (2nd ed., 2014), and Introduction to Social Work Practice: A Practical Workbook (2010).