Saul A. Singer

I have been providing behavioral health and addiction interventions for 5 decades. After almost 20 years, I became disillusioned by the widespread belief that 20-30 percent of clients would either drop out of therapy or recidivate. Hearing my colleagues normalize that almost a third of their clients were challenging, even impossible, haunted me. They blamed their clients, labeling them with personality disorders or derogatory descriptors. I refused to accept that there were “throw away clients” and believed that it was our responsibility to figure out how to collaboratively engage every client. During the last 30 years of practice, I made it my mission to focus on clients who others considered difficult, even impossible. Many of those clients had been coerced or mandated to therapy.

I made it a point to seek out referrals of those clients from other therapists; EAPs; managed care/insurance; community resource centers and agencies; treatment facilities; child welfare and juvenile justice families at risk of losing their children; and court programs. I was also able to work with foster kids; immigrant families who were being "victimized" by well-meaning agencies who did not understand them; families whose kids were medicated into zombies by psychiatrists because schools complained about their behaviors; families in multigenerational poverty, etc. I felt it was my responsibility to figure out what worked for each of them--individualized client-need driven interventions. So, I had to write a book about decades of amazing clients who overcame adversity, and the tools, strategies, and words that worked to develop a truly collaborative relationship leading to good outcomes even for clients who were coerced or mandated to attend therapy.

This book begins with my journey and the insights I gained throughout my professional development; and tells the stories of heroic clients in dire straits who overcame difficult circumstances, and the interventions that worked for them. This is my legacy work and I want to share the strategies and tools that I know are effective with truly deserving clients whom others might describe as arduous! I want anyone and everyone in our field to read about how to help clients with targeted clinical work and the advocacy and support required to enhance clinical outcomes.