Working Alliance Skills for Mental Health Professionals

Working Alliance Skills for Mental Health Professionals provides expert guidance to mental health providers who wish to develop and augment their skills and competence in this area of practice. Each chapter deconstructs a dimension of the working alliance in psychotherapy, defining and describing specific mechanisms and interventions that can help professionals establish an alliance with their clients. The book includes skills in nonverbal communication, ways to foster the working bond with diverse clients, goal and task setting strategies, and verbal and interpersonal therapeutic skills, as well as mechanisms for repairing ruptures and for fostering the working alliance through supervision. The authors provide "in session" examples of how each skill may be implemented, and highlight the use of interventions through clinical vignettes and masked clinical cases. Working Alliance Skills for Mental Health Professionals is ideal for use in training programs in counseling, clinical psychology, and social work. It may also be valuable to professional-level practitioners interested in honing their skills in optimizing the working alliance.

Jairo N. Fuertes, PhD, ABPP, LMHC, is Professor of Psychology in the Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University. He is a licensed psychologist and mental health counselor in New York State and has Board Certification in both Counseling and Clinical Psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology. He is also a staff psychologist at the counseling center at Baruch College, City University of New York.

Chapter 1: Working Alliance Skills for Health Care Professionals: Introduction Jairo N. Fuertes, Patrick Mele, and Julian Rapaport Chapter 2: The Working Bond in the Working Alliance Andres Perez-Rojas, Jazmin Gonzalez, and Jairo N. Fuertes Chapter 3: Therapist Technical and Interpersonal Skills in the Working Alliance Timothy Anderson and Matthew Perlman Chapter 4: Setting Goals and Tasks in the Working Alliance Georgiana Shyck Tryon Chapter 5: Agreement Communication to Solidify and Maintain Consensus Jairo N. Fuertes, Michael Moore, and Chloe Pagano-Staltzer Chapter 6: Clients' Experiences and Contributions to the Working Alliance Robinder Bedi and Syler Hayes Chapter 7: Multicultural Issues in the Working Alliance Changming Duan Chapter 8: Resolving Alliance Ruptures and Overcoming Treatment Impasses Jerald Gardner, Lauren Lipner, Catherine F. Eubanks, and J. Christopher Muran Chapter 9: Supervising the Development and Sustaining of the Working Alliance Rod Goodyear and Hideko Sera Chapter 10: Working Alliance Skills: Integration and Conclusions Jairo N. Fuertes