Main description:

Foundations of Marriage, Couple, and Family Therapy: Developing Helping Relationships is a comprehensive textbook focused on guiding graduate students in marriage and family therapy and counseling through their understanding of building professional helping relationships with family systems. The book focuses on the systemic nature of helping relationships and will explore ways in which building clinical relationships is interwoven into broader family dynamics and social dynamics. This book provides a conceptual overview of helping skills, explains how basic skills support the effectiveness of any helping approach by including common factors research, and illustrates how multicultural considerations are vital to the effective use of basic skills. Furthermore, this text moves beyond individual helping skills to include relational skills such as facilitating open discourse among family members, disrupting dysfunctional interaction patterns, identifying family processes, and honouring each person's perspective.

Applicable in both face-to-face and online learning environments, a companion website features experiential learning videos that allow students to see how the skills learned in this book are used in clinical situations, as well as assignments on case conceptualization, multicultural considerations, and more.

Contents:

Section I: Introduction 1: Introduction to Systemic Therapeutic Alliances 2: How a System Works: Theoretical Understanding of Systems 3: Connecting to the System 4: Common Factors in Professional Helping Relationships 5: Balancing Legal and Ethical Guidelines Section II: Tools and Techniques for Building Systemic Therapeutic Alliance 6: The Basics: Skills for Establishing Therapeutic Alliance 7: Setting the Stage: Tools for Beginning Phases of Helping Relationships 8: Let's Get Down to Business: Tools for Working Phases of Helping 9: Finishing Up and Moving On: Tools for the Closing Phase of Helping Relationships 10: When Something Just Isn't Quite Right: Addressing Challenges to the Therapeutic Alliance Section III: Model Specific Helping 11: Applying a Theoretical Systemic Understanding to Helping 12: Examples, Tools, Techniques of Specific Models Section IV: Understanding Self in the Context of the System 13: Starting with "Who am I?": Cultural Competency 14: Family Experience 15: Personal Triggers Section V: Applications Skills with Various Clients and Organizational Structures 16: Various Client Structures 17: Larger Systemic Work