The Client Who Changed Me - Softcover

Kottler, Jeffrey A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415951089 ISBN 13: 9780415951081

Publisher: Routledge, 2005

Synopsis

Although the impact that clients can have on therapists is well-known, most work on the subject consists of dire warnings: mental health professionals are taught early on to be on their guard for burnout, compassion fatigue, and countertransference. However, while these professional hazards are very real, the scholarly focus on the negative potential of the client-counselor relationship often implies that no good can come of allowing oneself to get too close to a client's issues. This sentiment obscures what every therapist knows to be true: that the client-counselor relationship can also effect powerful positive transformations in a therapist's own life.

The Client Who Changed Me is Jeffrey Kottler and Jon Carlson's testimony to the significant and often life-changing ways in which therapists have been changed by their patients. Kottler and Carlson draw not only upon their own extensive experience - between them, they have more than fifty years in the field - but also upon lengthy interviews with dozens of the country's foremost therapists and theorists. This novel work presents readers with a truly unique perspective on the business of therapy: not merely how it appears externally, but how practitioners experience it internally. Although these stories paint a complex and multi-layered portrait of the client-counselor relationship, they all demonstrate the profound and unexpected rewards that the profession has to offer.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffrey A. Kottler, Ph. D., is Chair of the Counseling Department at California State University, Fullerton and is one of the most prolific authors in the fields of psychology and education.

Jon Carlson, Psy.D., Ed.D., is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Counseling at Governors State University, University Park, Illinois and a Psychologist with the Wellness Clinic in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0415951089
• ISBN 13: 9780415951081
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232