On Being a Master Therapist: Practicing What You Preach 1st Edition

I am not one, and I never aspired to be the likes of one. To me, such was the providence of overly confident supervisors and trainers and especially workshop presenters who could take the suffering completely away from a "typical" client in one 50 minute spontaneous healing session. I was suspicious of such persons sporting such titles as their egos often proceeded them and who were often dressed in a formal tux bowing to the audience's de-lite. I do bow to the greats in the biz such as Yelom, Greenberg and Pipher. But this book isn't about showboating egos, its about learning what these master's do that we mortals can also do so to enhance better outcomes in the client. Its for that reason I give this volume four stars. Want a five star Kottler book? I suggest you go to his classic On Being a Therapist-- a must read for all inbound helper persons. Kottler holds nothing back.

This is a really great book that every therapist should read to better understand what really works in therapy. It is about the importance of relations rather than theory.

Excellent! The authors are refreshingly candid about their clinical work and how their personal lives influence and entwine with their professional approaches. Nice coverage of a broad range of subjects as well. You feel like you're sitting down for a chat with two true masters in the field and the reading is easy, informative, and times, touching. I teach university classes in counseling psychology and will be adding this book to the list of resources that we will use to discuss clinical practice issues as well as the personal aspects of being a therapist.

Excellent resource. I am a clinical counselor and counselor educator in private practice. Kottler shares openly the inner life of the therapist. I found the resource inspiring and normalizing for myself and I use it in some graduate counseling classes to help future clinicians understand what to expect. Students love it.

I enjoyed the book even though I am a graduate student in an MSW program and not yet a practicing professional.The book offered interesting insight into what qualities and skills contribute to one excelling in the field.

The book s a easy read. It's real life with no sugar coating. It's the real thingI loved it.

Very good read. Book came in emacculate shape.

A masterpiece by the masters

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book. As a person-centred psychotherapist I knew it was virtually inevitable that the authors would display ignorance of the non-directive / person-centred way of being a therapist, the radically different soft-but-strong alternative to the 'therapist knows best' approach. Indeed such is the authors' unfamiliarity with person-centred psychology that they are ironically unaware that their key findings point heavily in a person-centred direction.You know you are in the presence of someone who has not read much Rogers when they opine that Rogers' 'necessary and sufficient' conditions for growth were not sufficient. If this was truly the case then why is the person-centred approach as effective as other approaches? Why is it so popular with clients, often following inadequate experience with directive approaches? The authors seem to think that Rogers' contribution is limited to what they (not he) call 'core relational skills'. They claim that Rogers was naive to state that a therapist must be non-judgmental, yet Rogers never said this. He recognized that the degree to which the 6 therapeutic conditions were present would fluctuate, but that if they are all adequately in play a point of inflection is passed, facilitating growth from within the client's own frame of reference.They also claim to admire Rogers but have not managed to reference his most important expositions of his approach: his book Client Centered Therapy and his 1959 'Koch paper. (Yet 15 of Kottler's books are mentioned: was this book only about self-promotion?). They state that the person-centred approach is no longer relevant in contemporary society, which is a hell of a thing to say about an organismic model. Has human biology changed since then?!? They claim that 'new schools' have 'advanced his work', but offer no supporting evidence for this, perhaps because nobody has improved on Rogers, and he remains the future. Their book is published at a time when there are increasing numbers of clinicians re-inventing his ideas: medical-style assessment and diagnosis has never been so untrusted, clients increasingly expect therapists to respect their frame of reference, neuroplasticity and other advances in neuroscience have illuminated the biological mechanisms underlying self-actualization, and mindfulness, authenticity and congruence have been shown to be much the same thing. It is also rather noticeable that they have failed to note that the best therapists facilitate change that is lasting, something that the person-centred approach is famous for. And while saying that client factors are important, they fail to acknowledge that an approach that is as individual as each client provides more scope for these, as well as being the one that priorities relational depth more than any other modality.A good book could have been a great book if enough effort had been made to accommodate a proper appreciation of the non-directive approach, because it is just so radically different from the others. This is especially so as the authors state on numerous occasions that the faddishness of the assess-and-treat mentality has not given us better outcomes, and that client and relationship factors are key to outcomes. The authors show how the subtleties of the therapy that works from the inside out remain lost on those who can't see beyond the school of assess-and-treat. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and those who have only a cursory knowledge of Rogers' 3 'core conditions' will continue to believe that they can be combined with a directive approach. They cannot, because they are describing a non-directive approach(!) in which the conversation can only be held from within the clients' frame of reference, only from an orientation of empathy for the inner self of the client, and only from a state in which the therapist is so free of persona that it is very unlikely for any client to 'annoy' them to any significant extent. It seems that as long as those who teach therapy (or write about it) remain so ignorant about person-centred psychology, it will remain the most misunderstood of therapies, yet also one of its best-kept secrets.

Great material