Skills for Effective Counseling: A Faith-Based Integration
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
Anyone in a helping profession—including professional counselors, spiritual directors, pastoral counselors, chaplains and others—needs to develop effective communication skills. But learning these skills is like learning a new language: it takes time and practice to communicate effectively, and lack of practice can lead to the loss of one's ability to use this new language.
Suitable for both beginning students and seasoned practitioners, Skills for Effective Counseling provides a biblically integrated approach to foundational counseling skills that trains the reader to use specific microskills. These skills include perceiving, attending, validating emotion and empathic connection.
Chapters include textbook features such as sample session dialogues, role plays and a variety of both in-class and out-of-class exercises and reflection activities that will engage various learning styles. Strategically interwoven throughout the chapters are special topics related to:
This textbook and the accompanying IVP Instructor Resources include all of the activities and assignments that an instructor might need to execute a graduate, undergraduate or lay course in foundational counseling skills. Professors teaching within CACREP-accredited professional counseling programs will be able to connect specific material in the textbook to the latest CACREP Standards.
- Contains practical tools to help to become even more effective in the counseling area
- Gives an excellent tool to understand the relationship of faith-based counseling to secular approaches
- Strives to equip a new generation with listening skills and a constructive framework to counsel with love in service of Jesus Christ
- The Microskills Approach
- The Person of the Counselor
- What Do You Notice?
- Your Presence in the Room
- Identifying the Pieces of the Story
- Validating Emotion
- Connecting Empathically
- Zeroing In
- Connecting Deeply
- Expanding Therapeutic Options
- Reflecting Apparent Discrepancies
- Using the Here and Now
- Strategies for Growth
- Expanding the Counseling System
- Appreciating the Sacred
- Endings and New Beginnings
Top Highlights
“Input from others is the next step in cultivating self-awareness. It requires a level of vulnerability and teachability that can be risky, but it is essential to the development of self-as-instrument.” (Page 44)
“Target 1 is all about building foundations and creating a solid base on which the counseling relationship can develop. Target 1 involves using the related microskills to build the relationship with the counselee. This is the main task of the early phase of counseling. Consider your own life experiences and the people with whom you have chosen to confide over the years. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we rarely sit down with a stranger and reveal our deepest and darkest secrets before testing the waters to see whether we feel safe, heard and understood. Just because you may hold a formal position as ‘counselor’ does not mean that you are, or should be, automatically endowed with trust by the counselee.” (Page 55)
“The counselor who is more of a comforter tends to see how support, affirmation, empathy and comfort could create a sense of safety for the counselee that could then enable the counselee to move forward in a healthier direction. The challenger, in contrast, tends to see how well-meaning confrontation or challenges to logic, behavior or decisions could facilitate the counselee’s ability to understand his situation differently and thus move toward healthier change. There is a time and a place for both types of approaches, but most of the time your counselees will need you to be able to do both.” (Page 36)
Professionals often zero in on disciplinary differences in approach, but in this excellent text Elisabeth Nesbit Sbanotto, Heather Davediuk Gingrich, and Fred C. Gingrich transcend disciplinary differences and get to the heart of being a better people-helper—the interpersonal helping skills shared across people-helping disciplines. This is a comprehensive, readable text that is a fully integrated Christian and psychological model for being an effective helper. Regardless of your discipline or theoretical approach you'll love it.
—Everett L. Worthington Jr., coauthor of Couple Therapy
Every day I look for resources that will help me and others become more effective in helping counsel and minister to others. Whether you are a beginning student, seasoned clinician, or pastor, Skills for Effective Counseling is a must-add to your library. It is clinically excellent, biblically anchored, and easy to understand yet filled with immense wisdom and understanding.
—Tim Clinton, president, American Association of Christian Counselors
Wow. What a delightful surprise. This biblically sound, research-based, therapeutically relevant, and easy-to-read book is a unique, fresh, rich, integrative, and practical resource. Regardless of your therapeutic orientation, you'll find some practical tools to help you to become even more effective. It's a breath of fresh air for the practicing clinician and will be a resource that you'll turn to often. There are several chapters alone that are worth the price of the book. If you want to upgrade your therapeutic toolkit and increase both your confidence and effectiveness, read this book. It's that good.
—Gary J. Oliver, executive director, The Center for Healthy Relationships, professor of psychology and practical theology, John Brown University