Product reviews for Advanced Skills and Interventions in Therapeutic Counseling

In Advanced Skills and Interventions in Therapeutic Counselling, Gordon Emmerson views the counselling experience as one in which both the practitioner and the client must play an equally committed part in order to resolve his problems and to initiate his own self-growth. The client, therefore, needs to be wholly committed to the process while the counsellor must work with true commitment in his role of maintaining appropriate boundaries, upholding clinical ethics and observing his duty of care to his charge.
Gordon Emmerson's treatise on counselling skills focuses on Ego State therapeutic practice rather than on reflective person-centred counselling or cognitive behavioural techniques. The Ego State discipline considers that the client is a composite of a number of discreet parts which dictate his overall emotive responses and behavioural patterns but, when such states become troublesome, these psychic dilemmas can be resolved in the therapeutic context. An underlying ego state may be problematic for the client when it is born out of negative and/or traumatic experience and has been adopted as an emergency coping-strategy. Ego State philosophy originated as a personality theory devised by Paul Federn in the middle of last century but has been taken up more recently as the basis of a sturdy therapeutic approach by Eloardo Weiss and, notably, John and Helen Watkins. It is to this body of knowledge that Gordon Emmerson has contributed his insightful and comprehensive Advanced Skills and Interventions in Therapeutic Counseling for the benefit of the therapeutic fraternity.
In Advanced Skills and Interventions in Therapeutic Counseling the author spells out succinctly what is entailed in Ego State counselling. The Ego State practitioner will be guided by the author through the process of helping the client to identify, acknowledge, access and maintain a dialogue with his ego states as well as to interact with his introjects as the internalisation of the beliefs, convictions and perceptions of significant others. Gordon Emmerson specifies that the counselling profession demands active listening, keenly focused attention and empathic awareness of the client. Advanced Skills and Interventions in Therapeutic Counseling considers diagnostic criteria and thorough client-assessment to be the vital factors in determining the direction in which therapeutic intervention should veer. The author also provides a number of invaluable strategies for handling the client who is beset by a lack of psychic peace or internal dissent when ego-state negotiation is called for during counselling. The client who is exhibiting a tongue-tied approach to life, a lack of appropriate responses and/or unassertiveness in interpersonal communications may, similarly, be coaxed through the counselling process successfully. For the client who experiences difficulty in overcoming reluctance to face issues and, thereby, exhibits a resistance to locating, naming, acknowledging and initiating a dialogue with his ego states or introjects, the book also outlines various tactics and procedures to assist the counsellor in this respect.
Gordon Emmerson, furthermore, draws attention to the importance of assisting the traumatised client to dig out the root cause of his problems by employing a tripartite procedure for allowing him to express his negative emotions, eliminate fear-sources and achieve peace and contentment. This three-stage intervention can also be utilised for crisis management when the client is hampered by immediate difficulties in daily life with particular reference to grief, bereavement, anger management, relationship issues, depression, addictions, compulsions, sexual abuse and suicidal ideation.
Advanced Skills and Interventions in Therapeutic Counseling provides a thorough backbone to the practice of counselling, in general, and the practice of Ego State therapy, in particular, and thereby leaves the reader in no doubt whatsoever about how to work effectively with the client in order to resolve his distress and trauma. Advanced Skills and Interventions in Therapeutic Counseling is, therefore, a remarkable work which will be well worth the investment for any therapeutic