Helping Skills

Book excerpt: With this third edition of Helping Skills, respected clinician and researcher Clara Hill has revised and updated her popular textbook, continuing her comprehensive exploration of empirically supported, basic helping skills for undergraduate and first-year graduate students. Following Hill's well-established three-stage model of helping (Exploration, Insight, and Action), the text presents an integrative approach that is grounded in client-centered, psychoanalytic, and cognitive-behavioral theory. Hill's model recognizes the critical roles of affect, cognition, and behavior in the process of change, filling a void left by textbooks that focus more narrowly on the processes facilitating change. The text includes many student-friendly features and provides in-depth information on: the theoretical foundation of the three-stage model of helping the different goals used in each stage (e.g., attending and listening, restatement, challenge, self-disclosure, and feedback) the general principles of ethical conduct and strategies for resolving ethical dilemmas numerous practice exercises, labs, and Web forms that illustrate (and help evaluate) the complex interaction between client and helper and how students can intervene most effectively from moment to moment, based on their intentions and the client's reactions. New material for this edition includes: a revised approach to the three-stage model, emphasizing goals and tasks of the stages and the ability to traverse among the stages in a helper-client relationship more attention to multicultural issues and better delineation of steps of the Action stage for four discrete tasks (relaxation, behavioral change, behavioral rehearsal, anddecision-making). With her accessible yet instructive style, Hill instill