Helping the Client: A Creative Practical Guide

A remarkable synthesis of the conceptual and the practical, this powerful and innovative book will be essential reading for all those interested in developing their repertoire of skills and methods for helping a client.

John Heron draws on his many years of experience as a therapist, consultant and teacher to present his model of six main forms of helping behaviour which can be adopted by any practitioner offering a face-to-face service to any client within a formal contractual or more informal helping relationship. He explores the contexts and issues associated with these different forms of helping and, for each, describes a wide range of interventions which the practitioner may use. He examines the objectives of helping, states of personhood, the preparation of the practitioner and the many ways in which helping can degenerate. A discussion of the format for interpersonal skills training using the six-category model concludes the book.

While the primary focus of Helping the Client is upon the counsellor or therapist working with the personal development of the client, the approach it presents has a much wider application. It has been accepted as the basis for interpersonal skills training in diverse settings - business organizations, medicine, nursing, social work, teaching and youth and community work - and many examples are given of how the interventions can be used by different occupational groups.

Helping the Client is the fourth, revised edition of Six Category Intervention Analysis, previously published by the University of Surrey.