Topic: counseling skills

Rapid severe weight loss combined with heavy drinking is a formula for lasting difficulties.

We want to make sure the alcoholic person learns the right lesson from experience.

With ‘coerced’ clients, it’s easy to fall into a little game with the client striving to appear in compliance while covertly doing whatever he wants.

An agenda refers to the client’s underlying plan or program. Not just what he hopes to accomplish, but the things he’s determined not to do.

For some clients, particularly those with problems with rules and authority, their experience with boundaries is probably as important as anything that happens in counseling.

Takes a while to become really good at it, but most do. Addicts are not always great manipulators — that would be somebody so skilled you never realized you were being manipulated — but they’re bold, persistent, and creative when it comes to getting what they want

For some reason, the clients paid little attention to his advice. Most of the time, they treated him like a visitor from Mars.

Maybe you’ll find an idea or two that you can put to use doing what you do best: Getting the suffering alcoholic or drug addict safely through that doorway to lifetime recovery.

My outpatients get discouraged very easily. They may actually be doing pretty well for somebody new to recovery, but they don’t seem to realize it.

I recall one professor airily informing his class that recovering counselors had an ‘agenda’.