Skills and Techniques for Human Service Professionals: Counseling Environment, Helping Skills, Treatment Issues

The second edition of Skills and Techniques for Human Service Professionals: Counseling Environment, Helping Skills, Treatment Issues provides readers with valuable information about how the counseling environment impacts the helping relationship, ways of delivering critical helping skills, and the necessity of understanding important treatment issues when working with clients and consumers.

Section I focuses on the counseling environment. Whereas Chapter 1 highlights eight important characteristics of the effective helper, Chapter 2 examines how the client experiences the agency when first entering it. This chapter focuses on such things as agency atmosphere, physical space, and nonverbal behaviors of the helper.

In Section II, chapters move from the most basic foundational skills to more advanced skills and specialized training. Coverage includes honoring and respecting the client, being curious, delimiting power and developing an equal relationship, non-pathologizing, listening, reflections, paraphrasing, and basic empathy. Readers also learn about affirmation giving, encouragement, and support; offering alternatives; information and advice giving; modeling; self-disclosure; collaboration; advocacy; information gathering and solution-focused questions; advanced empathy; confrontation; assessing for suicidality and homicidality; crisis, disaster, and trauma helping; token economies; positive helping; and coaching.

Section III focuses on important treatment issues in human services including case management, culturally competent counseling, guidelines for working with diverse populations, and ethical decision-making when working with all clients.

Dr. Edward Neukrug is a professor of counseling and human services at Old Dominion University. A licensed professional counselor and licensed psychologist, he has experience in outpatient therapy, crisis counseling, substance abuse counseling, couples and family counseling, private practice, and as a school counselor. Dr. Neukrug is a nationally known author, presenter, and researcher. He was granted ACA Fellow status by the American Counseling Association in 2019. Dr. Neukrug is the author of eleven books: The Dictionary of Counseling and Human Services; Skills and Techniques for Human Service Professionals; Counseling Theory and Practice (2nd ed.); The World of the Counselor (5th ed.); Experiencing the World of the Counselor: A Workbook for Counselor Educators and Students (4th ed.); Theory, Practice and Trends in Human Services: An Introduction to An Emerging Profession (6th ed.); Essentials of Testing and Assessment for Counselors, Social Workers, and Psychologists (3rd ed.); A Brief Orientation to Counseling: Professional Identity, History, and Standards (2nd ed.); Skills and Tools for Today's Counselors and Psychotherapists; Counseling and Helping Skills: Critical Techniques for Becoming a Counselor; and Sage Encyclopedia of Theory in Counseling and Psychotherapy (editor).