Therapeutic Change with Difficult Clients

For therapists, one of the most challenging clients to treat is one who has little interest in change, who thinks that change is a waste of time, or a threat to their personal freedom or sense of being. The difficulty of creating change for such clients reveals the limits of typical approaches to psychotherapy, suggesting that a more thorough understanding of therapeutic change may be the most important step toward improving psychotherapy effectiveness. Now in its second edition, this book describes a common factors model for understanding and activating the process of change. The CHANGES model, which has been significantly expanded and updated since the first edition, is founded on the seven precursors of change, which are understood, identified, assessed, discussed, and activated in the context of therapeutic encounters. Through CHANGES, the authors examine the capacities of individuals to generate therapeutic change, identify the barriers to change, and discuss the power of therapists to catalyze the change process using a variety of well established techniques. In addition to updated supporting literature, the authors discuss recent advances in neuroscience and the cognitive sciences, as well as new developments in the interpersonal aspects of therapeutic engagement.