Collaborative, Competency-Based Counseling and Therapy

Preface "If you want truly to understand something, try to change it." --Kurt Lewin In early 1997 we began talking about writing a book that would begin to move competency-based ideas into counseling, marriage and family, social work, and psychology programs. Although we both became involved in a variety of other projects, including a few together, this particular one was never far from our thoughts. For Bob this book became especially important when he found himself teaching graduate courses in four different departments at three different universities. While there was a plethora of books published on traditional counseling theories and family therapy approaches, there was nothing available to students that brought together collaborative, competency-based ideas into one succinct volume. This made the writing of this book not only important for the field, but a practicality in terms of training others to work in what we consider to be respective and effective ways. As with traditional thinkers, unfortunately there are turf issues amongst competency-based theorists. For example, there continues to be a split between solution-based and narrative thinkers. This was no more apparent than in 1996 atTherapeutic Conversationsconference held in Denver, Colorado. Although touted as a "collaborative" conference, the split between solution-based and narrative thinkers came to light with many attendees feeling as if one theory was better than another or that they had to choose one side or other (Bertolino & O'Hanlon, 1998). During one of the group conversational processes that ended each day of the conference, a woman stood up and said that she had decided that the conference wasn't for her after participating in a small group process in one of the sessions. She had told people in her small group that she did long-term therapy and they began to tell her how incorrect that was. She had felt as if what she was doing was bad and that she wrong. Bill was very upset at hearing this and told her that even though he had an international reputation as a brief therapist, he had seen at least one client for 12 years. Interestingly, the dogmatic idea that had plagued therapy for years had invaded a "collaborative" conference and in the process had alienated some of its participants. One of the ways that we chose to address this concern was to find how therapy approaches were similar and complemented one another as opposed to what made them distinctly different. In addition, we made it a mission of ours to support our ideas with current research on psychotherapy outcome. We believe that all mental health professionals should be interested in whether what they do in treatment contributes to positive outcomes. We also formulated a "mission statement" that we would like to share with you. It reflects all that we do in clinical practice, teaching, training, and research: We vow to support and promote effective and respectful approaches to counseling and psychotherapy and stand opposed to those approaches that are ineffective and disrespectful. Notice that this mission statement does no reflect any single approach or theory. It does not suggest that we are this or that. What it does do is promise that whatever we do as clinicians, teachers, or researchers will be respectful of our clients and others. It also states that we will do our best to study the outcomes of our ideas and methods in order to determine how we can be most effective with our clients. Throughout this text we will offer collaborative, competency-based ideas that directly reflect our mission statement. Some of these ideas are based in empirical research and some are based more on our observation of clinical results and anecdotal responses from clients and people to whom we have taughBertolino, Bob A. is the author of 'Collaborative, Competency-Based Counseling and Therapy', published 2001 under ISBN 9780205326051 and ISBN 0205326056.