R103: Treating the Difficult Client

This Reading Course, comprised of 5 articles, offers a range of innovative approaches to dealing with most challenging clinical problems that will broaden your clinical thinking and help you find new ways to draw on the most powerful therapeutic resources of all: the complex, unpredictable vagaries of the client's own heart, mind, and spirit. Bill O'Hanlon will show you how to be with clients in their ambivalences and contradictions that allows them to step into fresh possibilities. Katy Butler explores in depth the influential contribution of Marsha Linehan and explains the nuts-and-bolts of her Dialectical Behavioral Approach. Yvonne Dolan reveals the language structures and techniques that can rebuild hope in even the most shattered client. Barry Duncan, Mark Hubble, and Scott Miller show how to let technique take a back seat in what other therapists might consider "impossible cases."

Course Readings

Revolution on the Horizon: DBT Challenges the Borderline Diagnosis by Katy Butler

Stepping Off the Throne: It’s Easy to Be Too Enamored with Our Own Theories by Barry L. Duncan

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Turning Ambivalence into Possibility by Bill O'Hanlon

The Pragmatics of Hope: What to Do When all Seems Lost by Yvonne Dolan

The Psychology of the Sand-Pit: Clinical Lessons from Winnie-the-Pooh by Douglas Flemons

Learning Objectives

1. Design interventions using inclusive language
2. Discuss the relationship between client action and hope
3. Explain the impact of avoiding a problem
4. List three elements of dialectical behavioral therapy