A complete guide for helping professionals, with tried-and-true techniques for practicing family counseling therapy

Now in its second edition, Working With Families: Guidelines and Techniques is filled with up-to-date, systems-oriented techniques focused on field-tested results. Outlining the dos and don'ts of working with different types of families and the various complications, nuances, and complexities that can occur, this practical guide provides a broad and proven selection of interventions, processes, and guidelines for working interactively, systematically, and compassionately with families.

Working With Families, Second Edition covers a range of topics including:

• Family work in different settings
• Session-by-session guidelines
• Therapeutic themes by family type
• Managing adolescents in family sessions
• Dealing with fear of family work
• Family mapping
• Strategic child assessment
• Chemical dependence and its impact on families

Informed by the author's many years of experience in the field, both as a clinician and as a trainer, Working With Families, Second Edition offers an invaluable systems-oriented, goal-directed, problem-solving approach to family counseling therapy for all mental health professionals.

John T. Edwards, PhD, is an Approved Supervisor in the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), an adjunct faculty member at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, a private trainer, and a consultant. He has conducted and supervised family therapy for more than twenty-five years and has served as director of counseling in a family health center and clinical director of an inpatient family care program. He has written two books on working with families and conducted hundreds of training events in the United States and Canada.