Our relationships enrich our lives. Strong bonds with family, friends, and colleagues make our lives full and vibrant, but they can also be a source of distress or even trauma. Few relationships are perfect, and we often find ourselves let down by even the people we count on most; learning to navigate the challenges is vital to protecting our health and wellbeing. In this book the author presents a model for forgiveness that addresses how we either repair relationships when someone has harmed us, or how we move forward when relationships are beyond repair. Repairing a relationship is not always practical. The model presented in this book can be helpful to promote self-healing and to either re-establish relationships with others or move forward when reconciliation is harmful or not possible. Practicing Forgiveness draws on the perspectives of counseling professionals from across the country to explore contextual and cultural aspects of forgiveness with stories, humor, clinical examples, research, and empirical findings, while also considering the influence of environment and religion. The forgiveness process is a universal one, and this book serves as a resource to anyone wishing to gain insight into their own personal journey.

Counseling Youth: Systemic Issues and Interventions highlights the nature of counseling youth and implementing interventions from a systemic perspective. This systemic perspective focuses on the multitude of issues and systems that impact youth and mental health, such as academic progress and achievement; emotional and behavioral problems; and overall behaviors that impact physical and emotional well-being. As these aforementioned issues are addressed, highlighted are the roles of various systems, including schools, mental health facilities, medical facilities, juvenile justice systems, and refugee services, as well as services geared to special populations, such as LGBT+ youth and undocumented immigrant minors. Included in this text is a brief overview of child-adolescent development that then focuses on issues, policies, and services for counseling youth in schools, communities, and clinical settings. Central to this book are the issues that families, schools, and communities are having difficulty addressing, such as trauma, abuse, suicide, teen pregnancy, and antisocial behavior, and the key to addressing these issues by utilizing a variety of resources within the system and advocating for systemic change. Utilized is a multidimensional focus on development, issues, and strategies, providing an integrative approach so that clinicians (present and future) have an understanding of the theory, concerns, policies, and approaches for working youth. This book also utilizes a transtheoretical approach and attempts to provide an overview of approaches and interventions regardless of theoretical approach. Unlike books that focus on a singular model, this approach is to speak to a variety of individuals training to be clinicians from a variety of backgrounds (e.g., social work, marriage and family therapy, counseling, psychology).

Students often experience assessment courses, and subsequently the textbooks used for the course, as a statistics-heavy class accompanied by an encyclopedia of a variety of assessments. Assessment in Counseling alternatively emphasizes the skills used in assessment, thereby enabling students to apply these skills across a broad range of assessment instruments and strategies. Assessment, like most core areas of counseling, has a theoretical basis and a pertinent, practical component. However, this practical component often gets lost in the application of the skills and use of instruments that heavily rely on psychometric properties. Written in an accessible, conversational tone, this text focuses on the application of the theoretical and measurement concepts of assessment in counseling and introduces three case studies that are followed throughout the text. Additionally, instead of introducing readers to a plethora of instruments, the authors select seminal measures that students are likely to approach and use in the profession. Through the use of this text and course content, one will acquire the skills to search, select, and administer the type of assessment instruments that he/she deems helpful for their practice as a professional counselor, regardless of specialization. Ultimately, this textbook serves as an invaluable guide for administering, scoring, interpreting, and communicating assessment results.