Clinical Social Work with Individuals, Families, and Groups: The Healing Power of Relationships

By: Michael C. LaSala

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Synopsis: This textbook equips Masters of Social Work (MSW) students and beginning social workers with the personal and professional tools needed to work successfully with individuals, families, and groups, guided by the social justice values of the profession. This book is a comprehensive description of practical, field-tested, ready-to-apply interventions based on the author’s 40 years of practice, as well as his national and international teaching, training, and supervision. By drawing case illustrations from composites of actual practice, he demonstrates how to apply various models, as well as how to identify, avoid, and rectify clinical errors. This book also provides core understandings and techniques from models of psychotherapy alongside essential clinical skills that cut across these approaches, such as engagement, establishing therapeutic relationships, managing one’s anxiety, reaching for pain, and the clinician’s use of self. Filled with reflective questions and ideas for class discussion, the book addresses how to heal relationships across all contexts, such as with clients in diverse and oppressed groups and doing clinical social work during the age of Covid. Providing a description of clinical social work that is congruent with diversity, equity, and social justice, this excellent textbook is for students and instructors of MSW courses and will prove indispensable to beginning practitioners.