The Making of a Therapist

Book excerpt: A paperback edition of the classic guide for new therapists seeing clients for the first time. Veteran therapist and mental health writer Louis Cozolino’s classic text contains all of the things he wished someone had told him during the first weeks and months of his clinical training. Now available in paperback, the book includes guidance about working with your clients, such as how to cope with silence, handle their direct questions, and get them to talk less and say more. It also focuses on the inner experience of becoming a therapist and ways of thinking and feeling while sitting across from clients. It speaks honestly about not having all the answers, and shuttling up and down between your head and your heart, and mind and body, struggling clients sit before you. It balances the process of developing therapeutic skills while also taking an inner journey—to becoming the professional, and person, you hope to be. With a new introduction to the paperback edition, this book remains an essential clinical reference. A Test Bank is available for professors using the book as a course text.