Collaborative Engagement for Clients Coerced or Mandated into Therapy: SELF-PACED ONLINE

Collaborative Engagement for Clients Coerced or Mandated into Therapy offers clinicians, interns, and students a unique look into the creative and effective application of foundational concepts and innovative clinical processes that foster collaboration and cooperation with clients who do not want to be in therapy but have been coerced or mandated into treatment. Research continues to affirm that a collaborative therapeutic alliance is the primary indicator of a successful outcome, and a client-need driven, culturally sensitive, adaptive, and collaborative approach that combines the experience and strengths of the client with the skills of a solution-oriented clinician is significant in fostering cooperation, engagement, and desired change.

This workshop was developed from five decades of clinical practice and research on coerced or mandated clients, supplemented with addendums from neurolinguistic studies, strategic interventions, and client-need driven clinical processes, as featured in the book, Brief Therapy for Clients with Challenging or Unique Issues: A Clinician’s Guide to Enhancing Outcomes, published internationally by Routledge. Clinical processes include methods to accomplish a collaborative therapeutic alliance, foster cooperation, build hope, define and identify desired outcomes, and accomplish authentic change.

Learning Objectives: 

By the end of this presentation, participants will:

• have a practical understanding of the challenges involved with engaging clients coerced or mandated into treatment;

• be clear about first session processes to build engagement, cooperation, and trust;

• have skills to identify a client’s agenda, philosophy of change, and processes that lead to client-need driven solutions;

• know the limits of clinical model research and how to determine what works for the client in front of them;

• understand the power of expectancy and hope on collaboration and outcomes;

• recognize different client positions in regard to receptiveness, and how to constructively proceed;

• demonstrate fluency in neurolinguistics that promote cooperation and desired change;

• possess best practice strategies to successfully engage and continue to motivate clients who are court ordered, or coerced to attend therapy;

• acquire client centered tools and strategies important for successful outcomes with diverse populations who have reasons to be skeptical;

• productively redefine traditional labels such as difficult, impossible, borderline, or uncooperative;

• understand authentic change versus compliance or temporary change;

• have a blueprint through stories of clients in “dire straits” who found their way.

Presented by: Saul A. Singer, LMFT, LCADC, AADC

Saul A. Singer, LMFT, LCADC, AADC, has worked for five decades as a behavioral health and addiction professional providing therapy, consultation, continuing education, college instruction, and clinical supervision in private practice and for community agencies and treatment programs. Author of Brief Therapy for Clients with Challenging or Unique Issues: A Clinician’s Guide to Enhancing Outcomes, a 2023 internationally published book that weaves together the stories of courageous clients and offers innovative tools that empower and motivate even the most reluctant clients to engage and identify solutions that fit for them.

Continuing Education Units (CEUs): 3 CEUs

CASAT Learning courses are approved for CEUs by the boards listed here. 

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