Nicole Nicotera – författare

Innovative Skills to Support Well-Being and Resiliency in Youth emphasizes the step-by-step procedures readers will need to implement evidence-based, innovative techniques and skills that emphasize well-being and resilience in youth. The strategies are specifically chosen to capture and hold the interest of youth who are often reticent to counseling. Furthermore, the skills-based approach of the book aims to demystify what one actually does in session with youth by moving away from the vagueness of talk therapy when youth have nothing to say, and toward sessions that engage youth in action, stimulating communication and change. Innovative Skills to Support Well-Being and Resiliency in Youth also advocates for practice interventions that empower youth to be in charge of their personal well-being and the healing process. By doing so, youth can take an active role in their own healthy functioning, as opposed to passively receiving treatment.

Essential Interviewing Skills for the Helping Professions reaches beyond most other essential skills for clinical interviewing books with its emphasis on social justice, attention to the role of microaggressions in clinical practice, and the upmost importance of practitioner wellness as integral to longevity in the helping professions. Each chapter addresses interviewing skills that are foundational to the helping professions from mental health to physical health, includes detailed exercises, addresses social justice, and discusses practitioner wellness opportunities. Sometimes clients' stories are fraught with trauma, other times their stories are bound within generations of substance addiction or family violence, while other clinical stories present personal and social obstacles that arise from years of oppression at the hands of prejudice and discrimination. This book therefore goes beyond the basic ideas of choosing when to use an open question or to reflect emotions by covering how to integrate social justice and knowledge of power, privilege, and oppression into the interviewing arena. Essential interviewing skills require the practitioner to not only purposefully listen to the client's story, but also to be self-aware and willing to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them. The work of the clinical interviewer is a continuous challenge of balancing listening, responding, action, and self-awareness, and this book is designed to help.

Couples who enter therapy often view the endeavor as a last-ditch effort before seeking legal services, filing for divorce, and parting ways for good. Given this mentality at the outset, couples therapy is not always successful or enjoyable-for either the client or the therapist. It is also an area of practice that is often given short shrift in training programs that predominantly focus on clinical skills in work with children and adolescents, group work, practice in specific settings, and assessment and treatment of mental disorders. Innovative Skills to Increase Cohesion and Communication in Couples discusses evidence-based clinical techniques and skills that support and nurture couples in their relationship. Each chapter begins with a succinct overview of a technique, evidence that supports it, and ideas for assessment to ensure it is appropriate for the couple. Subsequent sections of each chapter provide clear examples of approaches so that new or seasoned clinicians will have requisite knowledge for effective implementation, required materials, suitable locations for use, and personal preparation. The text serves as an essential resource for clinicians, as well as social work, counseling, and psychology students and professors.

Experiential Therapy provides hands-on, engaged, holistic experiences aimed at exploring, better understanding, and resolving clinical issues. The methodology includes guided activities, games, mental puzzles, time in nature, and physical challenges. The resulting experience gives rise to words, thoughts, feelings, and future actions that a client might not have found through traditional talk therapy alone.Understanding and Effectively Utilizing Experiential Therapy gives practical advice and skills to enable new or seasoned clinicians to create their own Experiential Therapy practice. Through didactic presentation of basic concepts, concrete description of techniques, and numerous illustrative clinical examples, the book guides readers to become proficient clinicians in Experiential Therapy. The book emphasizes knowledge and skills for supporting diverse clients across a variety of identities to successfully engage in these non-traditional clinical modalities to increase well-being and resilience and promote recovery and growth after trauma.

Risk, Resilience, and Positive Youth Development: Developing Effective Community Programs for High-Risk Youth: Lessons from the Denver Bridge Project describes an approach to developing and testing effective community-based programs for at-risk children and youth. This volume shows how elements of risk and resilience, positive youth development, and organizational collaboration are used to develop a comprehensive intervention framework called the Integrated Prevention and Early Intervention (IPEI) Model. The IPEI is then applied to a community-based after-school program called the Bridge Project to illustrate how an integrated intervention framework can be used to prevent childhood and adolescent problems and improve academic achievement. Findings from an evaluation of the Denver Bridge Project intervention components are presented, and recommendations for advancing policy and practice for high-risk youth in community-based programs are described. Readers will follow the planning, development, implementation, evaluation and assessment of the Bridge Project guided by first-person perspectives from program participants who share their stories throughout the book. Risk, Resilience, and Positive Youth Development presents an integrated theory and model for working with at-risk youth, demonstrated in a detailed case example, giving practitioners, administrators, educators, researchers and policymakers a complete package.