The Client Who Changed Me : Stories of Therapist Personal Transformation

Although the impact that clients can have on therapists is well-known, most work on the subject consists of dire warnings: mental health professionals are taught early on to be on their guard for burnout, compassion fatigue, and counter-transference.

However, while these professional hazards are very real, the scholarly focus on the negative potential of the client-counselor relationship often implies that no good can come of allowing oneself to get too close to a client's issues.

This sentiment obscures what every therapist knows to be true: that the client-counselor relationship can also effect powerful positive transformations in a therapist's own life. "The Client Who Changed Me" is Jeffrey Kottler and Jon Carlson's testimony to the significant and often life-changing ways in which therapists have been changed by their patients.

Kottler and Carlson draw not only upon their own extensive experience-between them, they have more than fifty years in the field - but also upon lengthy interviews with dozens of the country's foremost therapists and theorists. This novel work will present readers with a truly unique perspective on the business of therapy: not merely how it appears externally, but how practitioners experience it internally.

Although these stories paint a complex and multi-layered portrait of the client-counselor relationship, they all demonstrate the profound and unexpected rewards that the profession has to offer.