Clients’ Personal Histories – Collecting Helpful Information
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Client self-disclosure of personal history is essential to assessment, treatment, and the development of plans for preventing further harm to others. This workshop explores methods for helping clients to explore their lives, including through the use of a structured workbook.
Presenter Steven Sawyer emphasizes how client disclosure can yield information about the individual’s strengths, attachment style, and amenability to treatment. The workshop introduces the Your Personal History workbook and provides a summary of the workbook’s content and purpose. The training describes and illustrates the workbook’s use as a data collection tool for intake or assessment. It also focuses on using the workbook as a series of pretreatment exercises that build treatment readiness and the self-reflection mindset necessary for optimal treatment participation.
Topics discussed include:
- The value of pre-treatment information collection can be enhanced by using a variety of methods.
- Opportunities to integrate client history workbook into an assessment protocol.
- Opportunities to incorporate client history workbook content into an existing treatment curriculum.
- Workbook content and uses.
1) Facilitate client self-disclosure in the treatment of sexual aggression
2) Collect data for comprehensive assessments using a personal history workbook
3) Employ personal history information in preparation for abuse-specific treatment.
4) Incorporate a client’s history into pre-treatment self-assessment of personal strengths, attachment style, openness to treatment change.
Audience
This training is for professionals working with people who have experienced complex trauma as well as people who have perpetrated abuse. Professionals who will benefit from this training include social workers, psychologists, clinical counselors, and interested paraprofessionals.
Content Level
Disclosure
Continuing Education Approval
American Psychological Association (APA)
Safer Society Foundation, Inc. is approved by the American Psychological Association (APA) to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Safer Society Foundation, Inc. maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
Who's Presenting
Steven Sawyer, MSSW, LICSW, ATSA-F
Steven Sawyer, MSSW, is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker and is founder and President of Sawyer Solutions, LLC, a private clinical and consulting practice. He was a founding board member and Executive Director of a local non-profit treatment agency in Minnesota where he served for 17 years, a founding board member and past chapter president of the Minnesota Chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (MNATSA), a past board member of ATSA, and is a past board member and chair of the Minnesota Board of Social Work. He currently provides clinical and consultation services to individuals, families and organizations. He serves as a consultant to catholic religious orders on matters of sexual abuse prevention, and management and personnel issues, and provides clinical supervision services for State employees. He has given lectures and trainings locally and nationally to public and professional groups about sexual offender treatment and sexual abuse prevention. He has published more than 18 articles and book chapters on a program for men who use prostitutes, sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, group therapy with adults who sexually offend, sex dysfunction in sex offenders, and treatment program outcome research. Over the past 33 years he has facilitated or observed more than 4000 hours of group therapy, has assessed and treated hundreds of men who have committed sexual crimes, and has supervised the treatment of several thousand men in sexual offender treatment.