Treatment and supervision professionals often encounter challenges when dealing with complicated cases. To fulfill these clients’ primary treatment goals, professionals are trained to incorporate three distinct strategies into their approach.

During the training, David Prescott uses fictionalized case examples to illustrate how to use the Good Lives Model (GLM), Motivational Interviewing (MI), and the therapeutical alliance to develop an understanding of a complex case, initiate or revise an individualized treatment or supervision plan, and get treatment or supervision on the right track.

• The Good Lives Model: proposes that effective offender rehabilitation should focus on reducing recidivism risk and enhancing the offender’s well-being by fulfilling a universal set of human needs termed “primary goods.” This model can be applied to enhance well-being and treatment motivation in offender rehabilitation.
• Motivational Interviewing: can be used to elicit a client’s own reasons and ability to change, explore client ambivalence, and build motivation to make difficult changes. It can be particularly effective in working with teens and young adults by helping them explore and resolve their ambivalence about change.
• The Therapeutic—or Working—Alliance: the collaborative relationship between a healthcare professional and a client or patient. It is characterized by the collaborative and affective bond between the therapist and the patient, as well as the agreement on treatment goals and tasks. Research has consistently shown that a strong therapeutic alliance is associated with better outcomes in psychotherapy across a variety of disorders.

Like fitting puzzle pieces together, the training shows how to combine the effectiveness of the therapeutic alliance with principles of the GLM and MI to get one’s work with clients moving in the right direction.

Topics covered include:

• Defining the working alliance (also known as the therapeutic alliance).
• “Going upstream” — a method of developing risk-relevant goals from the GLM.
• Using specific MI skills to elicit a client’s own reasons and ability to change.
• Methods for eliciting client feedback on treatment processes and ensuring open communication.
• Combining these methods and models to develop case conceptualizations and plans.

This training is applicable to anyone working with teens and young adults, including counselors, psychologists, and probation officers. Professionals attending this training should possess a foundational grasp of MI, the GLM, and the therapeutic alliance. Throughout the training, discussion of the case examples demonstrates how to frame one’s work with clients using goals that they can approach rather than things they must avoid. Finally, David reviews methods for including client feedback at each turn.