Elements of the Helping Process: A Guide for Clinicians takes a humanistic approach to guiding clinicians, emphasizing that professional practice involves a deliberate, conscious, and disciplined use of self with clients participating in a forum that is steady, safe and consistent. The book maintains that optimal clinicians display strengths in both rational systematization and empathy. They marry the rational with the sensitive, the science with the art, the head with the heart, making a direct connection between formal theory and its application to the uncertainties and ambiguities of day-to-day practice. This allows them to render precise assessment and effective intervention as they make clients feel heard, understood, and cared about. Elements posits that the rudiments of the professional encounter between clinicians and clients should encourage a milieu of mutuality, engagement, and active problem-solving. The overall message of the book is for clinicians, anchored in discipline, art and compassion, to establish with their clients an ambiance of openness, challenge, and change.