If you’re not familiar with — or even wary of — brief or time-limited approaches to counselling, this book provides a comprehensive introduction that could challenge your way of thinking. The whole theory behind brief therapy is in fact an incentive to be present, to check everything out with the client, not to let things slide, hoping that they will come up later. The time is now!

The Relational-Cultural approach makes a robust challenge to the assumptions of much therapeutic, psychological and philosophical theory, by understanding human growth not as a process of separation and individualisation but as a process of making connections.

The basic conceptualisation of human experience offered by this book is that distress arises from our relationship with our own internal experience. The remedy goes beyond (and could be seen as contrary to) the traditional cognitive therapy approach of disentangling the client from the thoughts, questioning them and replacing them with more realistic and helpful ones.

This book works well as a manual for parents. It is clearly written, it has plenty of real life examples and regular eye-catching bite-sized summaries, and it convincingly explains the importance and the process of listening to your children’s feelings, thereby defusing arguments before they start. For many parents, it may be a godsend.

Seemingly aimed both at students and at internet-illiterates, this book provides fairly comprehensive coverage of the history and development of online counseling. As a practical guide or handbook, however, it lacks depth.

Written by four luminaries of the mindfulness movement in psychotherapy and counselling, The Mindful Way through Depression is a self-help book in the best sense of the term, and you don’t need to suffer from depression to find it useful.

This is an impressive and very wide ranging introduction to the Person Centred Approach. It not only introduces the approach but adds new dimensions to the theory and new extensions of it into practice, reaching well beyond the counselling room walls.