Sociodynamic Counselling: A Constructivist Perspective - Softcover

This book breaks new ground for counsellors working with clients in times of uncertainty and change. It describes the counsellor's work from a constructivist perspective and introduces valuable counselling tools to use in planning and coping with unpredictable events in worklife and in social life. The book suggests how counsellors can help clients construct meaningful futures and actions and how they can move toward the making of more resilient selves.

The book gives counsellors many suggestions about how they can work directly with the client's life-experience to move toward useful and personally meaningful solutions. The book is written in an inspiring style and stresses how counsellors and clients can cooperate to find innovative ways to navigate difficult life situations.

The author provides readers various clues on how to unlock the 'iron cage' of positivist thinking and how to step out into the fresh air of choice, responsibility, action, meaning, empowerment and authentically co-operative relationships in counselling. Readers are brought into contact with 'cultural sensibility' rather than individualistic, psychological theory as a guide to good counselling.

Vance Peavy was Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria. He was a Canadian authority on counselling and the inventor of Constructivist Career Counselling in Canada and the inventor of SocioDynamic Counselling, as well. For his research and professional contributions to counselling he received the Canadian Guidance and Counselling Association's award for Outstanding Professional Contribution to Counselling in Canada in 1988. In 1997 he was made an honorary member of the Swedish Counsellors' Association for his contribution to counsellor education in Sweden. He was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology. Vance died during the summer of 2002. A scholarship fund has been established in his name.