The Practical Practice of Marriage and Family Therapy: Things My Training Supervisor Never Told Me. - Review - book review

Adolescence, Spring, 2000

ODELL, Mark, & CAMPBELL, Charles E. The Practical Practice of Marriage and Family Therapy: Things My Training Supervisor Never Told Me. New York: The Haworth Press, 1998. 276 pp. $49.95 (h), $24.95 (p).

It is a truism among therapists in most mental health disciplines that the most important aspects of clinical practice are learned only after one has left graduate school and entered "the real world." While many of the basics could be covered in graduate school, supervisors of new therapists often feel that the fundamentals are only addressed in detail after a therapist has been employed. In response to this predicament, Odell and Campbell offer The Practical Practice of Marriage and Family Therapy as a useful daily guide for graduate students and beginning marriage and family therapists that will ease the transition from learner to practicing professional in the clinical domain. The book covers the major areas that typical graduate programs do not have time to address, including how to: integrate theoretical training with pragmatic clinical practice to maximize therapeutic effectiveness; face the practical problems involving the financial elements of clinical work; become a thoroughly credentialed profession al; develop an approach to becoming specialized; uncover the motivation for being a professional marriage and family therapist; and increase one's ability to maintain high-level practice over a lifetime of work by developing coping strategies and methods of safeguarding one's own mental health.