Online Therapy: Reading Between the Lines by Jethro Adlington

Online Therapy: Reading Between the Lines by Jethro Adlington
Buy Online Therapy: Reading Between the Lines by Jethro Adlington at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Home and Family
Reviewer: Sue Magee
Summary: A lively and entertaining look at the skills required to practice psychotherapy online. Although primarily directed at NLP practitioners much of the content would be valuable to other professions.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 228	Date: November 2009
Publisher: MX Publishing
ISBN: 978-1904312741
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You can get most things online these days and even therapy is becoming more widely available on the internet. It might seem like a simple step to take but many of the signals beyond the spoken word are not available to the online therapist. In a face-to-face situation body language is an added form of communication and even small changes in skin tone can give clues as to state of mind. In a situation where these clues are not available it's essential to make the most of all the clues offered by the written word.

Jethro Adlington has more than twenty years experience as a psychotherapist and more than a decade of experience online. It was when he was looking for information about this relatively new medium that he realised that advice about the skills required had not been brought together in one book and set about remedying the omission. The result is Reading Between the Lines which looks at the skills which will be required and how the therapist can introduce them into their work. It doesn't cover the history of online counselling, the technology required, how to carry out assessment or referral procedures or ethical considerations. Adlington makes this clear very early in the book and I've just about quoted his words verbatim to ensure that there's no misunderstanding.

After many decades working in a profession which required me to work out what people were really hiding behind the words which they spoke I found this book enormously illuminating. Its readership really shouldn't be limited to those in a specific profession. It's particularly useful to anyone who needs to establish rapport with someone through the written word or who has to examine what is being said to them in some depth.

It's a practical NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) based guide but it was a stroke of genius on Adlington's part to present this as though it was a course being taken by a handful of students thus making what could have turned out to be a very dull book into something lively and entertaining. It's broken into bite-sized chapters – or lessons – with just enough information to absorb and consider before the next chapter. Some quite difficult concepts are introduced – such as complex equivalence – but they're presented in a very accessible way. If there's a minor criticism here it's that I would have appreciated a glossary to save me having to search back to refresh my mind on certain points.

The writing style is friendly and informal, particularly if you're used to email or chat communication, but the book has unfortunately not been adequately proof-read and I was frequently pulled out of the written words because they simply did not make sense – and had to reread to ensure that I had understood the point being made. Few books are completely free of all errors and this was far from being the worst that I've seen – but it could and should have been better.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

We have reviews of other NLP based books and you might be interested in Seeing Spells Achieving by Olive Hickmott and Andrew Bendefy and Make New Year's Resolutions and Keep Them Using NLP by Donna Blinston.

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You can read more book reviews or buy Online Therapy: Reading Between the Lines by Jethro Adlington at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
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