Working briefly with reluctant clients: child protective services as an example

Therapists and counsellors often are faced with reluctant clients and constraining circumstances. Such difficulties are especially prevalent and severe in casework in child protective services ‐ the parents of abused or neglected children are all involuntary clients, case loads are large, and time is limited. Drawing on experience in applying and modifying prior work at the Brief Therapy Center of MRI to work in child protective services of a Northern California county, this article suggests general principles for effective intervention in such difficult circumstances and illustrates these with specific case examples. Since consideration of extreme conditions is often helpful in dealing with parallel but less extreme ones, the authors' aim and hope is that readers will find this article helpful not solely in child protective work but also in the much wider territory where similar obstacles to effective counselling also occur.