This book argues for the importance of recognizing clients' expertise on their own lives and allowing them the space to generate their innate capacity for self-healing. It offers fresh insights into clients' experiences and offers guidelines for how therapists can capitalize on clients' knowledge, skills, and strengths to build the therapeutic alliance and ensure transformational change.

Contributors present what is known about client factors, what can be inferred about clients from the literature, and what isn't known or is missing. They also emphasize that each client must be understood as an individual that does not always conform with broad empirical conceptualizations.

Authors discuss implications for practice, teaching and training, and identify fruitful areas for future research. Case examples offer vivid, practical illustrations centering psychotherapy around individual clients in real-life clinical scenarios.