Documents and Counter-Documents

This chapter highlights the many different types of documents and counter-documents that can be used with clients such as awards, certificates, cards, lists, worksheets, workbooks, and genograms. Each of these can be used by any clinician regardless of their theoretical orientation and model. They can be in-depth and complex or very simple and straightforward. The chapter discusses how there are many benefits to using documents and counter-documents in the therapeutic process. They can help the client highlight achievements and successes, remember skills learned, celebrate big and small accomplishments, shift patterns of negativity, and reinforce new and more desired identities. Using these documents allows the client to develop a more resourceful identity instead of the limited identity they may have formed from documents acquired from life experiences that paint a negative picture of them. The overall aim of the chapter is to explore how the different types of documents tend to emphasize the client's voice and often the creation of a document can be a collaborative process between the therapist and the client.