ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on therapist qualities and attitudes. To forge a therapeutic alliance and reinforce the client factors, a successful therapist makes a targeted use of her or his qualities as a human being. He or she also adopts an attitude that will help the clients to invest their resources in attaining their goals. The therapist respects and accepts clients as they are, with their good and their bad habits, with their qualities and their failings, with their inconsistencies, their contradictions, and their mood swings. Acceptance does not mean neutrality: It is an attitude of active respect for the whole person of the client. In solution-focused therapy, the therapist's empathic attitude is closely linked to care for the clients' well-being, to unconditional acceptance of the clients. Carl Rogers considered congruence, which he also called genuineness or authenticity, to be an important quality of good therapists. Humor can be a wonderful tool in the therapeutic relationship.
