Practice Innovations, Vol 9(4), Dec 2024, 293-304; doi:10.1037/pri0000249
Most psychotherapists will have more than one client with a disability during their career. It is harmful to disabled clients for psychotherapists not to be adequately prepared for work with disabled people, as is true for any cultural identity. There is a general lack of guidance on how to integrate the disability identity and experience into therapeutic work with disabled clients. Disability affirmative therapy (Olkin, 2017) is a guide to therapy case conceptualization with disabled clients meant to be used alongside a therapist’s typical theoretical approach. The authors, two disabled clinicians, use a case example to illustrate how disability affirmative therapy can be used with clients. The authors illustrate this through a composite client, Brice, a White disabled male veteran. To highlight therapeutically relevant aspects of disability culture, the authors introduce spoon theory to communicate about a disabled person’s capacity. This article adds to the literature on therapeutic interventions that can be helpful with disabled clients. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)