Clients and clinicians alike need to be aware of clients' potential sources of strength, coping, and resilience. The authors make the concept of strengths more concrete and provide tools to assist in assessing strengths. Client characteristics that represent strengths are drawn from the research literature. The notion of strength in the context of clients' personal history, their immediate social environment the larger societal matrix, the mix of individual characteristics, the challenges clients face, and the meanings clients ascribe to their experiences and situation are discussed. A self-report instrument that can be used to enlist clients and their significant others in helping identify clients' strengths is provided, and cases of its use are presented.
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