Strategic Therapy Institute
When Your Therapy Client Won't Do the Homework
Includes 4 printable worksheets — free for registered members below.
Between-session assignments are where strategic therapy does most of its work. And yet most therapists have at least one client for whom homework consistently comes back undone.
This book starts with Haley’s reframe: a missed assignment is diagnostic information, not a compliance failure. The specific way a client doesn’t complete a directive — forgetting it, explaining it was too much, returning with an account of why it wasn’t relevant, or doing something adjacent instead — each of these is a different signal that points toward a different intervention.
When Your Therapy Client Won’t Do the Homework identifies seven distinct non-completion patterns and provides the targeted clinical response to each. You will learn how to tell the difference between a client who forgot and a client who was not ready. How to match the format of a between-session task to how a specific client actually processes and acts. How to frame directives so they feel like low-stakes invitations rather than tests of commitment. How to use Erickson’s observational and non-verbal assignment formats for clients who have resisted written work consistently.
The book also covers Haley’s paradoxical prescription for persistent non-completion, the structural adjustments that help clients who genuinely forget, the clinical use of what the client did instead of the assignment, and the differentiation between a directive that failed because it was poorly calibrated and one that failed because the therapeutic relationship was in the way.
The final chapter provides a method for building a personalized between-session system — a stable structure for directive work calibrated to what a specific client’s history has demonstrated actually gets done.
Four worksheets come with this book as free downloads for registered members. Print them, add your practice branding, and put them to work before the next session with a client who consistently doesn’t complete the homework.
Published by Strategic Therapy Institute.
Free for Registered Members
Worksheets included with this book
Each worksheet opens in the Directive Printer — add your clinic name and logo, then print or save as PDF. Register free to access all four.
Homework Non-Completion Diagnostic
Identify which of seven non-completion patterns applies before redesigning the directive.
Assignment Framing Template
Design the framing language before the session — so the assignment arrives as an invitation, not a test.
Directive Redesign Worksheet
Rebuild a missed assignment from what the non-completion revealed, not a restatement.
Between-Session System Planner
Build a personalized homework structure based on what this specific client's history has shown actually gets done.
Get the worksheets free
Register for a free Rapport7 account to download and print all four worksheets with your practice branding. No payment required.