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People have known and experienced the power of talking and relating to other human beings since the earliest recorded times. In ancient times, healing or reparative talk in the context of a relationship was most frequently placed within religious practices. Also, Hippocrates, in his injunctions to physicians, emphasized the healing nature of maintaining a patient’s privacy and implementing honest and straightforward communication with patients. In the late 1800s, Sigmund Freud (1953) introduced the modern concept of therapeutic conversations, which formally developed into psychoanalysis. Freud’s concepts led a host of other practitioners to focus on the reparative aspects of healing relationships, frequently expressed in the form of talking but also extended into healing communities or expressive forms of therapy. Soon thereafter, therapists, counselors, and others were describing therapeutic efforts with children, families, couples, and individuals with a variety of individual, social, and community problems. All of these efforts, over more than a century, have produced a recognition that psychotherapy or personal counseling, whether practiced in individual, group, couples, or family settings, is a unique craft with specific skills implemented to achieve a reparative response in an individual. In this time, different models of understanding behavior have emerged, including psychodynamic, interpersonal, systems, self- or ego psychology, cognitive, behavioral, and other approaches. Each model produces a growing literature to foster its continued development. Similarly, organized research efforts, beginning with Carl Rogers (1951), have focused on examining the basic elements of the therapeutic relationship