My first session with a real, live psychotherapy patient[1] was at a university counseling center in New England. I was in my second year of graduate school. My only previous experience that even resembled doing therapy was limited to interviewing my classmates as pretend patients. In those role-plays, everyone was agreeable and talkative. They gave […]
If you are a psychotherapist of a certain age you no doubt remember the 1982 New York Times Magazine article on Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (STDP; Davanloo, 1980) by journalist Dava Sobel. In contrasting STDP (“the most aggressive form of psychic medicine to rest on the principles of Sigmund Freud”) to traditional psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Sobel noted, […]
Currently, there is a paradigm clash between different visions of the nature of psychotherapy. The clash is not merely about what psychotherapy is, how it helps, and how it should be practiced. It is also about the nature of scientific evidence and what the evidence shows about effective practice. In the forward to this book […]
Psychotherapy with Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Clients Psychotherapy is a complex and often vulnerable experience for clients, and the therapy relationship is vital to the process and success of psychotherapy (Gelso & Carter, 1994). The therapy relationship has been conceptualized as a Tripartite Model (Gelso, 2014) which posits that the therapy relationship consists of three […]
Despite our best efforts as therapists or supervisors, some clients will fail to improve while in treatment. A significant amount of research has been conducting seeking to identify the client, therapist, treatment, and process variables associated with client change. A number of methods have been developed to decrease the number of clients who stay the […]
Lately I’ve been thinking about therapist authenticity. Since moving to private practice three years ago I have worked primarily with adult survivors of childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. Due to years of chronic violence during developmentally important periods, clients’ life experiences are typically characterized by an insecure (often disorganized) attachment style, a chronically activated […]
Ample research suggests that therapists differ in their level of effectiveness (Baldwin & Imel, 2013; Blow, Sprenkle, & Davis, 2007; Wampold, 2001). Even more striking is that therapist effects appear to be larger than treatment effects (Kim, Wampold, & Bolt, 2006; Lindgren, Folkesson, & Almiqvist, 2010). Moreover, therapist training, experience, and theoretical orientation do not […]
In 1988 John Bowlby published a groundbreaking collection of his lectures and essays. He inspired a generation of researchers by asserting that the therapist-client relationship has key features in common with parent-child attachments. Roughly coinciding with the 25th anniversary of Bowlby’s book, four meta-analyses have recently been published. These articles and other summaries take stock […]
The most consistent and robust predictor of outcome in psychotherapy is the quality of the client-therapist relationship (Lambert, 2013). While we know that therapists’ overall competence and client factors, such as motivation, are relevant and important to treatment, the client-therapist relationship is considered essential to effective treatment, at least in most therapies (Norcross & Lambert, […]
Abstract Practice research networks may be one way of advancing knowledge translation and exchange (KTE) in psychotherapy. In this study, we document this process by first asking clinicians what they want from psychotherapy research. Eighty-two psychotherapists in 10 focus groups identified and discussed psychotherapy research topics relevant to their practices. An analysis of these discussions […]