17 - The Importance of Novelty in Psychotherapy

Abstract

This chapter explores the importance of novelty in psychotherapy. Novelty is defined as fresh understandings, behaviors, and experiences introduced by a therapist to interrupt and alter established problem patterns, and it is central to break through resistances to change and overcome demoralization. Novelty not only activates and arouses the client's interest, but also disorients the client in a positive way and creates perturbations in the client's prior assumptions and established sets. New thoughts promote new experiences, which facilitate new behaviors, which in turn, reinforce the new thoughts and encourage further experiences. Novelty is not just intrinsic to therapist interventions, but instead is relative to clients' understandings. Clients on their part bring their distinctive, culturally derived worldviews to therapy, helping to shape what is novel. Various therapeutic modalities and some of the major inductive and deductive strategies are used to introduce novelty and facilitate change, which include behavior therapy, cognitive therapy, psychodynamic therapy, and solution-focused and strategic therapies. Although these modalities hardly exhaust the variety of therapeutic schools, they cover a range of commonly encountered approaches to helping. At the level of technique, each operationalizes novelty similarly by facilitating new understandings and new experiences in the context of a supportive relationship.