Process Of Therapeutic Change Research Articles

Change: How do we recognize it?

The paper seeks to examine the working assumptions that guide us as therapists engaged in the attempt to facilitate change in families. It summarizes a piece of preliminary research based on the responses of a group of therapists working in different agencies. A questionnaire on change was developed and given to the therapists followed by a group discussion.The results suggest that therapy teams, and families, have common sense ideas about: the beginning, and end of a period of change; types of change—those falling into four categories; of behavioural, structural, communication and experiential. Our results suggest that difficulties in therapy may be associated with a failure amongst the therapists in a team to negotiate their mutual assumptions about change. In addition the process of therapeutic change is seen as involving a negotiation between the family and the therapists about what will count as change.The data were gathered from a group of therapists attending a local meeting of the Association for Family Therapy in Plymouth.

Integrating affect and cognition: A perspective on the process of therapeutic change

There is a growing recognition among clinicians of the need for a comprehensive model of emotion, which illuminates the role of affective processes in psychotherapy. In the present article, we employ a constructive model in which emotion is viewed as resulting from a synthesis of components. This emotional synthesis model is used to explore some of the ways in which “feeling” and “thinking” interact, both in clinical problems and in therapeutic change. It is suggested that many clinical problems involve a breakdown in the emotional synthesis process and that an important focus of therapy should be the integration of the different levels of processing involved in the construction of emotional experience. It is also argued that affect does not play a simple, uniform role in therapeutic change but instead should be viewed as operating in different ways in different change events. For this reason, it is important to begin delineating different mechanisms through which changes in emotional processing can bring about therapeutic change. To this end, three such mechanisms are proposed: the synthesis of adaptive emotional experience, de-automating dysfunctional emotional habits, and modifying state-dependent learning.

An interview with Dorothy Stock Whitaker

The years raced backwards like a tape recorder in response to rewind button. When I stopped it, I was in a Manchester bookshop and it was 1967. I picked from shelf Psychotherapy through Group Process by Dorothy Stock Whitaker and Morton A. Lieberman. With mounting interest which rapidly became excitement, I read, and read on. Described here was a search to identify properties of and processes of therapeutic change. Here group, and individual in group, were examined in depth. This was a period when the and group were being endowed with magical all-embracing powers and with blind confidence, in protean situations. My own experience suggested quite otherwise -potent a might be, but this must surely be for ill as well as for good, for damage as well as for therapy. My cotherapist and I were searching for a model to identify what was happening in group, session by session, for individual and group. Of course I bought book, and from this time on we used Group Focal Conflict model for monitoring of our therapy groups. No longer were we exploring in dark: We now had a map and a compass. Our explorations were exciting and much emerged from them. Now, in July 1983, I was travelling across Pennines to interview Professor Whitaker for journal Group . The train stopped and started, admitting and discharging hikers, mothers and babies out for day, workmen, and others whose mission was not evident. I recalled how early in 1968 I heard to my amazement that Dr. Whitaker was living and working in Leeds. Could these things be? They could and indeed were so, and before long a of interested colleagues and myself were making regular journeys to Leeds for seminars and discussions with Dr. Whitaker. All too soon for us she became Professor of Social Work at University of York and regular contact could not be maintained. Happily, earlier this year Dr. Malcolm Pines enquired whether I was interested in interviewing her for Group . I most certainly was. The day set for interview was fine with big white clouds racing above and with blue sky sometimes getting upper hand. It might well rain, I thought, as I searched for a taxi outside vast railway station at Yorkonce one of most important in country. At University, I snatched a quick sandwich in cafeteria of Goodricke College, for I had regretfully declined Professor Whitaker's kind invitation to lunch on ground that it would certainly then be difficult for me to assume detachment appropriate for a

A Focusing Group

Focusing as a process of therapeutic change, based on the work of E. T. Gendlin et al., is applied in a group setting. Examples of the focusing process, callingfor a bodilyfelt sense of situations and problems, are presented and implications and uses of the method explored.

A Theoretical Approach to the Treatment of Work Difficulties in Borderline Personalities

This paper reviews the psychodynamic basis of borderline personality disorder with special reference to work difficulties. The model of human occupation is reviewed, and its use as a theoretical framework model for a formulation of borderline occupational functioning is proposed. A hypothetical model is conceptualized and the expected deficits in the volitional, habituation, and performance subsystems described. The primary occupational dysfunction of the borderline patient is shown to occur at the level of exploratory behavior, or play, and to manifest itself in the inability to perform autonomous adult roles. A treatment approach derived from this formulation is delineated, emphasizing the need for a context of exploration and curiosity. A specific treatment program is described and the therapeutic change process is illustrated through clinical case examples.

The problem of truth in psychotherapy: A phenomenological approach to treatment

Scientific method cannot establish whether a patient's productions in psychotherapy are truthful because of the nature of Cartesian dualism. Phenomenology, however, is an alternative that clarifies what is truthful in therapy and provides insight into the process of therapeutic change itself. Basic ideas of Paul Ricoeur and the epistemology of Michael Polanyi are applied to the treatment setting to evaluate change. Clinical examples illustrate the usefulness of exegesis as a paradigm for understanding the process of therapy.