Common principles of psychotherapeutic change: patterns of use

ABSTRACT

Many authors have proposed the existence of common principles of counselling and psychotherapeutic change. However, little is known about how practitioners use these change principles. A sample of 373 Czech psychotherapists and counsellors participated in an online survey and rated their use of 10 psychotherapy change principles in their practice over the previous year. The frequency of the use of the 10 change principles is reported. Furthermore, three principal components of the change principles were identified: exploration, acceptance, and understanding of clients’ experience; attending to clients’ own resources; and furnishing clients with new skills and advice. The use of these components was mainly associated with the practitioner's theoretical orientation. The implications of the component structure for psychotherapist and counsellor training and practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Change principles
• common factors
• psychotherapy integration
• patterns of practice
• survey

Disclosure of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tomas Rihacek, Ph.D., is a psychologist and psychotherapist. He works as an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, where he teaches courses on qualitative methods and psychotherapy research. His research interests include psychotherapist development, psychotherapy integration, and other topics in psychotherapy research.

Jan Roubal, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychotherapist, psychiatrist, psychotherapy trainer, and supervisor. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Czech Republic His professional interests include Gestalt therapy, psychotherapy integration, psychotherapy research, psychotherapy training, and psychotherapy in clinical practice.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 An unknown proportion of this number may represent respondents who started to answer the questionnaire, had to interrupt it for any reason (e.g. they realised they did not have enough time to complete the questionnaire), and later returned to complete the questionnaire. Therefore, these responses cannot be included in the analysis nor used to estimate the response rate.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Grant No. GA18-08512S provided by the Czech Science Foundation.