‘If that's what I need, it could be what someone else needs.’ Exploring the role of attachment and reflective function in counselling psychologists' accounts of how they use personal therapy in clinical practice: a mixed methods study

ABSTRACT

Empirical evidence supporting the inclusion of mandatory training therapy for therapists is sparse. We present results from a mixed methods study designed to interrogate how counselling psychologists' attachment status and levels of reflective function (RF) intersect with how they experience, recall and describe using personal therapy in clinical practice. Results suggest that securely-attached, or earned secure participants with ordinary or marked levels of RF used their therapy to manage feelings evoked by difficult or challenging clients. Insecurely-attached participants with lower levels of RF found therapy valuable in terms of behavioural modelling, but not in managing complex process issues. Negative case analysis found that high levels of RF may not be uniformly advantageous for therapists. The study concludes with a brief discussion of issues relating to epistemology, validity and reflexivity.

Keywords:

• counselling psychology
• personal therapy
• IPA
• mixed methods
• qualitative

Notes

1. This can be viewed as at least partially consistent with ‘teleological’ (rather than ‘mentalising’) models of behaviour, where actions are accounted for in terms of concrete outcomes or physical reality. Fonagy and Target see this as characteristic of individuals whose attachment history has limited their capacity to account for behaviour on the basis of attributed beliefs, intentions and other psychological states.