Psychotherapy process research: Identifying productive in-session processes to enhance treatment outcomes and therapist responsiveness

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an overview of my research programme for the past 37 years. The focus of my work has been on identifying productive in-session processes to enhance treatment outcomes and therapist responsiveness. Two foci will be reviewed, first, my research on client and therapist interpersonal process and second, productive processing in psychotherapy in three different therapeutic approaches including EFT, CBT and CCT. Given that many competing theoretical perspectives are effective, I was curious about change processes that are common and unique to each. In my work, I employed a variety of research methodologies drawing on frameworks with alternative epistemological and ontological assumptions to capture specific in-session change processes in an attempt to reveal the richness and complexity of the phenomena being studied and illuminate the process of change.

Keywords:

• alliance
• CBT
• EFT
• experiential/humanistic/existential
• emotional processing
• process
• outcome
• responsiveness
• resistance

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge and thank my colleagues and the many students with whom I have collaborated over the years, who shared my passion for process research and devoted considerable time and energy to understanding the factors that contribute to change in psychotherapy. Thank you to the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions that improved the final product.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.