Many factors influence the development and outcomes of psychotherapy, including therapist errors. There is a widespread idea that the functioning of therapy is the responsibility of those seeking help.
However, bringing it to the letter can be a big mistake, as many variables are also relevant over which the customer has little or no control.
- Are the factors that explain therapeutic change social support and personal strength of the person?Extratherapeutic change: specific techniques used in therapy.
- Placebo effect or expectations and therapeutic relationship.
- Where therapist errors can have a significant impact.
Along with extratherapeutic change, the therapeutic relationship between the psychologist and the client is a very important factor in achieving change.
Thus, it becomes important to expose certain errors of therapists that can threaten the therapeutic alliance, a factor that weighs about 40% in the patient’s change in psychotherapy (Corbella and Botella, 2004).
This list is based on an Introduction to Pipe Psychotherapy and Davenport chapter (2004). This chapter presents some of the therapist’s most common mistakes. Some of them are as follows.
This is one of the most common mistakes therapists make, although some types of therapy, such as psychoanalysis, seek a very deep understanding of client problems and invest time and effort in understanding this narrative, the truth is that this does not happen with all therapies.
Many of them are inserted in contexts where the minimum number of sessions is synonymous with quality, the fewer sessions needed to complete the therapy, the better therapist.
Therefore, some psychologists may sin by content with superficial information, reducing problems and intervening without evaluating other areas that do not seem relevant.
When a customer is in a bad mood because of their low grades, for example, do we do an evaluation and plan an intervention?Evaluate your perfectionism, the meaning of irrational thoughts related to failure, emotional management techniques for when this happens?and we can put aside important factors.
The customer may have an eating disorder that we did not evaluate because we never found the eating problem problematic. It may also be that when he told us that his eating habits had changed after poor results, we assumed that the phenomenon was the result of poor results. Degrees.
An intervention that is not preceded by a good evaluation has a chance of failure, it is important to invest the time necessary to evaluate and not get carried away by the anguish of starting with a quick intervention.
Despite what many think, the verbal and nonverbal interventions of the in-session therapist must have some functional value, so although humor, conversation, satire, jokes, etc. useful, as they can create a deeper therapeutic alliance, caution is required.
Such interventions should be considered for a particular purpose, whether confronting, calming customer anxiety, ridiculing or exposing their ideas to have an overview, etc.
You also have to control the therapist’s laughter, reinforcing a type of customer intervention. It is necessary to examine the content of the joke, because the purpose of the joke is usually to ridicule a specific aspect.
The therapist should evaluate how it looks, how it relates to the client’s problem and, most importantly, whether he wants to strengthen the client by making this joke about this problem.
If we talk to someone who can’t take anything seriously, with anger management issues, and at some point makes an angry joke and the therapist laughs, it reinforces the idea that these tantrums aren’t important.
It can also be extrapolated to control the therapist’s laughter when he wants to reduce his anxiety.
If the therapist is untrusted, if the client is someone difficult, the therapist laughs to calm down, but conveys the message that what was said was funny, this can confuse the client and make him not feel totally safe in the therapeutic alliance.
Dramatic and rapidly made changes are far from the norm in therapy, however, the enthusiasm and haste of the therapist can precipitate therapy in this direction, whether you are trying to expand your social network, have new experiences, do things that are beneficial at first?
Forgetting or superficially dealing with aspects that may seem simple – when they are not so simple for our clients – is one of the most common mistakes that therapists make.
Perhaps a client expands their network of friends by talking to the people around them can be something they are not prepared for, such encounters may go wrong, the client may not have the skills to have a conversation or be unable to control anxiety in certain environments. .
The lack of results, in many cases, is not the responsibility of the client, but of the therapist, in therapy the procedure must be intelligent and adjusted to time, ensuring that all the tasks and recommendations we propose are built according to the needs and pace of the client.
The therapist has not invested years in training in psychotherapy to become someone who listens and gives advice, so many doctors agree that they should not be friends with the client.
This is not appropriate for the therapeutic relationship, it makes confrontations difficult, the tasks in therapy are understood as optional, can the client be irritated by the expectations he has of the therapist as a friend? This would be one of the hardest mistakes to make. correct among therapists.
Therefore, it is important to avoid actions that lead the client to believe that the therapist is trying to be more than a professional: do not comment on appearance unless it is a therapeutic problem, never lend money, do not give advice on what to do and what to do and, of course, never meet the client outside the session.
There are several types of interventions that can make customers stay away, distort messages, or feel useless. If customers feel this and continue for the rest of the therapy, the best thing that can happen is that the therapy is ineffective.
We should not forget the iatrogenic effects of therapy for the client, this means that the therapist does not criticize or blame, this is something that his circle may have done before and we are not interested in being part of that large group.
While it is normal for a clinician not to criticize directly, the client may feel judged when one is impatient, when he or she says he is not interested in changing, or when he says his or her behavior was poor.
There will be times when we will position ourselves with difficult people. Never mind. It is risky and counterproductive to be so explicit, to kiss and try to understand what the client says and to delve into their emotions is much more beneficial than to tell him that he was not right.
Finally, it is also advisable to avoid certain phrases that leave the client defensive: “complaining will not change things”, “Are you a person on the defensive?Do you feel sorry for yourself?.
Focusing on the client’s difficulties, rather than correcting their values, will make therapy less difficult, taking care of the therapeutic alliance is an important goal in this context, so that emotions such as enthusiasm, ignorance or ego do not provoke customer withdrawal.