5.2.2.
Outline: Therapist Experiential Response Modes
|
A. Simple Empathy |
Responses intended primarily to
communicate understanding of immediate client experiencing. |
|
Empathic Reflection |
Accurately represent most central, poignant or strongly-felt aspect of client's message. |
|
Empathic Following |
Brief responses which indicate that therapist understands what client is saying (acknowledgments and empathic repetitions). |
|
Empathic Affirmation |
Offer validation, support, or sympathy when client is in emotional distress or pain. |
|
B. Empathic Exploration |
Responses intended to encourage
client exploration while maintaining empathic attunement. |
|
Exploratory Reflection |
Simultaneously communicate empathy and stimulate client self-exploration of explicit and implicit experience, through open-edge or growth-oriented responses. |
|
Evocative Reflection |
Communicate empathy while helping client to heighten or access experience, through vivid imagery, powerful language or dramatic manner. |
|
Exploratory Question |
Stimulate client open-ended self-exploration. |
|
Fit Question |
Encourage client to check representation of experience with actual experience. |
|
Process Observation |
Nonconfrontationally describe client in-session verbal or nonverbal behavior (usually with Exploratory Question). |
|
Empathic Conjecture |
Tentative guess at immediate, implicit client experience (usually with Fit Question). |
|
Empathic Refocusing |
Offer empathy to what the client is having difficulty facing, in order to invite continued exploration |
|
C. Process Guiding Responses |
Responses intended to directly
facilitate useful client experiencing. |
|
Experiential Formulation |
Describe the client’s difficulties in PE terms, such as emotional avoidance or action on the self. |
|
Experiential Teaching |
Provide information about nature of experiencing or treatment process/tasks. |
|
Structuring Task |
Set up and offer specific help for continued work within a specific therapeutic task (including proposing, creating context, or offering encouragement for task engagement). |
|
Process Suggestion |
Encourage client to try things out in the session (“coaching”: feeding lines, proposing mental actions, directing attention). |
|
Awareness Homework |
Foster experiencing outside of session. |
|
D. Experiential Presence |
Responses intended to reveal therapist’s emotional presence to client. Generally communicated via speech, paralinguistic, nonverbal manner (e.g., warm/gentle vocal quality, responsive facial expression, self-deprecatory humor, exploratory manner, respectful silence). |
|
Process Disclosure |
Share own here-and-now reactions, intentions or limitations. |
|
Personal Disclosure |
Share relevant information about self. |
|
E. Content Directives (“nonexperiential”)
|
Responses intended to provide
expert external perspectives on the client’s problems. These include: •Interpretation •Problem-solving advisement •Expert reassurance •Disagreement/criticism •Introducing nonexperiential content •Pure information questions These responses are not central to PE therapy and occur infrequently. When they occur, they are carried out briefly, tentatively and with an experiential intent. |
Materials designed to
accompany the book Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy: The
Process-Experiential Approach to Change from APA Books.
©2003 Robert Elliott, Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman, and Leslie Greenberg
http://www.process-experiential.org/learning