Transforming Negative Reactions to Clients

"The goal of this book is to help psychotherapists better understand, manage, and transform the wide range of emotions they experience while conducting psychotherapy and to help them use these experiences to facilitate an understanding of their clients and a strengthening of the therapeutic alliance. Affective modes of communication are central to everyday discourse, yet psychotherapists have tended to marginalize their personal reactions to clients as idiosyncratic and subjective--or, worse, devalue them as intrusive, counterproductive, and unprofessional. This book is based on the premise that the affective states therapists experience when treating clients are frequently a consequence of interacting with clients who experience intense emotions and have problematic interpersonal behaviors. In addition to tracking their clients' affective states, therapists need to monitor and regulate their own affective reactions. If therapists fail to recognize such emotional reactions, or perceive them only as noise in the therapeutic process, they risk missing an important source of data that may directly or indirectly affect the therapeutic alliance and negatively influence treatment outcomes. By increasing their awareness of how clients throw them off balance, therapists are more likely to develop a more compassionate stance toward both their clients and themselves. With the exception of psychoanalytic work on countertransference, little has been written on the therapist's affective experience while conducting psychotherapy. This book adopts an integrative perspective, arguing that all therapists, regardless of orientation, are vulnerable to a wide range of problematic emotions, and all practitioners will increase their understanding of the process of psychotherapy by acknowledging how their reactions are an important source of clinical data"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).