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The process experiential approach relies on the provision of a genuine, prizing, empathic relationship and on the therapist being highly attuned and responsive to the client's moment by moment feelings and experience. Within the context of an empathic relationship the therapist guides the client's cognitive and affective processing in certain directions. A central issue for this treatment is achieving a balance between relational responsiveness and process directiveness, between leading and following. The aim is for the therapist and client to work collaboratively to explore the client's experience and to construct new meaning. Within the safe working environment created by the relationship conditions, the approach uses active interventions in a process diagnostic and process directive fashion. The approach is process diagnostic in that the therapist listens for the emergence of markers of particular types of affective problems with which the client is currently struggling, such as splits between two parts of the self. It is process directive in that when a marker emerges, the therapist suggests a specific in-session task to facilitate task resolution. Five major sets of markers and tasks have been delineated:
In this approach, the therapist is viewed as an expert in how and when to facilitate particular kinds of exploration of experience but not as an expert on the content of the client's experience. Rather, clients are viewed as experts on their own experience, and therapy is a discovery-oriented process. The therapist, therefore, works to guide the client's experiential processing in different ways at different times to promote the type of cognitive and emotional processing that is likely to be most productive at that point and likely to lead to the resolution of relevant tasks. Emotion plays a central role in this approach. Emotions are seen as organizing processes that enhance adaptation and problem solving. Accessing emotion in therapy and the promotion of further emotional processing is seen as leading to enduring change. Emotions are therefore evoked in therapy to help people make sense of what they feel and to promote emotional reorganization through the synthesis of previously unavailable internal resources. Return to Process Experiential Psychotherapy: An Emotion-Focused Approach |
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