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APA Psychotherapy Training Videos are intended solely for educational purposes for mental health professionals. Viewers are expected to treat confidential material found herein according to strict professional guidelines. Unauthorized viewing is prohibited.
In Constructivist Therapy Over Time, Dr. Robert A. Neimeyer demonstrates this empathic, client-centered therapy. In this approach, therapists follow closely where the client wishes to go in each session, focusing on the meaning clients assign to their experiences and constantly striving to guide clients toward the most emotionally significant areas of their narratives. Constructivist therapy views humans as meaning makers, and the meaning or sense that humans make of their lives in turn creates their experience of the world. This therapy helps clients to find new and deeper significance in what they may be experiencing, ultimately allowing them to grow and change. In this session, Dr. Neimeyer works with an African American woman whose daughter was delivered stillborn. The client has been paralyzed by grief and depression for months. Over the course of six sessions, Dr. Neimeyer helps the client to make new sense of her life and work through her grief, while reconstructing a sustaining bond with her deceased child. These powerful sessions show how the client moves from near constant sadness to a new sense of hope, vitality, and strength.
Constructivist therapy is more of a theory of knowledge than a system of therapy. Constructivist theory holds that humans are meaning makers, and in a very real sense the meaning we create in turn creates our experience of the world. Thus, constructivists focus on the meaning clients attribute to their world and the ways these shape and constrain clients' sense of themselves, their relationships, and their difficulties.
Robert A. Neimeyer, PhD, is director of Psychotherapy Research in the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis. He also maintains an active private practice in Memphis, Tennessee. Since completing his doctoral training in clinical psychology at the University of Nebraska in 1982, Dr. Neimeyer has published 20 books, including Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss and Constructions of Disorder (both with the American Psychological Association). The author of over 300 articles and book chapters, he is currently most interested in developing a narrative and constructivist framework for psychotherapy with special relevance to the experience of loss. Editor of both the Journal of Constructivist Psychology and Death Studies, Dr. Neimeyer has been granted the Distinguished Research Award, the Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Eminent Faculty Award by the University of Memphis and has been elected a fellow of Division 12 (Society of Clinical Psychology) of the American Psychological Association.
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