Clinical Relationship
Based on Humanistic Principles of Relating
By Dr. Johnathon Neda, Orange County Humanistic Therapist and Psychologist in Costa Mesa-Newport Beach.
What is the Client-Therapist Relationship about?
Using the shared resources within the clinical relationship to work collaboratively on joint purposes together.
Working Things Out in Relationship
An essential part of doing this thing called therapy involves co-creating a therapeutic relationship. In fact, the clinical relationship (based on humanistic principles of relating) is the medium of change in good psychotherapy, which in itself can promote a healing response. Most people don’t work things out in themselves—we work things out in relationship. For example, engaging in emotional self-regulation in isolation (rather than amidst a helpful relationship) is often very inefficient and unproductive.
Healing Relational Wounds
From the cradle onwards, the bulk of what human beings learn is conveyed relationally. Relationships are crucial to our survival and our thriving. We get damaged through relationships but we also get healed through relationships. Most importantly, the ability to really know another and gain a real sense of the terrain of their heart is made possible through the establishment of a good therapeutic relationship.
Working with Emotional States
In order for a client to really feel known in the mind of the psychologist, the two of them must work together as a team. If you’re thinking of coming to therapy, you can expect your individual reality to be primary within the therapeutic conversation. In our dyadic interchange, our work together will be based on making more clear sense of your internal emotional state. We will work to bring into focus aspects of your deeper experience that is outside of your immediate awareness. Sometimes this includes uncomfortable feelings that may be suppressed, which involves the conscious desire to postpone attention to an emotion. Putting something out of your mind doesn’t mean it’s gone and you might give it more power that way. At other times, our awareness may be repressed and kept out of consciousness.
Provision of a Secure Relational Base
Just as nature is the holding environment of the earth, the therapy relationship itself also serves a regulating purpose. The therapeutic frame functions as a sacred container—retaining the significant themes that emerge into the room across time. The co-creation of a relational atmosphere of safety, privacy, openness, acceptance, commitment, and empathic understanding is crucial in order for you to feel that you are allowed to be anything you are.
Therapeutic Containment
Feeling contained is necessary for you to know that you will be held as you unravel. The provision of a holding environment or sense of containment is what gives my client a secure relational base—a bedrock of trust and safety from which they can venture to explore uncharted terrain. The formation of a good working alliance involves our building and discovering that trust and that safe haven together. This secure base is enhanced by really having the client’s mind held in mind by the psychologist.
If client’s don’t feel [it] can be contained in the therapeutic environment, then they will not dare to bring into therapy the following: their major fears, their overwhelmingly intense or scary feelings, their guilt and shame, their so-called unflattering or unpolished sides, or the huge secrets they’ve been carrying. The forging of a good relationship is essential for clients to conjure up the courage to really put it on the line for change.
Attending to Process and Content
Finally, promoting change through the skilled use of the therapy relationship is carried out by calling attention to process equally as much as to content. Content is what is said and pertains to the actual words spoken. Attending to process illuminates how, in the moment, clients are implicitly revealing or explicitly enacting what they’re talking about.
Sometimes this shows up as an interpersonal issue. For instance, we often repeat our past relational patterns with people we’re intimately in contact with now, but in therapy you can foster an opportunity to safely work through and diminish dysfunctional or unhelpful patterns as they emerge.
Emotionally Corrective Experience
Within the intimate person-to-person meetings of your therapy, both content and process (the what and the how) are always understood against the backdrop of the broader context in which the given issue occurs. The overarching context is what colors the under latent meanings surrounding the predicament or matter at hand.
In the therapeutic encounter, the psychologist is in a position to provide an emotionally corrective stance to the client. In other words, by setting the intention to use the clinical relationship as the vehicle of change, psychotherapy has the power to change the nature of one’s attachment style. This is carried out by the clients’ use of the psychologist as a trusted companion and secure base for engaging in experiential self-exploration within the relational encounter. A satisfactory level of security, attunement, hope, support, and ethic of care in the clinical relationship can be especially relevant for those suffering with attachment disturbances.
Transformative Change
In bringing this section to a close, the clinical relationship is important because it becomes the fertile ground upon which effective psychotherapy takes place. The client-therapist relationship is facilitative of personal growth, emotional healing, and transformative change. Paradoxically, because therapists are removed people, clients can actually get closer to us. So, making full use of the therapeutic relationship is central to what we do in therapy and how we do it.
