 Adlerian therapy is a growth/wellness model.

 It is an optimistic perspective that views people as unique, creative, capable, and

responsible.

4 Phases of Adlerian Therapy

1. Forming a Relationship
 Caring Interest/ Listening with the eyes
 Informed Consent
 Hearing The Story
2. Psychological Investigation (Assessment)
 Lifestyle Assessment
 Conceptualization
 Listening for Meaning
3. Psychological Disclosure/ Interpretation (Insight)
 Tentative Suggestions (Hypothesis Interpretation)
 Collaboration and Challenge
4. Re-orientation and Re-education
 Reframing Old Experiences, Patterns, and Messages
 Creating New Experiences

Adlerian Encouragement
 Clients present for counseling because they discouraged and lack the confidence and
“courage” to engage successfully in the tasks problems of living.
 Encouragement is not a technique, but rather attitude and a way of being with clients

Adlerian Encouragement: Factors and Skills

The Common Factors of Successful Outcome
 Extra-therapeutic (Client) Factors (40%)
 Therapeutic Relationship Factors (30%)
 Hope and Expectancy Factors (15%)
 Theoretical and technique Factors (15%)
(Scott Miller -based on Lambert’s research)
Key Concepts in Adlerian Theory
 Emphasis on client’s subjective experience
 Teleology (Goal-directed)
 Holistic
 Interpersonal/social
 Gemeinschaftsgefuhl (community feeling/social interest) and self-realization
(completion)
 People are neither “good” nor “bad.” Optimistic.
 Developmental perspective based on observation and direct study of children.
 Emphasizes the primacy of the client-counselor relationship.
 Holds a non-pathological view of maladjustment
 Stresses an encouragement-focused process facilitating change.

Therapeutic Chameleon
 Encouragement is not a technique, but rather and attitude and a way of being with
clients.

Characteristics of an Effective Counselor

 Effective therapists have an identity.
 Effective therapists respect and appreciate themselves.
 Effective therapists are open to change.
 Effective therapists make choice that are life oriented.
 Effective therapists are authentic, sincere and honest.
 Effective therapists have a sense of humor
 Effective therapists make mistakes and a willing to admit them
 Effective therapists generally live in the present
 Effective therapists appreciate the influence of culture.
 Effective therapists have a sincere interest in the welfare of others.
 Effective therapists possess effective interpersonal skills.
 Effective therapists become deeply involved their work and derive meaning from it.
 Effective therapists are passionate.
 Effective therapists are able to maintain health boundaries.

Challenges Faced by the Beginning Therapist

 Dealing with our Anxieties
 Being Ourselves and Disclosing Our Experience
 Avoiding Perfectionism
 Being Honest About Our Limitations
 Understanding Silence
  Dealing With Demands from Clients
 Dealing With Clients Who Lack Commitment
 Tolerating Ambiguity
 Avoiding Losing Ourselves in Our Clients
 Developing a Sense of Humor
 Sharing Responsibility With the Client
 Declining to Give Advice
 Defining Your Role as a Counselor
 Learning to Use Techniques Appropriately
 Developing Your Own Counseling Style
 Staying Vital as a Person and as a Professional

Phases of Existential Counseling

 Initial phase: identifying and clarifying the assumptions about the world
 Middle phase: self-exploration
 Final phase: transformation

Humanism vs Extentialism
Humanism
 Clients do not suffer from anxiety in creating an identity
 Clients need to believe that they have natural potential to actualize
Existentialism
 Clients come into counseling because they are facing anxiety in trying to construct an
identity in a word without intrinsic meaning
Humanism vs Extentialism
 Humanism and Existentialism BOTH:
 Respect for client’s experience and trust in client ability to change
 Believe in freedom, choice, values, personal responsibility, autonomy, meaning

Key Concepts
 the capacity for self-awareness
 freedom and responsibility
 striving for identity and relationships to others
 the search for meaning
 anxiety as a condition of living
Gestalt Therapy
 To make whole
o Mind and body
o Emotional, behavioral, and cognitive
o Past and present

Person-Centered Therapy
 A humanistic theory- each of us has a natural potential that we can actualize and
through which we can find meaning
 Shares with existentialism a focus on respect and trust for the client
Goals of Therapy
 To become fully capable of organismic self-regulation (be “centered”)
 To have direct, immediate awareness of the total perceptual field
 To establish contact with the world
Therapeutic Goal
 To assist clients in moving toward authentic and learning to recognize when they
deceiving themselves

Brief Introduction to IP/ AP

 Individual Psychology from the Latin, “individuum” meaning
 indivisible- unable to be divided or separated
 persons can not be properly understood as collection of parts but rather should be
viewed as a unity, as a whole.
 Adlerian theory is holistic, phenomenologically, socially-oriented, and teleological (goal
directed) approach to understanding and working with people.
Learning Target & Success Criteria
 Students will learn how to apply Adlerian therapy
 We are learning to apply the Adlerian encouragement as interpersonal conveyance as
therapeutic modeling by reviewing the concepts of Adler’s theory of personality
 We will show that we can do this by doing recorded counseling simulation (by pair)
 To know how well are learning this, we will know for pairs to perform an unscripted
counseling simulation and students will critique the whole therapeutic process
 It is important for us to learn this because Adlerian approach provides a solid base
integrating diverse treatment modalities and formats.
 We are learning to apply the Existential Therapy by identifying the goal through
learning pairs
 We will show that we can do this, we perform an unscripted teacher-student
counseling simulation

Resistant to Contact
 Lack of contact = superficial relation with the word (instead of aware and intimate)
o Confluence: the condition of no-contact. Instead of an and a ‘You’ there is a ‘we’
or a vague, unclear experience self.
o Introjection: the individual experiences something as him/herself when in fact it
belongs to the environment (false identification).
o Projection: the individual experiences something in the environment when in
fact it belongs to him/her (false alienation).
o Retroflection: the individual holds back a response intended for the
environment and substitutes it with a response for him/herself (e.g., self-harm,
doing poorly in school).

The Role of the Therapist

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Change
 Congruence- genuineness, one’s behavior congruent with emotions
 Empathy- accurate ability to view the world from client’s perspective
 Unconditional Positive Regard- acceptance, caring
Process
 There are no real techniques, other than listening, empathizing, understanding, and
responding to the client
 The client’s self-assessment is of primary importance
 There are no specific stages to the process, and is all about the client’s own process of
change and growth, which must happen at their own pace

Theoretical Assumptions
 The path to wholeness and health is to interact with nature and with other people
without losing one’s individuality (contact)
 People are manipulative, avoid self-reliance, and are not willing to accept their own
perceptions and valid.
 Change happens in the present.
If you want to go to Alaska, where do you start?