CLINICAL STRATEGIES

MAINTAINING THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

1. Responds to the client by conveying a respectful, collaborative, empathic, validating

nonjudgment stance
2. Shows evidence of listening respectively
3. Recognizes the client’s strengths and convey this to the client
4. Addresses obstacles (silences, coming late, avoidance of meaningful topics) and opportunities
(inquisitiveness, assertiveness, willingness to be vulnerable) that might influence the therapeutic
process

ACCESSING AND PROCESSING EMOTIONS

1. Help the patient stay emotionally regulated

2. Encourages the patient to experience and express affection in the session.
3. Facilitates patient’s experience awareness of emotions, and uses various strategies to help
deepen their emotional experience
4. Helps the patient label emotional experience and recognize its goal-directed significance
5. Helps the patient access, experience, and deepen attachment-related feelings and or primary
emotions specifically related to dysfunctional patterns.

EMPATHIC EXPLORATION

1. Use open-ended question

2. Inquires into the personal or unique meanings of the patient’s words
3. Responds to the patient’s statements descriptions by seeking concrete detail

FOCUSED

1. Throughout the therapy, maintains a focused line of inquiry

RELATIONALIONSHIP FOCUS

1. Facilitates the patient’s expression and exploration of feelings, thoughts, and beliefs about
significant others (including you and the therapeutic relationships)
2. Encourages the patient to discuss how the therapist might feel or think about the client
3. Discloses one’s reactions to some aspect of the patient’s behaviors in general and the patient’s
maladaptive dysfunctional patterns
4. Communicate about the interpersonal process that is evolving between you and the patient.

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CYCLICAL PATTERNS

1. Identify the patient introject

2. Helps the client link his or her emotions and personal meanings to a recurrent pattern of
interpersonal behavior
3. Deepens the patient’s emotional and conceptual understanding of how old patterns of behavior
continue to inform current interpersonal and intrapersonal functioning.
4. Link the need for projecting/disowning primary emotions to the patient’s early experiences with
caregivers
5. Helps the patient incorporate their more adaptive (healthier) feelings, thoughts, and behaviors
into a new narrative.

PROMOTING CHANGE DIRECTLY

1. Provide opportunities for the client to have a new experience of himself or herself in interaction
with you and to have a new relational experience in interaction with you in accord with the
goals of treatment
2. Gives process directives in session and outside of session to help the patient to take steps
toward new emotional and /or interpersonal experiences and understanding.

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