How can psychologists respond effectively to challenging clients? Here's advice from practitioners who have eased stressful encounters with their clients:Ĭalm yourself. But, they add, there are ways to use uncomfortable interactions to actually improve treatment. Responding the wrong way - whether by pushing back at the client or withdrawing - can derail the client's progress, say Honda and others. Forensic psychologists, such as those working as postdivorce parenting coordinators, can also face hostility. Challenging clients aren't just a problem for clinical and counseling psychologists, either. Some - whether they're in court-mandated treatment or pushed into therapy by spouses or parents - just don't want to be in therapy. Psychologists sometimes face clients who have personality disorders that prompt them to lash out, for example.
I almost ran out of the office."Īlthough the mother stepped in to defend Honda and they eventually repaired their therapeutic relationship, the experience left him shaken. "Within 15 minutes, they had completely torn apart my self-esteem," says Honda, who chairs the couple and family therapy program at Antioch University in Seattle. He was working with two parents and their daughter, when the father started attacking Honda, making hostile comments about his abilities as a therapist. They wrote that the federal government should refrain from endorsing interventions when the research base is exceedingly weak and derives from largely flawed studies.Even though Seattle-area private practitioner Kirk Honda, PsyD, had been a psychotherapist for 15 years, it only took a hostile client a few minutes to make him question his own competence. There are treatments that have both shown success when subject to rigorously designed studies that have at least a potentially plausible theoretical rationale.”
But in reality, it should be limited to ‘science-based’ therapies. Lilienfeld and Satel wrote that “acceptance into the registry is limited to ‘evidence-based’ therapies. The therapy was found to be promising for phobia, panic and generalized anxiety disorders and symptoms depression and depressive symptoms and general functioning and well-being.Īny improvement that patients showed using TFT was by accident, the placebo effect and a desire to please the therapist, the authors wrote. One of the two journal studies was conducted in Rwanda with genocide survivors diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder.īased on those studies, SAMHSA said TFT was found to be effective for trauma and stressor-related disorders and symptoms, self-regulation and personal resilience/self-concept. One was not peer-reviewed and the other two were published in obscure journals. The authors wrote that SAMHSA reviewed three studies dealing with TFT. The registry is aimed mainly at state-level programmers and lists intervention they can implement with the dollars for treatment services that SAMHSA has allocated to the states through block grants, Lilienfeld and his co-author, Sally Satel, wrote in the Forbes article, which was headlined “You won’t believe the government is supporting this crackpot Mental Health Therapy.” SAMHSA’s registry is designed to provide the public with reliable scientific information on mental health and substance abuse interventions. Moreover, there is not a shred of evidence that invisible energy fields exist in the human body, let alone that manipulating them helps to treat psychological problems.” Lilienfeld, Ph.D., the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology at Emory University, wrote in the March 29 issue of Forbes magazine that “there is no good evidence supporting this ‘therapy,’ which draws vaguely on the traditional Chinese idea of a life force. The February decision by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to add Thought Field Therapy (TFT) to its National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices prompted a strong rebuttal from a leading psychologist.
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