PT46 Enable The Client To Express Feelings and Emotions Within Humanistic Therapy
PT46 Enable The Client To Express Feelings and Emotions Within Humanistic Therapy
PT46 Enable The Client To Express Feelings and Emotions Within Humanistic Therapy
OVERVIEW
This standard is about working with feelings and emotions as a central aspect of
humanistic therapy. It focuses on how the therapist enables the client to connect with
and express feelings and emotions that are difficult to access and name, using creative
and active methods of expression. It describes how to work effectively with the feeling
and emotional content of a clients experience, as well as drawing on the therapists
emotional response to them.
This standard describes therapeutic practice adopted successfully in mental health and
wellbeing interventions for adults, based on the philosophical tenets of the humanistic
tradition and incorporating a range of approaches from a humanistic value base. (See
reference in the additional information section on page 3.) To apply this standard,
therapists also need to take account of the multiple problems and complex
co-morbidities that individual clients may bring to therapy.
Users of this standard will need to ensure that they are receiving supervision and that
their practice reflects up to date information and policies. This standard should be
understood in the context of the Digest of National Occupational Standards for
Psychological Therapies.
Version No 1
5. the rationale for responding empathically to the client and being warm, open,
PT46 Enable the client to express feelings and emotions within humanistic therapy Page 1 of 4
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non-judgmental, genuine and transparent
6. how to employ the specific methodology, key concepts and relevant components
of the model being used
7. how to maintain therapeutic conditions
8. the psychological conditions that make change more likely
14. the range and severity of mental health difficulties and their presentation
15. factors associated with the emergence, development and maintenance of mental
health difficulties
16. humanistic models of mental distress
17. the ways in which mental health difficulties can impact on personal and
interpersonal functioning
18. models of a fully functioning individual
32. the mechanism and nature of shared meanings co-constructed by therapist and
client
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33. how the therapeutic relationship reflects the relationship histories of both the client
and the therapist
34. how the explicit and implicit meanings that shape the clients and therapists
perceptions of their world may be experienced within and influence the therapeutic
relationship
35. how the clients explicit, manifest communications may contain an implicit, latent
meaning
36. ways in which aspects of past events can be re-experienced in the present
37. how the therapist may make use of their immediate emotional and embodied
reactions to the client
38. the ways in which the therapists immediate responses and experiences within
the therapeutic relationship can form a basis for communicating empathic
understanding and informing exploration of the clients subjectivity
PERFORMANCE CRITERIA
1. recognise the ways in which the client manages and processes their feelings and
emotions
2. attune to and empathically engage with the clients world
3. draw on your own emotional response to what the client is saying
4. discern and distinguish between the clients and your own emotional processes
5. draw on your own and the clients embodied experiencing
6. be open to dialogue between different aspects of the clients experience
7. help the client not to be overwhelmed by their emotions
8. acknowledge and empathise with the client over the risks they wish to take
9. help the client to express unexpressed emotions
10. accept and be aware of your own and the clients resistance to fully experience
feelings and emotions, where this exists
11. recognise the clients expression of their feelings towards you as therapist and
determine what they might mean, where this is of relevance to the client
12. enable the client to reflect on and make choices about the expression and
containment of feelings and emotions
13. help the client to develop, from their frame of reference, awareness of the impact
of their feelings and emotions on others
14. use supervision to uncover and explore your own unrecognised emotional
responses to the client and understand further their emotional world
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
This standard is derived from research reported in Roth A D, Hill A and Pilling S (2009)
The competences required to deliver effective Humanistic Psychological Therapies.
Centre for Outcomes Research & Effectiveness (CORE) University College London.
This standard has indicative links with the following dimension within the NHS
Knowledge and Skills Framework (October 2004):
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Final version approved June 2010 © copyright Skills For Health
For competence management tools visit tools.skillsforhealth.org.uk