Adlerian Psychotherapy Prioritizing social interest History of Adlerian Theory

1. Establishing the relationship

• Therapist gets to know the client as a person
• Supportive, caring human connection
• Warmth, empathy, and acceptance
• Hope, reassurance, and encouragement
• Love
• Therapy is collaborative
• Goals established together prior to start
• Awareness of goal discrepancies during early phases
• Scripts (“Have you ever seen a patient like me before?”)
• Games (“My previous therapist said the opposite…”)
• Realignment of goals, when necessary

2. Gathering information

• Interview
• Client tells own story as expert on own life
• Presenting problem(s)
• Early recollections, influences (earliest memories, vivid memories from early adolescence)
• Life tasks
• Personality priorities
• Lifestyle Assessment -- therapist listens for clues to client’s coping and approach to life, develops therapy goals by identifying major successes and mistakes
• “The Question” -- If I had a magic wand that would eliminate your symptom immediately, what would be different in your life?”
• Family constellation, other paper-pencil tests
• Integration and summary

3. Facilitating Self-Understanding & Insight

• Insight = Understanding of motivations (the whys)
• that operate in client’s life

• Therapist clarifies vague thinking with Socratic questioning.
• Therapist invites evaluation of consequences of ideas and actions.
• Therapist gently challenges mistaken ideas about self and others.
• Therapist offers open-ended interpretations to:
• bring conscious awareness to unconscious processes
• identify and confront resistance
• explore purposes of symptoms, feelings, behaviors or blocks
• Types of interpretation
• Of nonverbal behavior: to bring the client’s nonverbal behavior to the attention of the client and interpret it.
• Of the therapeutic process: Dealing with what is in the here and now.
• Active wondering: Proposes an alternative to the presenting problem.