Studies suggest that approximately half of clients leave therapy prematurely and fail to benefit from psychosocial interventions. One factor consistently associated with client retention and outcome is the quality of the therapeutic alliance. While strong alliances contribute to positive outcome, tensions or breaks in the client and therapist's collaborative relationship (i.e., alliance ruptures) contribute to poor outcome. Although ruptures are common in therapy, current treatments may not provide effective ways to manage alliance ruptures. A promising way to identify new strategies to address alliance ruptures is through clinician-informed approaches. This study is designed to systematically collect, categorize, and identify clinician-generated strategies to resolve situations in which alliance ruptures occur in adult individual therapy. The goals are 1) to compile and categorize typical therapeutic situations and associated resolution strategies concerning alliance ruptures that confront clinicians, and 2) to identify a set of intervention strategies to address alliance ruptures that can serves as potential therapeutic strategies to be evaluated through future psychotherapy outcome research. I predict that the resulting clinical strategies will correspond to Bordin's conception of the alliance and Safran's rupture and repair model.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F31)
Project #
1F31MH074271-01A1
Application #
7054437
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZMH1-ERB-I (09))
Program Officer
Light, Enid
Project Start
2005-09-13
Project End
2008-09-12
Budget Start
2005-09-13
Budget End
2007-09-12
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2005
Total Cost
$28,119
Indirect Cost
Name
State University New York Stony Brook
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
804878247
City
Stony Brook
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
11794
Eubanks, Catherine F; Burckell, Lisa A; Goldfried, Marvin R (2018) Clinical Consensus Strategies to Repair Ruptures in the Therapeutic Alliance. J Psychother Integr 28:60-76