|
|
 |
APA Psychotherapy Training Videos are intended solely for educational purposes for mental health professionals. Viewers are expected to treat confidential material found herein according to strict professional guidelines. Unauthorized viewing is prohibited.
Adlerian therapy is a brief, psychoeducational approach that is both humanistic and goal oriented. It emphasizes the individual's strivings for success, connectedness with others, and contributions to society as being hallmarks of mental health. Birth order is considered important in understanding a person's current personality, yet the therapy is future-minded, rather than retrospective. This approach emphasizes understanding the unique lifestyle of each individual before working toward change.
Using this approach, the therapist strives to understand two important things in a client—ways of thinking and context. We all often have some form of faulty thinking—a pattern of cognition or assumptions that we learn early in life and that continues to influence what we do and feel in the present. In addition, context is important as well as cognition: culture and birth order strongly influence thoughts and behavior.
There are four stages or steps in this approach:
- Engagement: The therapist and client agree to collaborate on the problem at hand and create an alliance.
- Assessment: The therapist takes the client's history, including early recollections and birth order influences; more traditional assessment tools may also be used (e.g., Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory),
- Insight: The therapist helps the client see his or her situation or role differently.
- Reorientation: The therapist gives the client activities to do outside of therapy that will reinforce this insight or create further insight.
Adlerian therapy is integrative in that a therapist may call on any number of approaches within the general Adlerian approach—the goal is to be the best therapist that the client requires, something that may require adjusting the approach. Adlerian therapy has been empirically tested over the past 30 years, and it can work with any type of mental illness or disorder.
Return to Adlerian Therapy
|
)
