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 client’s experience, as well as drawing on the therapist’s 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

Knowledge and Understanding

You will need to know and understand:

Understanding of human emotion

1. the range of feelings and emotions likely to be encountered in therapy
2. the verbal and non-verbal signs of an emotion that is present but unexpressed
3. methods by which expression of feelings can be expressed and moderated
4. the feelings and emotions the therapist finds it harder to access personally
   
   Conditions for therapeutic change
   
5. the rationale for responding empathically to the client and being warm, open, 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
   
   Principles of humanistic therapy
   
9. philosophy and principles that inform humanistic therapy
10. humanistic theories of therapeutic process
11. approaches to psychological therapy that have grown out of the humanistic psychology movement
12. experiential methods of learning
13. non-humanistic approaches that influence humanistic therapy
    
    Mental health and wellbeing
    
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
    
    Human growth and development and the origins of psychological difficulties
    
19. models of change, health and wellbeing
20. the impact of conflicts within the individual
21. the impact of social context on psychological growth and development
22. the role that emotional experiencing has in an individual’s awareness of how an action contributes to growth
23. the role of relationship in the development of self-experience
24. the mechanisms and effects of internal processes out of the client’s awareness in the development of self-experience
25. the role of internal processes out of the client’s awareness in difficulties in self-experience
26. how thinking, feeling and behaviour are determined by an individual’s subjective reality
27. the impact on psychological development of empathic attunement and acceptance and the extent of its absence during the formative years
28. the mechanism and effects of internalisation of the values, beliefs and attitudes of others
29. the development and benefits of the capacity to reflect on inner processes and experiences
30. the development of the capacity to balance inner and outer realities
31. multiple perspectives from which human experience can be viewed
    
    Relational processes in the immediate therapeutic relationship
    
32. the mechanism and nature of shared meanings co-constructed by therapist and client
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 client’s and therapist’s perceptions of their world may be experienced within and influence the therapeutic relationship
35. how the client’s 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 therapist’s immediate responses and experiences within the therapeutic relationship can form a basis for communicating empathic understanding and informing exploration of the client’s subjectivity
    
    The actualising tendency and process
    
39. the role of actualisation in human growth and health
40. the ways in which internal processes out of the client’s awareness can undermine, distort or block the actualising tendency
41. how the actualising tendency is expressed in the practice of humanistic therapy
42. the concept of symptoms as a signal for integrating experience and growth
43. the concept of symptoms as indicators of the actualisation process

Performance Criteria

You must be able to do the following:

1. recognise the ways in which the client manages and processes their feelings and emotions
2. attune to and empathically engage with the client’s world
3. draw on your own emotional response to what the client is saying
4. discern and distinguish between the client’s and your own emotional processes
5. draw on your own and the client’s embodied experiencing
6. be open to dialogue between different aspects of the client’s 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 client’s resistance to fully experience feelings and emotions, where this exists
11. recognise the client’s 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

Additional Information

This National Occupational Standard was developed by Skills for Health. 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): Dimension: Core 1 Communication