Psychotherapy Effectiveness: The Role of Common Factors

This essay delves into the critical role of common factors in determining the effectiveness of psychotherapy, particularly within the context of loss and trauma therapy. The author argues that these factors, including goal/value congruency, therapist warmth and genuineness, and trustworthiness, often surpass the impact of specific therapeutic techniques. The essay explores how these factors contribute to the development of a strong therapeutic alliance, which is essential for successful treatment outcomes. It addresses challenges such as client avoidance, the impact of therapist behaviors, and the influence of cultural taboos on the therapeutic process. The author emphasizes the importance of therapists cultivating warmth, genuine self-disclosure, and trustworthiness to enhance the client-therapist relationship. The essay concludes by advocating for the integration of common factors into therapy training, highlighting their potential to improve treatment outcomes and promote a more effective and supportive therapeutic environment.

Running Head: PSYCHOTHERAPY EFFECTIVENESS DEPENDS ON COMMON FACTORS 1
Psychotherapy Effectiveness Depends on Common Factors
Student’s name
Institution

PSYCHOTHERAPY DEPENDS ON COMMON FACTORS 2
Introduction
In loss and trauma therapy, there is need to set factors within the empirical area that support the
techniques relating to alliance and enhancement building between clients and therapists
(Thompson-Hollands, et al., 2018). Suppose, within a certain situation the client views a therapy
session to be lacking alliance or is not enhancing any kind of relief. What next? Do we re-
educate the client to enable him or her to get to grips that the transferential distortions blind her
or him from the true therapist’s alliance? Do we get a new therapist? Can we (shall we) make the
therapist add the alliance volume during sessions? What behaviours could create an alliance with
the traumatized clients?
To answer these questions, some factors have to be taken into consideration. There are two main
interlocking sets of lines that one can dangle on and they are: determining the therapeutic
relationship dimensions leading to positive client-therapist alliance and/or positive therapeutic
arrangement process and determining how the underlying dimensions could be affected by the
non-verbal and verbal therapist behaviour (Earls, 2018). It has come to this article’s realization
that the therapeutic process is very reliable and enhanced once the process is undertaken using at
least four therapy or therapists features crossing the normal therapeutic orientation: goal/value
congruency, caring/warmth, the therapy’ clarity rationale and
trustworthiness/credibility/genuineness (Kirsch, Keller, Tutus, & Goldbeck, 2018). In general, this
article argues between choosing to use or not to use the four common factors in therapy.
1. Enhancing Goal/Value Congruency and buying into the Therapy Rationale
I chose to practice the therapeutic field where the avoidance disorder symptom has become
primary among many clients. As therapists, it should not be a surprise variation meeting the

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avoidance strategy everywhere during therapeutic sessions (Cooper, 2018). Loss and trauma
clients could be avoiding trauma discussions, trauma reminders, and the major potent trauma
treatment aspects. It is therefore worthy of having experimented on ways that encourage
behaviour approaches when therapy is involved (Cooper, 2018). For example, is it advisable for a
new patient to read brief rationale descriptions and trauma treatment benefits from numerous
resources, looking forward to specific emphasis, specific metaphor, or specific phrasing that
produce their turning points? Should clients write such descriptions, maximizing similarity
concerning the recent clinical participants, or should only highly deemed credible sources be
represented for expertise reasons (physicians, therapists) or social standings (those in power,
celebrities)?
From my experience, therapists have to make an effort to sell their patients the idea that the
journeys they are commencing are a shared journey. A journey that extends to become a guided
tour whereby roles of the guide are varying from time to time as both the therapist and the client
begins offering plausible exploration suggestions (Cooper, 2018). Such an undertaking is true
once the therapist accepts the theoretic formulation stating that there exist dissociated,
unformulated facets within individuals and that the patterns can be described and sensed by the
clients or described and noticed by the therapists. In the end, the client and the therapist will be
able to reach an emotional reaction. The emotional reaction can then be held to light, handed
back and forth between the client and the therapist as they look for possible points of views. This
behaviour would champion commitment and acceptance of therapy (Cooper, 2018).
However, the therapy goals and values can be hampered by the existing community taboos
which prohibit the discussion of matters like money, sex, culture and race. The San Diego
Counter transference conducted extensive interviews involving client numbers above 500 who

PSYCHOTHERAPY DEPENDS ON COMMON FACTORS 4
had undergone loss and trauma therapy and this research taught me an important theme that both
therapists and clients usually withhold crucial information from one another in unsuccessful and
unhappy dyads (Cooper, 2018). On the contrary, it is worth noting that taboos are only obstacles
to be crossed. Take, for instance, an interview on Hispanic and Black clients who were through
with their loss and trauma treatments with White therapists. This study showed that a 47 client
percentage noted that race was never mentioned during therapy sessions, a 48 client percentage
noted that therapists did not feel comfortable discussing race and only a 38 client percentage
thought that the therapy sessions handled race-related issued well (Cooper, 2018). This finding
generally identified the recommendation of talks regarding taboo issues to be routinely done to
ease the mood of expression.
2. Therapist and Client Warmth
Many kinds of literature lack two researching lines which are very important in this article. First,
is it possible to train a trauma therapist to become warmer and less avoidant when facing the
extreme threat in therapeutic session? To answer this, the recent predictive studies are identifying
warmth as a stable feature a therapist should possess rather than a personality facet to be made
up or imagined. However, Piotrowski and Cameranesi (2018) found that when therapists were
faced with chronic and repeated trauma tales, their responsiveness to clients’ emotional cues
reduced as time went by. Although, there was no effect on the therapists’ response to positive
cues. This sums up why there is unsuccessful therapy when discomfort exists during therapy
sessions as therapists are criticized and client reticence in disclosing negative information
regarding therapists (Piotrowski & Cameranesi, 2018). On the other hand, in my perspective, these
tendencies can be modified in that when there is an addition of direct evaluation requests from

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therapists – where clients are asked to assess the warmth feeling of their therapists, for example –
could lead to self-correction opportunities for therapists.
Secondly, other studies state that warmth is only an assumption that is short-lived during the
interactional experience between therapists and clients (Piotrowski & Cameranesi, 2018). I can back
this theory by recalling several individual clients where many of them thought well of the
therapy sessions. One client, however, once decided to call repeatedly in the dead of the night.
After seeing I could not return the calls, the client immediately sent a message that I was not
supportive and caring. Besides, one single father felt my warm reception as being intrusive, in
that he could not reciprocate such kind of behaviour (Piotrowski & Cameranesi, 2018). Therefore,
with regards to loss and trauma, some clients may not be able to tolerate or recognize warmth as
well as have the potential to reach for and maintain warmth recognition signs for emotional
connection.
3. Taboo Prohibiting Self-disclosure and Genuineness
I get encouragement from the theoretical discussion on the relational-cultural theory proponents
that Merriman and Joseph (2018) strive to advocate for. The relational-cultural theory advocates
for mutual empathy primacy regarding psychotherapy, in that the development of such
foundations encouraged individuals to be emotionally responsive, empathically attuned, open to
change and authentically present. On the contrary, our communities do have active traditions
prohibiting self-disclosure which in some cases can be seen to be a refusal against genuineness.
The general prohibition in therapy behind such prohibition is also understandable since it
protects the therapy session from becoming therapist dominated rather than clients’ material,
client distraction by irrelevant therapist knowledge. However, reaching the strategy’s practical
implementation, it is left to the therapists’ whim (Merriman & Joseph, 2018).

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In my client samples, who had gone through loss and trauma therapy, many of them were asked
what question types would they have asked a therapist in their sessions. For this article, I will be
focusing on three questions – one question was regarding the sexual orientation of the therapist,
another on the loss and trauma history of the therapist and the last on the other clients of the
therapist. When these questions were forwarded to therapists for possible answers, young
therapists could not find it clear on how to be both therapeutic and genuine given that some
disclosures were emotional – for example responding to tragedy by crying- were thought to be a
burden (Merriman & Joseph, 2018).
In my view, such thoughtful discussions on theory have to be devoted to finding better emotional
and verbal self-disclosure when therapist find themselves questioned to display genuineness.
Especially, since their non-responsiveness to similar emotional need situations are clear facets of
insecure therapeutic moves (Merriman & Joseph, 2018). Therefore, therapists have to be educated
on how to manage and reciprocate client views. Becoming genuine, warm and trustworthy is the
focus of this article and ultimately vouch for the use of common factors in therapy training since
it would highly improve the outcomes of treatments.
Conclusion
This article identifies that common factors depict effectiveness across therapies, often leading to
outcome variation than therapeutic technique, which is, however, being treated as erratic
variations rather than modifiable treatment features. In this article, I argue that through the use of
common factors employs complex predictions affected by respective loss and trauma-related
variations (such as insecure attachment) in addition to these common factors required to be
directly and routinely assessed, this article promotes the acceptance of common factors into
processes of loss and trauma therapy through:

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 Therapists focusing on not only on methods but also on individual levels of genuineness,
warmth and trustworthiness.
 Therapists taking time to discuss difficult topics that could be raised by clients or topics
that are difficult to be raised during psychotherapy to help increase comfort.
 Extended rationale discussions for client-friendly treatment ways that develop alliance-
building and nuanced techniques in therapy.

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References
Cooper, M. (2018). Goal-oriented practice across therapies. Working with Goals in
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Earls, M. F. (2018). Trauma-Informed Primary Care Prevention, Recognition, and Promoting
Resilience. North Carolina medical journal, 108-112.
Kirsch, V., Keller, F., Tutus, D., & Goldbeck, L. (2018). Treatment expectancy, working
alliance, and outcome of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with children
and adolescents. Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health, 16.
Merriman, O., & Joseph, S. (2018). Therapeutic implications of counselling psychologists’
responses to client trauma: An interpretative phenomenological analysis. Counselling
Psychology Quarterly, 117-136.
Piotrowski, C. C., & Cameranesi, M. (2018). Aggression by children exposed to IPV: Exploring
the role of child depressive symptoms, trauma-related symptoms, & warmth in family
relationships. Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 360-371.
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Theory, Research, and Practice, 1.