The Good and The Bad Events in Therapy

Every therapist can name those significant moments in therapy, when something important happens to shift a client’s awareness or elicit powerful emotion. Yet studies in which clients and therapists are interviewed separately following therapy and asked to identify turning points often reveal a lack of agreement between therapists and clients over which moments were significant. Growing research demonstrates that what the client perceives as important in therapy matters more in terms of successful outcome than what the therapist perceives as important. Therefore, it seems essential to understand therapy from the client’s perspective.