The interplay between therapeutic relationship and therapeutic technique: “It takes two to tango”
Journal of Clinical Psychology, EarlyView.
Psychotherapy Research
Confronting Your Fears in Virtual Reality Therapy
VR scenarios get more personal as doctors tailor therapy to individual experiences
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How Storytelling Can Enhance Therapy for OCD
Telling your story can be a powerful way for you and your family to respond to OCD.
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Sleep Disturbances Prevalent in Long COVID, Analysis Finds
Source: Google News – Health More than two in five patients with long COVID suffer from moderate to severe sleep disturbances, according to an analysis published in Journal of General Internal Medicine. The analysis also identified risk factors for moderate to severe sleep disturbances, including race, hospitalization for COVID-19, greater anxiety severity, and fatigue. After
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Basic Tenets of Separation Theory
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Ahead of Print. This article outlines the basic tenets of separation theory, including the fantasy bond and the voice process. The fantasy bond is a unifying concept explaining how human beings seek security in fantasies of fusion in an attempt to heal the fracture related to interpersonal trauma compounded by death anxiety. Painful elements in parent–child interactions are incorporated in the form of a negative thought process or “voice,” creating a division in the personality between the self and the anti-self. My colleagues and I developed a methodology called “voice therapy” to expose and contend with people’s destructive attitudes and attacks on themselves. The article also describes the evolution of a group of more than 100 associates and friends who have lived in close proximity and shared their innermost feelings in an ongoing group experience for more than 40 years. These people contributed significantly to the evolution of separation theory. Together, we developed an implicit set of values based on understanding factors that hurt people in their psychological development. The article specifies the concepts learned from observing the reference population and delineates findings from research in the neurosciences, attachment theory, and terror management theory that validate the key concepts of separation theory.
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Associations Between Existential Concerns and Adverse Experiences: A Systematic Review
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Ahead of Print. Exposure to traumatic events or adverse experiences and its consequences have been studied mainly from a posttraumatic stress disorder perspective. Existential psychotherapy focuses on universal human concerns and the anxiety that occurs when a person confronts the conflicts inherent in life and toward death, which include the experience of difficult situations. A systematic review was performed including 56 papers that studied the relations between adverse experiences and existential concerns. The articles were assessed and described in relation to existential domains, type of adverse experience, posttraumatic responses, and existential psychological interventions. Existential concerns appeared in different degrees and categories in studied samples. Outcomes suggest that from an existential psychotherapy perspective, reactions to traumatic events can be both negative and positive for a person. In addition, the pass of time turned out to be an important factor, especially in finding meaning from traumatic experiences, the reduction of negative symptoms, and the achieving of posttraumatic growth. Existential-related interventions described in this review showed positive outcomes, suggesting that it is an effective trauma treatment approach.
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Integrative Jungian Psychotherapy for Anxiety and OCD
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Ahead of Print. Cognitive-behavioral interventions for anxiety and obsessive–compulsive disorder have received a great deal of attention for their growing evidence base. These therapies focus on symptom elimination by way of cognitive and behavioral change and, though undoubtedly helpful, miss important symbolic aspects of the client’s experience of these disorders that have the potential for meaning and the resolution of traumatic history. Jungian psychotherapy, like other depth-oriented and humanistically oriented approaches, is concerned both with meaning in the client’s life and the process by which the client becomes more themselves by integrating fragmented, wounded, and hidden aspects of the psyche—a process known as individuation. This article integrates Jungian concepts with trauma theory to generate an integrative framework for psychotherapy with individuals with anxiety and obsessive–compulsive disorder. The case of “Stefan,” which provides a description of trauma-informed psychotherapy incorporating eye movement desensitization and reprocessing within a Jungian framework, is then presented to illustrate key elements of this theoretical integration.
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From Climate Anxiety to Climate Action: An Existential Perspective on Climate Change Concerns Within Psychotherapy
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Ahead of Print. With the growing body of knowledge climate change stands out as one of the most important contemporary problems. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms the urgent necessity to reduce greenhouse gases emission, as the window to address the problem is becoming narrow. Rising temperatures and bushfires, melting glaciers and droughts make the acceleration of climate change evident, and citizens around the globe are increasingly worried about the magnitude of the problem. In this article, we propose an existential perspective on climate change-related concerns. Although environmental worries are legitimate, they sometimes cause severe anxiety and distress so aggravated as to be discussed within the framework of psychotherapy. In the course of this research, we examine the experiences of 10 Swedish psychotherapy clients addressing their climate concerns within treatment. We engage them into in-depth conversations about the experience of climate anxiety and inquire about the individual pathways toward recovery. Moreover, we propose the existential perspective as a tool to understand such experiences. We aim to address all existential concerns, as described in Ernesto Spinelli’s themes of existence framework: death anxiety, spatiality, temporality, meaning, relatedness, authenticity, freedom, and responsibility. All of the above are present in participants’ reports of climate anxiety. In conclusion, we emphasize the value of introducing existential perspective to practitioners working with clients experiencing climate distress.
Future Time Perspective as an Operationalization of Existential Concerns Related to Time
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Ahead of Print. Psychologists and other clinical therapists often focus on the psychological processes that result from the fact that human beings will one day die, not death anxiety/afterlife anxiety itself. Nevertheless, existential concerns are death concerns, and any anxiety associated with death should be understood through that lens—as resulting from concerns about death. Understanding how one views the amount of time left to live, and how this perception influences motives, goal cognitions, mood, and well-being, is of great importance from a humanistic–existential perspective. Socioemotional selectivity theory and the concept of future time perspective (FTP) capture these phenomena and have the potential to operationalize perspectives of time constraints within existential psychology. The present work attempts to show how FTP may be used to operationalize the problem of time from an existential perspective, specifically targeting the existential themes of death, meaning, isolation, and freedom. Clinical implications of considering FTP as an existential construct are discussed, as are limitations and future directions.
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Existential Meaninglessness Scale: Scale Development and Psychometric Properties
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Ahead of Print. Grounded in a tripartite existential meaninglessness model, the authors developed the 18-item Existential Meaninglessness Scale (EMS) to assess one’s concern and anxiety of existential meaninglessness. Across three samples, the EMS’s factor structure and evidence of convergent, criterion-related, and incremental validity, internal consistency, and test–retest reliability were examined. Exploratory factor analyses demonstrated three dimensions of the EMS: incomprehension, purposelessness, and insignificance. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that a bifactor model was a better fit to the data than other models. The bifactor model provided evidence for a general factor and measurement invariance. Ancillary bifactor indices indicated EMS’s unidimensionality. Findings of bivariate correlations and hierarchical regression analyses provided evidence for different aspects of construct validity and internal consistency. Both the Concern and Anxiety measures of the EMS positively predicted depressive symptoms and suicide ideation above and beyond the effects of general existential meaninglessness, general feelings of anxiety, and presence of meaning in life. Based on the findings, the authors discuss future research directions on existential meaninglessness using the EMS.
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