Bulletin

Issue: August 2005

Research in Action

Helping Counsellors counsel

A La Trobe University psychologist is collaborating with American and Canadian colleagues in research to assist counsellors and psycho-therapists to better assist those who seek their help.

The project, which began three years ago, aims basically to understand the thoughts, feelings and emotional processes of people suffering from a number of forms of distress.

According to Dr George Wills, Coordinator of the Master of Counselling Psychology program in La Trobe University's School of Public Health, a fuller understanding of such feelings and emotional processes enables counsellors to better pinpoint the source of emotional problems - and hence to treat them more effectively.

'Human distress is usually caused when people lose touch with themselves,' Dr Wills explains. 'Our research is attempting to find out why by concentrating on examining in depth a small number of cases rather than superficially surveying a large number.'

The project expands Dr Wills' career-long interest in humanist-existential approaches to psychotherapy to include research into areas described as 'Process Experiential Therapy' and 'Emotion Focused Therapy'.

These approaches have been developed by his collaborators, Professors Laura Rice and Leslie Greenberg (York University, Toronto) and Professor Robert Elliott (University of Toledo, Ohio).

Professor Elliot visited La Trobe in 2000 as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow and worked with Dr Wills' students on several projects.

Dr Wills said the approaches emphasised the relationship between the therapist and client, the client's capacity for personal growth, and the importance of giving attention to psychological processes in clients in accounting for treatment outcome variance.

In collaboration with Professors Elliott and Greenberg, Dr Wills has been coordinating a set of research projects with La Trobe students in the Master of Counselling Psychology, the Doctor of Clinical Sciences and PhD programs.

These include inquiries into the experiences of adolescent depression, men's uncontained anger, post-natal depression in Vietnamese women, parents of children suffering from the terminal condition hypoplastic left heart syndrome and men and women diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder.

'Let me give you an example here in Australia where we have a large Vietnamese population. Traditionally Vietnamese women take problems like post-natal depression to very close friends or relatives - and would never dream of broaching their problems with a stranger, even a well qualified professional. If psychotherapists or counsellors were not aware of this, they would make little progress and would not know why.

'All collaborators are gathering and sharing reliable information about client experience that can be used to assist professional counsellors better to empathise with the experiences of different groups of people,' Dr Wills said.

'Better empathy means better counsellor-client working alliances and deeper client experiential understanding of their conditions, which permit clients to move on from feeling stuck with their distress.

'At the moment we are starting research into the detail of therapist experience of working with depression in adolescents and of depressed adolescents' experiences of working with the therapist.

'Often what therapists think most strongly influences client outcomes is not what clients think produces constructive change. As professionals, we could assume that we really know, but in this research we intend to begin to find out.

'The research is being conducted using "post-positivist" methodologies. These methods permit researchers to find out, in great detail, what processes occur during therapy. Later we intend to conduct research of a more normative kind employing the information we are currently gaining.

'Research conducted mainly in Europe, the United States and Canada is revealing that outcome effects on clients with many different presenting difficulties are at least com-parable to other approaches to therapy, including cognitive behaviour therapy.

'There is plenty of evidence that generic qualities are what accounts for outcome and that the most likely form these qualities take is derived from therapist sensitivity to clients, clients' interest in recovering from distress and having the social supports that enable this to happen.'