August 2021 Clinical Supervision Topic: Therapist Effect

This month we’re talking about therapist effect as one of the common factors. Check out the write-up from last year as we’ll use some of the content to guide our exploration this month.

We know that the client extra-therapeutic factors account for 40% of the therapy outcome, or if we were going to say it from a medical model perspective, social determinants of health account for about 50%. These include, but aren’t limited to: genetics, social and physical environment, faith, persistence, support of family members, socioeconomic level, race or other physical/identity characteristics. Except for the last area, these are things that will change to varying degrees throughout a person’s life. We don’t have any control over them and they greatly affect the work.

We also know that therapist themselves greatly affect how the work goes. This is in how we develop relationships with clients, how we deliver a modality (there are intra-modality discrepancies in effectiveness), and a few other things. Check out this finding from a research article that I often reference:

This month in our work together, we’ll take directly from this article and discuss the following (feel free to reflect on this in preparation for our sessions):

• What have you shifted in your therapeutic alliance approach since we delved more deeply into it four months ago? How can you tell when an alliance is strong vs. average?

• Which interpersonal skills are you nailing? Not sure about?

• What does expressing professional doubt mean to you, and how do you do it?

• What’s your off-shift clinical skills training game look like?

Looking forward to seeing you all soon. So grateful to be doing this work with you.