Psychotherapeutic Models and My Practice

Psychotherapy Corey's ultimate recommendation, when it comes to the different schools of psychotherapy, is to pursue an integrative approach, in which the different methods are combined and individually tailored to suit the client. This seems ultimately very sensible, but the goals for my own practice are highly specific, and I think it is worth considering the ways in which I might be able to integrate different techniques in a practice that focuses on life coaching and career counseling.

The chief advantage of traditional Freudian psychoanalysis is that it encourages the patient to talk as much as possible with very little intervention by the therapist. I still consider this to be a useful technique to start. A therapist can only work with what he or she is given. But when the therapist's specific area of professional expertise is life coaching, a certain number of assumptions can be made about what sort of client will walk in the door.

The clients that I can expect to be handling are not likely to be suffering from issues like grief or depression, for example: these might be tangential issues related to why a client is seeking a life or career change, but they are not going to be the primary motivating factor for why a person seeks the help of a life coach.

Consequently I imagine that my own method will probably use the Freudian technique of encouraging the client simply to talk, or even to free-associate, until certain patterns or even contradictions become evident. The more a client has to say about anything at all represents the more that the therapist has to work with, in this scenario.

So as a form of methodology this seems very appealing to me, even if I find its underlying theory of mind to be largely irrelevant to the sort of work that I intend to do.

I am certain I can integrate Freudian notions of parental-child relations if they seem specifically relevant to a client's issues in terms of career change or motivation, but it does not strike me that these are necessary to use the Freudian technique, nor would they be particularly likely to surface in the kind of work I anticipate. The Existential model is much more relevant, and will probably form the core of my basic theoretical underpinning.

For a life coach, the notion that a client's own choices and actions are the central matter under examination seems obvious. I am sure that more Freudian techniques can be integrated into the therapy when a client seems utterly bewildered by the motivations for his or her own choices and actions: obviously the notion that there can be subconscious motivation is something that a therapist has to be prepared to spot, precisely because it represents what the client may not be able to spot.

But at the same time, the Existential model is one in which tangible changes and goals seem most likely to succeed. A life coach can presuppose a client base that has come in for precisely this reason, to seek change or to take action. A theoretical basis which places these mental actions front and center and makes them the primary subject of therapeutic discussion is obviously going to serve my practice well. Additionally Corey's depiction of Reality Therapy makes.