A new study published in Counselling and Psychotherapy Research finds that psychotherapy clients prefer therapists who provide insights, challenge assumptions, and adapt to their unique needs. These researchers challenge some conventional views that therapists should remain neutral observers and suggest that an active, engaged stance is central to effective therapy.
The research, led by Gina Di Malta at The Open University alongside Mick Cooper, Hanne Oddli, Joshua K. Swift, and Sarah Knox, analyzed qualitative interviews with clients receiving pluralistic psychotherapy. Their findings reveal that clients want therapists to offer perspective, engage in meaningful dialogue, and, at times, challenge their assumptions.
“I think it was more they just allowed me to talk and talk and talk, and they wouldn’t really engage with me or like question my thoughts and my reality about a certain event,” one client reported. “They would never really do that, and I don’t think it’s because they didn’t care or they weren’t being good therapists; I just think they assumed that maybe I just wanted to talk.”
An “active” therapist isn’t someone who gives homework or advice—they’re someone who deeply engages with a client’s world, helping them make sense of their emotions, relationships, and struggles. In depth-oriented and relational therapies, this means creating a space where clients can explore not just what they already know, but also what might be influencing them beneath the surface. Research suggests that clients do not necessarily find directive interventions, such as behavioral assignments, to be meaningful. Instead of offering quick fixes, an active therapist helps clients uncover new ways of understanding themselves, opening the door to lasting change beyond just symptom relief.
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MIA: what significance have any of your articles outside of the true and horrifying greater context of this insane society and a global civilization that is tearing itself apart and is thereby incapable of solving the global problems that are certain to destroy us? Are you hoping that we can turn all citizens into these so called ‘therapists’ to cope with the apocalyptic circumstances we are all in, whether we see it or not? You will not see it if you are living in a cloud of your own opinions, conclusions, assumptions and beliefs about life which constitutes your false sense of reality that distorts and perverts your perception accordingly. In any case, few of you can see clearly the omniscient and undeniable dangers all around of you, or if you can you make a good show of hiding it, but it seems you can’t see it clearly, because if you did worry you sufficiently to compel you to actually find out the true state of affairs of our planet and of humanity globally, just as a loving parent would be compelled to master the necessary medical and scientific jargon in order to find what out the nature of an illness gravely affecting their child.
America has a population which is perhaps the least interested in other countries and global affairs unless they pertain, in the estimation of the socially conditioned and therefore stupid brain, to be important to American interests. But understanding your reality is in everyone’s interests my friends, and without this understanding you are like hundreds of millions of children burdening these imaginary ‘experts’ and ‘authorities’ in charge who are supposed to know what to do with all your hopes when they too are these very confused and frightened children not knowing what to do. So in this context, we need to radically rethink the whole problem you call mental health as a total social crisis and a total crisis in human consciousness, the one expressing the other, the two actually being two dimension of one thing, which is WHAT YOU ACTUALLY ARE BEYOND WORDS. It is only in the understanding and fixing of THAT, which is what you are, your consciousness, that there is hope for anyone but it can never rescue the whole total global social process in time which is run by people who cannot and don’t want to see what is at all.
We are all in utter delusion about there being hope whatsoever in resolving the environmental and global-social problems that are certain to destroy the whole basis of human civilization globally,, because it is one total interdependent process that no one nation can steer, obviously. And of course there is no political solution to our global problems which only ever get worse, such as climate change, environmental destruction, global hunger, tyranny and instability, and the immiseration of human life as reflected in the astonishing rises of DISABILITY, not mere diagnoses, due to ‘mental illness’ in all Western countries. The Green party in every country are being intellectually dishonest, because the problem is a total global social historical process that nobody steers and nobody can steer because of nationalism, dividing humanity into competing blocks fighting each other, and the trajectory is clear, manifest and obvious: global divisions on every level are only ever increasing, creating catastrophic problems like the behaviour of Israel and Russia, and the division between Trump’s America and the rest of the world, and the fact that the project of eliminating fossil fuels is manifestly being ‘put on hold’, i.e. presently abandoned, because of all the problems produced by the total global social historical system which has shattered already the whole of a once perfect, total, living, harmonious, homeostatic system called Mother Nature into a billion sad fragments, all of which have lost many species and aren’t the same as they were before.
So Mother Nature has already been destroyed, nobody can stop it, and if you have hope based on a theoretically possible solution you don’t see that everyone has conflicting and contradictory opinions but the most predominant opinion the world over is to burry our heads in the sand and pretend other things are important.
And so we are in a car that nobody can steer and it’s heading off a cliff – this is certain. So it IS too late, and if we can’t be honest about that, our brains are as useless as chopped liver, because it can’t even face and admit to reality. Unless the Greens abandon their absurd, false and dishonest policy of there being hope, they are betrayers of the truth, and Mother Nature is that truth – that destroyed and deserted thing which we ourselves are. Don’t abandon yourselves in the final hour to comforting illusions that will only blind us when we need more then anything to see things as they are.
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One therapist sat like a bump on a stump while another couldn’t keep her goddamn mouth shut.
Then there was the idiot who insisted I keep a journal she insisted on reading.
I’ve had more fruitful encounters with total strangers.
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This is really being reported seriously for a study talking to 13 people?
I’ll add this this kind of therapy really damaged me. This is just kind faux pro psychodynamic article. Throwing shade at “endless talking” of humanists and “behavioral homework assignments” of CBTesque therapists. Without giving credence to all of these therapists are capable to being actively involved in understanding a patient’s world, and that doing so, whether a patient wants it or not, can also be harmful.
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psychiatry is mercilessly wrong judgment.
Those of you who exonerate yourself from all judgements while imposing them on others will be subject to the worse judgements obviously. Know yourself and understand the darkness within you – don’t project it onto others as judgement in order to keep for yourself the illusion of being clean. Those who suffered judgements yet refrained from judgements of others are those that justice itself would dictate should be the judges of all, including themselves, for they have discovered that others are not to blame, so will look at what is as it is. Those who judge see only their judgements, hence don’t see reality at all, but only a fiction exclusive to them. And they get angry at people who contradict it, like wild dogs during a famine. They need to be understood. All people do. Judgement is the only thing that destroys all human understanding.
All human consciousness is one. You don’t own yourselves – you are not individuals at all. You are part of a vast fabric of life. You are part of an infinitely complex and infinitely intelligent process that no human brain is capable of understanding, being but a tip of a root of the vast tree of life. But consciousness is not the human brain, and is the only reality within which the world and the human being are unreachable mysteries. You can’t touch a sensation or a thought – you can’t touch pleasure or pain, so you can’t even touch what you think you are. What you are is the miracle of seeing all this phenomena. Those who understand this are on solid foundations. Those who identify with any of the phenomena within consciousness, like thought, life, the world, possessions, hopes, dreams, ideas and relationships, those who depend on them, must one day have to lose them, because they were never the real – they are happenings within you, and because of them you no longer know who you are, and are able to be convinced that you are these socially conditioned stuffed animals, these production line human beings, these rubber toys. Only nature has health, power, intelligence and vigour, so become that. It demands that you release yourself from the intellect, the socially conditioned vampire in your head calling itself ‘me’.
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Oh yeah, and you know that manifesting thing? It’s probably a billion dollar industry in book sales and brain dead blogs and other grifts, and it goes along the lines of “if you expect a miracle, a miracle would come”, and you can insert anything you want as that miracle, and apparently this is how you manifest it. I guess nobody is expecting any really meaningful miracle hen because the whole of humanity is too busy tearing itself to pieces to care about the fact it’s torn the whole of Mother Nature to pieces and has undermined all the support foundations of our beautiful Earth, which is after all everything we know and love. You think you love your children, but if you lost the Earth and Sky you’d realize you loved them above all things, for they bore all of you and your children. They are the Mother and Father of all things. Yet we destroy our Mother and care more about our financial income or kids education or healthcare or the price of fuel more then that, all this so you can keep your fucking pig shuttles (cars) that most of you use unsparingly, cars which have destroyed your children future and often only have one stinking passenger in it. So if all weneeded to do was expect a miracle and a miracle would happen, you’d think with nearly 8 billion people on Earth we might have a solution to just one of the many problems we have. If you don’t care about Mother Earth or any life on Earth, then obviously it’s no problem. But if you care about fucking anything you ought to wake up and see we’ve got some work to do, not least destroy this runaway system that’s destroying the Earth and is owned and controlled by vampires that will abandon the population to protect themselves as the shit hits the fan and the whole world starves and burns. And we exchanged the once perfect, harmoneous, total Mother Earth which belonged to us all, which we were, and within for eons we lived free lives and we able to jump from boat into the sea and swim with dolphins in the crystal sky knowing that we were Mother Earth and death was merely like these many perfect raindrops shattering in the ground. We were the whole eternal water cycle. Now we live in dystopian nightmares of shops, offices, factories, private dwellings and land otherwise scarred by roads and farming, and the whole world was chopped up and divived off to the rich before we were even born. Obviously no human ever did or ever would consent to that, and it was OUR fucking Earth, not yours and mine. Now see what we have done, and see what irrelevance, untruth, escapism and moral irresponsibility is all this manifesting nonsense, because if it really did work, then why aren’t you manifesting some good things in the world instead of this universal and ubiquitous horror, meaninglessness, and meaningless total self-destruction as we give ourselves to and worship and vote in all the vampires that destroy us.
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There’s no substitute for the unstudied candor and ease of spontaneous conversations that occur naturally in the course of a week or even a day: no appointment, no fee, no “professional” intent on categorizing you. Just two people or more who may not even know each other’s name yet are able to see eye to eye on personal things, unafraid of being themselves instead of playing a role beats talking to a “professional” by far.
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