Commentary: On Wisdom

Psychotherapy Research, 2014

Objective: This research study explores the concept of clinical wisdom. Method: Seventeen psychologists who were nominated multiple times by their peers as wise clinicians participated in an interview on clinical wisdom, analyzed using grounded-theory methods. Results: Participants described clinical wisdom as accepting that the best answers to clients' problems often were not immediately accessible and instead using their sense of their clients, their theory of psychotherapy, and their own experiences of adversity, diversity, and intimate relationships to help clients explore the ambiguities and vulnerabilities they experienced to craft idiosyncratic answers. Conclusions: An understanding of clinical wisdom is put forward, characterized by markers and principles for practice, to guide therapy processes within therapists' intentionality and direct research on common factors.

2014

The counselor’s wisdom, expressed through the self-of- the-counselor, will potentially transform the counseling relationship. The purpose of this phenomenological pilot study was to define wisdom from the counselor’s perspective and describe the lived experience of wisdom in the therapeutic working alliance. Several descriptive themes emerged as distinct aspects of the wisdom of the counselor; a reflective attitude, the ability to gain insight from experience, emotional intelligence, cognitive ability, real-world skills, and concern for others. The holistic description of wisdom which materialized has important implications for counselor education and supervision, since it can be intentionally incorporated into counselor training programs from admission, to training and evaluation.

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2000

Objective: This research study explores the concept of clinical wisdom. Method: Seventeen psychologists who were nominated multiple times by their peers as wise clinicians participated in an interview on clinical wisdom, analyzed using grounded-theory methods. Results: Participants described clinical wisdom as accepting that the best answers to clients' problems often were not immediately accessible and instead using their sense of their clients, their theory of psychotherapy, and their own experiences of adversity, diversity, and intimate relationships to help clients explore the ambiguities and vulnerabilities they experienced to craft idiosyncratic answers. Conclusions: An understanding of clinical wisdom is put forward, characterized by markers and principles for practice, to guide therapy processes within therapists' intentionality and direct research on common factors.

Psychotherapy research : journal of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, 2017

To explore the nature of professional wisdom, through learning from the experiences of a group of highly experienced senior therapists. Twelve senior psychotherapists took part in qualitative in-depth interviews about their professional role and their views around a range of aspects of therapy theory and practice. Interview transcripts were subjected to thematic analysis. The analysis yielded nine wisdom themes, clustered within three domains. Each domain represented efforts to resolve dilemmas arising from the experience of being a therapist, around the use of theory in psychotherapy practice, the type of therapeutic relationship that is most helpful for clients, and the experience of therapeutic failure. Therapist wisdom can be viewed as a form of contextualized knowledge, which functions as a source of emergent insights that arise as responses to the limitations of prevailing ways of thinking. Research into the nature of therapist wisdom draws attention to sources of knowledge wi...

Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 1991

The research-clinical practice connection is weak in family therapy. Some have argued, in an inordinate ideological and political tone, that traditional research methods are inappropriate for family therapy. This position mischaracterizes modern day clinical researchers and research. I n presenting 10 key dimensions of the research-clinical practice issue in family therapy, this paper addresses some of these misrepresentations. If research and practice are to interact more productively, a major commitment, the scope and implications of which have not yet been realized, will need to be made. Actualizing the research-practice link is a training problem and a fundamental professional issue. Progress in this realm would change the particulars of clinical practice as we know it. These processes will involve nothing less than remaking the culture of family therapy. PRELUDE I celebrated Haynes Johnson's recent book, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years (1991), for two reasons. First, it was a remarkably insightful narrative of 8 unfortunate years in our nation's history. Not only did it illuminate some distressing themes for this decade of our lives, but it also provided a fitting analogy for the subtext of this paper. Of course positive illusions help us cope and creative selfdeceptions are particularly adaptive when one is threatened with adversity (Taylor, 1989). However, I must admit that in recent years I have become afraid that we in family therapy are somehow, following Mr. Johnson, sleepwalking through history. The subject of this paper concerns every family therapist. The topic influences how we see ourselves and how others view us. It touches every supervisor, teacher, and student. Our response to this matter, which thus far has been diversionary and irresponsible, will shape the future of family therapy. Simply stated: What should be the role of research, and more basically, empirical values, in the practice of our everyday clinical work? There are two components to this question. The first concerns how basic research on psychological, social, and physiological processes should be utilized by family therapy.

2011

The therapeutic working alliance has been identified as the most important factor in the outcome of counseling. The therapeutic working alliance is the relationship between the client and the counselor. It is the context in which the counselor builds hope, collaborates on treatment goals and uses selected treatment approaches to best meet the needs of the client. Scholars have suggested that the counselor\u27s personal characteristics contribute to the therapeutic working alliance. Further, researchers have identified wisdom traits as a set of cognitive, affective, and reflective personal characteristics that are interactive, as well as both interpersonal and intrapersonal, which are beneficial in counseling. Wisdom traits can be organized by six conceptual categories; cognitive ability, insight, reflective attitude, concern for others, real-world skills, and emotional intelligence. Based on the review of literature, it is speculated that wisdom traits related to the person of the c...

Journal of Adolescence

A 1.5-Order Therapy: Between knowing and not-knowing, 2023

This clinically based article explores how experienced family therapists' practice may evolve and oscillate between knowing and not-knowing positions and how this plays out in the therapy room. People seeking therapy benefit from a feeling that the therapist "knows what s/he is doing" and that they are in good hands, which for many years has, for many, meant a collaborative approach where we explore meanings and possible change with people in ways we have called "conversational" and where objective truth and traditional meanings are eschewed. While exploring and respecting the ways in which clients make sense of their lives, I posit that our experience and learning afford us knowledge which sometimes escape people who seek our

Journal of Family Therapy, 2002

2002

Expanding the treatment system from the individual to the couple or family carries with it some unique challenges and fundamental clinical dilemmas for the marital and family therapist. Marital and couple therapy is explored with a focus on the dilemmas that dyadic relationships bring to the treatment context. The couple's "central relationship dynamic" is discussed as a way of distilling the sources of disharmony in an intimate relationship to the emotional concerns most relevant to treatment. The dilemma of therapeutic technique that is omnipresent in all forms of couple therapy is the distribution of the therapist's confrontation and support among the partners. This issue is elucidated in light of the role that the therapist occupies within the family and treatment hierarchies. Finally, the dilemmas involving the balance of relational power in the couple, the attribution of responsibility and blame, the question of family loyalties, and the balance of therapeutic "art" in an age of "science" and empirically validated treatments are also examined. (Contains 80 references.)