Favorite Counseling and Therapy Techniques

Howard G. Rosenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781138462779
• eBook ISBN: 9781135196011
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In the new edition of this highly popular book, Howard Rosenthal once again brings together a group of prominent therapists who share their insightful, pioneering, and favorite therapeutic techniques. These therapists include such well-known figures as Albert Ellis, Arnold Lazarus, William Glasser, Raymond Corsini, and Allen E. Ivey. Many of the classic entries in the previous edition are once again included, some unaltered and others updated, while several new chapters have been added to reflect the newest advancements in the counseling field. For practitioners wondering what methods to use when working with clients and what they can prescribe for them between sessions, or for those who simply are interested in gaining insight into the thoughts and minds of such eminent therapists, the more than 50 entries in this text are sure to be both highly useful and exciting reads.

Chapter 1
Serendipitous Suggestion

An Introduction to the Wonderful World of Psychotherapeutic Techniques

The aberrations of the mind, so I had always thought, were for others… . But now, as I listen from my chair behind the couch I know better. I know that my chair and the couch are separated only by a thin line. I know that it is, after all, but a happier combination of accidents that determines, finally, who shall lie on the couch, and who shall sit behind it.

Robert Lindner
The Fifty-Minute Hour (1973, p. 207)

His classmates had dubbed him the “Ape Man.” To be sure, Marty, a freshman at a local high school, struck a posture more reminiscent of the great apes than that which is the norm for the species Homo sapiens. Marty spent the better part of each day staring at the ground, rarely looking a soul in the eye, and on occasion would grunt when spoken to. Slumped over before me was an adolescent who embodied nearly every possible symptom that comes to mind when one mentions the term “inferiority complex.” Worse yet, this lad was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was exceptionally ugly. Because of this false conviction, Marty—despite the fact that he appeared totally normal and was free of any physical disabilities—walked with his upper torso bent over nearly parallel to the floor.

Though Marty probably never was eligible for any prizes of mental health, his own account (and that of his family) was that his present state of self-proclaimed inferiority escalated dramatically after he experienced an unusually embarrassing moment in front of a large number of his peers. The kids in the neighborhood, and those who attended his high school, would never let him forget it, nor would he afford himself the luxury.

When I met Marty, he informed me that one of his goals was to meet and possibly date a nice young woman. Although it might sound cruel, Marty’s personality and overall demeanor convinced me that he had about as much chance of meeting and sustaining a relationship with a nice young lady as I did of winning the lottery that day, and I hadn’t even purchased a ticket. Lest the reader get the wrong idea, I must emphasize that I had a wealth of empathy. Unfortunately, it was laced with a lethal dose of therapeutic pessimism.

Although Freud in his wisdom had made great strides with the Wolf Man and the Rat Man, my initial nondirective sessions with this client, whom the kids unmercifully had nicknamed the “Ape Man,” were anything but promising. Again and again I would ask myself what needed to transpire so that Marty could change. Finally it occurred to me that I would need to do something different, something strange—in fact, something downright drastic! And something different, something strange, something drastic I did.

I enlisted the help of my talented colleague, Amy Hilgemann. Amy and I met to plot an innovative course of therapeutic action intended to head Marty’s self-deprecating tendencies off at the pass. After extensive brainstorming, Amy and I came up with an intervention that could be implemented so swiftly that Marty would barely be aware of its existence. Like criminals scheming a bank robbery or a jewelry heist, we wanted to get in and get out quickly before Marty could consciously process and possibly negate what had transpired.

During our next session, Marty, per usual, sat bent over staring at the empty desktop that separated our chairs. Without warning, Amy came running into the room yelling, screaming, and flailing her hands in the air. Her verbalizations centered on a client who supposedly severely beat her children.

“Damn it,” I yelled, as I pounded my fist on the desk, nearly breaking the surface. My exceptionally loud belligerent comments and my forceful blow on the desktop forced Marty to sit up and take a gander at what was going on in the room. I continued, though very briefly, with my contrived tirade. “Okay,” I remarked, “I’ve had it with that lady. Call the police and have her arrested. I want her kids yanked out of the home. Now!”

As Amy turned around to exit the room, she smiled coyly and said, “Hey, is that your friend? Gosh, he’s really cute.” Marty looked perplexed. Perhaps dumbfounded would be a more accurate description. Before he could utter a single word, I interjected, “Oh, no big deal, Marty; I’m sure you hear that from women all the time.” I then changed the subject intentionally to the topic of his schoolwork.

Although only a knave, a fool, or a neophyte clinician would suggest that Marty was cured, I’ll have you know that he walked out of the session with a more optimistic attitude, and, for the first time since I had met him, he was sporting an upright posture.

I was so enthralled with the power of this technique that I dubbed the strategy “Serendipitous Suggestion” and wrote the results in an article to share my thoughts with other practitioners (Rosenthal, 1983). The physiologist Cannon (1945) had set the groundwork by using the term “serendipity” (from Horace Walpole’s fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip) to depict a research study in which a hypothesis is tested but accidentally reveals an even more valuable discovery. Likewise, I described a serendipitous suggestion as a situation in which a client expects one suggestion yet discovers another (often more valuable) suggestion in the process of attempting to perceive the first suggestion.

Six Key Reasons Why Techniques Can Enhance Your Therapeutic Effectiveness

Based on Marty’s progress and the improvement I noticed in numerous other clients using this and myriad other strategies, I became sold on the value of techniques. From that time forward, I routinely would scan scholarly works and compare notes with colleagues, searching for innovative techniques that might help when traditional interventions proved ineffective.

Creative interventions infiltrated their way into my therapy sessions. On numerous occasions, for example, I utilized paradoxical strategies urging insomniacs who routinely would awaken at a given hour in the middle of the night to set their alarm clocks to awaken themselves 20 or 30 minutes early. More often than not, these clients who had chased the sandman unsuccessfully and counted more sheep than they cared to remember would turn off the alarm, roll over, and get some sleep.

When I was working in a hospital setting, a woman who had been through endless courses of treatment exclaimed that she had experienced panic attacks every night for 6 months and challenged me to abate them. “Because of my condition, I haven’t slept a wink in ages, and I want to know what in the heck you’re going to do about it.” I decided to give her a therapeutic assignment for that very evening. I insisted that prior to the onset of her nightly attack she purposely should bring on an attack—more severe than any in the past—so that the nursing staff could monitor her physiological response. “You’re crazier than I am, Dr. Rosenthal,” she remarked. The next morning she chided me in group therapy: “You’re not half as smart as you think, Dr. Rosenthal. I couldn’t bring on an attack, and I slept like a baby.” (Crazy like a fox, I guess.) Therefore, based on my own therapeutic successes with paradox, serendipitous suggestion, and a host of other methods, I was and still am a fervent proponent of techniques. The following are six key reasons why I am convinced that techniques can improve the efficacy of your counseling and therapy sessions.

1. A technique often allows the client to surmount an impasse or sticking point. Certainly it was true in Marty’s case.

2. A technique sometimes renews the client’s interest in therapy. I remember a situation in which I was running therapy groups in a stress unit using primarily a person-centered therapy approach. One day after utilizing a host of techniques I overheard a client in the hall tell another client, “We finally did something different, and I think it really helped a lot of us.”

3. A technique or strategy offers an escape from the humdrum experience of doing the same thing session after session, a practice that, at best, shuns creativity, intimates that the human practitioner can be replaced by computer therapists or perhaps hypnotic audio programs and leaves the helper and helpee with a frightening case of déjà vu. In short, techniques add variation, creativity, or both to the psychotherapy sessions and thus can help curb burnout on the part of both parties.

4. A technique can be used as an adjunct to any brand or modality of therapy. Thus, a person-centered practitioner or a logotherapist can learn a rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) technique, implement it, and then return to his or her psychotherapeutic treatment of choice.

5. A technique is often the factor that the client insists is responsible for his or her change and remembers as the zenith, or high point, of treatment. When I worked in an inpatient and aftercare chemical dependency unit, we would administer an evaluation to determine what the client felt helped him or her the most. I was amazed—even though I already was convinced that techniques had merit—by the sheer number of clients who accredited a technique or strategy (similar to many of the interventions our experts will share with you in this text) as the primary curative factor. Certainly clients’ self-reports such as these are often inaccurate. Still, the large number of clients who mentioned a technique, strategy, or therapeutic exercise made it difficult to dismiss categorica...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editor
• Chapter 1 Serendipitous Suggestion
• Chapter 2 The Dark Side of Techniques
• Chapter 3 Techniques
• Chapter 4 Recommendations for Effectively Implementing Counseling and Therapy Techniques