The Relationship Inventory

A Complete Resource and Guide

Godfrey T. Barrett-Lennard

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781118788820
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118790724
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Written by a pioneer in person-centered therapy, this is the only resource to provide full access to the Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory (BLRI) – along with information on the instrument's history and development and supporting materials for counseling practitioners, researchers, and students.

• Provides a complete instrument for  measuring empathy in relationships, a critical component for success across a wide range of therapeutic interventions
• Charts the development and refinement of the BLRI over more than 50 years, with particular attention to the influence of Carl Rogers' theories, and outlines the future potential of the instrument
• Contains all the materials necessary for critical understanding and  application of the BRLI, including the full range of forms and adaptations, and guidelines for successful implementation
• Also presents the author's Contextual Selves Inventory (CSI), which permits direct study of the self as distinctively experienced in different relationship contexts

Part I
The Relationship Inventory:
Beginning, Fruition, Future

Chapter 1
How Change Happens: The Guidance and Refinement of Theory

Research and practice in a new field can begin in two main ways. In the first the work starts with an existing theory studied in a prior context and imported. In this case the new field is effectively treated as another application of established principles. This could be a theory of how new learning and change in behavior occurs. The theory then also helps to define the forms of practice and process in this field (psychological therapy, for example), since the practice would need to be credibly related to kinds of change predictable by and found within the theory. However, if the practice is itself shaped to accord with the theoretical principles, and its outcomes tested within the same frame of thought, there is a distinct self-confirming risk. In other words, if the theory-based scope and patterning of treatment leads to the targeted changes, this further demonstrates the principles in action but does not test whether the practice is a matching response to the whole complex phenomenon it faces. This ‘phenomenon’ may include people who are desperately working to cope while feeling divided, torn, alone, or in other mental-emotional agony, yet also with risked hope of finding a way to lift out of this pain and into a path of positive change. In any case, the first-considered kind of helping treatment is exemplified in the influential major approach briefly considered at the beginning of this chapter.

The second broad approach does not rely on a prior theory but begins with careful observation of the unfolding new phenomenon discovered through practice experience; the experience to be examined of working with troubled clients in intensive personal therapy. The close observer of whole recordings of this phenomenon could be expected to discern various distinguishable features of the process, leading perhaps to a landscape view of discriminated elements. This view may reveal regularities across different interviews and client–therapist combinations and go on to show shifts in process during therapy. Close study of subprocesses and their movement may remain a main focus through a range of studies that yield an increasingly differentiated and complete description of the phenomenon. As a result questions then naturally come into view, for example, “How does this descriptively known phenomenon work to produce or enable client change?” “What are the crucial features that mediate its effects?” A theory is then born and begins to guide further research. In contrast to the first approach this method uncovers its principles through examined practice. A major example of it, and the nature of the theory that emerged and came to fruition, occupies the latter part of this chapter. The immediate relevance is that this development triggered the 60-year history, specific instrumentation, and paths of research presented in this book.

Practitioners who draw heavily on B. F. Skinner’s work (1953, 1974) exemplify the first approach mentioned above in its application to the field of psychological therapy and related helping practice. The theory grew out of studies of animal and human learning and crystallized in the view that behavior patterns, generally, are shaped by rewards (or their absence) in an operant conditioning paradigm. In essence, people in difficulty had acquired faulty or maladaptive behavior patterns through their environmental history of learning and reinforcement of those patterns. To undo and change these patterns a helper would need to properly understand how they continue to work and to engage with the client to introduce a scheme of rewards that reinforce any appearances of desired alternative patterns and avoid any rewards for the maladaptive ones – so that the former (at least in theory) come to predominate and the latter fall away or are “extinguished.” The process first referred to as “behavior modification” as applied, for example, in institutions for delinquent or wayward youngsters ¹ or for people with phobias or compulsions, came to be called behavior therapy in its applications in the clinical field.

In principle the approach is pragmatically appealing. It implies that helpful change is an inevitable and almost automatic process when it arises from an exacting and consistent focus on observable and reinforcing behavior, ‘undistracted’ by complex mental processes or the inner life of the client. This radical behavior analytic approach based strictly on associative and operant action learning emerged as a mode of helping in the early 1960s, and has continued to be a strong background influence in behavior therapies. Not surprisingly, however, the original or “pure” forms have been largely supplanted. Prominent exponents such as Bandura (1969, 1977), Beck (1976), and Wolpe (1973), while subscribing to experimentally based learning models of change, shifted attention from an exclusive focus on observable behavior to an included emphasis on inner cognitions and to consideration of rewards as social phenomena. In the 1970s the major shift to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) gave room for inner assumptive thought and self-instructive conversations to be seen and treated as having vital relevance in human difficulties, and also for clients to have a greater role in their own change.

CBT practice is now very varied (see O’Donahue & Fisher, 2009) and was becoming more varied by the 1980s (Rimm & Cunningham, 1985). There is a broad zeitgeist, however, that therapists are expert guides, and that the detection of reinforcers and training replacement of maladaptive thought-feeling messages and behaviors remain defining features in accepted mainstream work. Discovery of deeper-lying or “core” cognitive schemas seen as masterminding automatic thought patterns and assumptions also can be a major focus (Riso, Pieter, Stein, & Young, 2007). Indicative chapter titles in O’Donahue and Fisher’s (2009) comprehensive edited volume include: “Anger (negative impulse) control,” “Cognitive restructuring of the disputing of irrational beliefs,” “Differential reinforcement of low-rate behavior,” “Contingency management interventions,” “Response chaining,” “Emotion regulation,” “Habit reversal training,” “Multimodal behavior therapy,” “Self-management,” “Shaping,” “Stress inoculation training,” and “Systematic desensitization.”

Alongside the formidable almost surgical language there is significant and growing awareness in CBT circles of the importance of responsive sensitivity and quality of the therapist–client relationship, quite often in terms, or language at least, that borrow from the permeating influence of Carl Rogers’ work (see also Chapter 2). The attention to the relationship is largely viewed as necessary for effective communication and problem understanding and as a pre-condition for the right choice and effective use of research-based change-inducing techniques. The belief in a reliable, strong research base underpinning CBT is, though, by no means universal (‘inside’ critique by Follette, Darrow, & Bonow, 2009, p. 58). Bohart and House (2008), for example, examine and deconstruct the evidence base and assumptive paradigm underlying an “empirically supported/validated treatment” approach (exemplified in mainstream CBT), concluding that it is out of keeping with the very complex working of human consciousness and behavior. Certainly, the learning theory based retraining stance and most associated practice as formally described stands in contrast to the second approach exemplified in Carl Rogers’ thought and ‘person-centered’ practice.

Rogers, a practicing psychologist through the 1930s, was knowledgeable regarding the psychotherapies of the time, relatively eclectic in his leaning, and pragmatic in his concern for the practical outcomes of his work with problem children and (in lesser focus) their parents. Exposure to practical ideas associated with the responsive-relational emphasis of Otto Rank and his colleagues (see, e.g., Rank, 1936/1945; Taft, 1933) encouraged and contributed to Rogers’ directions, as did his early years of practice experience (Barrett-Lennard, 1998, pp. 6–9; Rogers, 1939). He saw an active potential in people toward developmental growth and change and came to the view that effective therapy hinged on the quality of the relationship between client and therapist in order to release this potential (Rogers, 1942, 1946). Therapeutic change, then, was not a matter of directed retraining (though self-discovery learning could be vital) but of providing an environment in which the client’s own recuperative tendencies and motivation in the presence of an enabling relationship would bring about integrative shifts leading to growth. These were still broad principles and years of further thoughtful searching was needed for their systematic working out. The existence of bright enquiring graduate students (1940 on) at Ohio State and then the University of Chicago, and Roger’s intensive experience as a therapist, alongside focused study of recorded process, flowed into the continuing development of his perspective on the process and outcomes of therapy.

The research began with several years devoted mainly to close descriptive study of the interview conversation over the course of therapy (Raskin, 1949; Barrett-Lennard, 1998, pp. 234–238). This emphasis on process and its regularity of pattern lead on to a significant period where concern centered on establishing the outcomes of this process empirically. Was the therapy, in fact, effective in terms of measurable helpful changes in client functioning and outlook from before to after therapy? Positive results on this level then opened the way to an explanatory focus on just how these valued directions of change come about and, more specifically, what the change-enabling features were in the therapy relationship. Even before systematic attention to this third phase of research, Rogers was reflecting on and periodically articulating therapist attitudes (such as respect, a nondirective stance, and belief in inherent growth forces) that he thought permitted and enabled fruitful process and change in clients. As in these examples, his ideas were at first quite broadly expressed, and it took another decade and more for his view to sharply focus and mature into a distinct theory of change. A new theory may burst into clear view suddenly, but its full meaning hinges on the progression of enquiry and thought that resulted in this emergence – as I am briefly tracing in this instance. ²

By the mid-1940s Rogers was actively reaching for a general explanatory formulation evidenced in an article he contributed to the first volume of the American Psychologist (Rogers, 1946). He began there to use the language of “conditions” of therapist attitude and behavior and proposed six such conditions. These were: that therapists view their clients, first, as self-responsible; and, second, as inherently motivated toward development and health; that they create a warm, permissive, accepting atmosphere; that any limits set on behavior do not apply to attitudes and feelings; that they respond with a “deep understanding of the emotionalized attitudes expressed,” especially through “sensitive reflection and clarification of the client’s attitudes”; and that they abstain from probing, blaming, interpreting, reassuring, or persuading. Moreover, “if these conditions are met” then healing and a growthful process will be reflected within therapy and in an awareness and behavior beyond therapy (Rogers, 1946, pp. 416–417). Although this was a practical formulation compatible in broad direction with the six conditions that he distinguished a decade later, it assembled a diverse mix of ingredients on varied levels. The aspects of “deep understanding” and of a “warm, accepting atmosphere” foreshadow later distinctions in idea though not yet in sharp focus or definition.

The 1946 statement was, however, a systemizing step beyond the vivid account of practice in Rogers’ influential 1942 book. Both sources imply a feature that another colleague went on to further elucidate. Raskin (a former student of Rogers) singled out a genuinely nondirective attitude as pivotal in the approach, arguing that it underpinned true acceptance and created the potential for understanding in depth (Raskin, 1948, pp. 105–106). In a further important paper, Rogers spoke with cogent eloquence about the difficulty and importance of entering and holding a mirror to the client’s inner feelings...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Part I: The Relationship Inventory
• Part II: The Journeying Self in Personal and Group Relations
• Part III: Reframing
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• References
• Indexa
• About the Companion Website
• End User License Agreement