What is Therapeutic Relationship? Why is it important?
The existence of a relationship between doctor and patient was discovered by Hippocrates and defined as the key to healing. The therapeutic relationship is a special relationship established between the client and the therapist, unlike the relationships we establish in our daily lives. This relationship appears as a unique, comprehensive and complex process that involves an interaction in which the attitudes and personalities of the parties are undeniably influential. In this context, the therapeutic relationship is a professional and structured form of relationship based on certain theoretical concepts ; It is very important for a client to open up to his therapist, to express himself comfortably and freely, and to trust him, in order for the therapy process to begin and continue in a healthy way.
What is Therapeutic Relationship?
The therapeutic relationship is among the most determining factors that reveal the quality of therapy for the client and therapist during the therapy process. This relationship is a professional relationship. It is equipped with certain ethical rules, has privacy and certain boundaries, and is placed within the framework of ethical rules. It contains important elements that are essential to comply with and need to be taken into consideration. First of all, the focus of this relationship framework is on certain rules of therapy. It is important that the time period for therapy is determined in advance, that the meeting takes place in a suitably designed therapy room, and that the therapy environment is free of distracting and disturbing items and objects.
During the therapy process, which is a professional job, the principle of confidentiality is carefully observed. The therapist cannot have a friendly or friendly relationship with his client during the counseling process. At the same time, the therapist cannot perform therapy with relatives, close friends, or people with whom he or she frequently meets in social life. These ethical rules create the boundaries of the therapeutic relationship process and prevent the process from being damaged. A healthy therapeutic relationship ; It is achieved by fulfilling many factors such as a suitable environment, compliance with the rules of therapy, empathy, openness to information sharing, and a good knowledge of psychopathology.
Contact us for online and face-to-face solutions for Erdem Psychiatry Clinic, Ankara Psychiatry Clinic , which offers a professional client-therapist relationship .
What are Therapeutic Communication Techniques?
In order for people to begin the therapy process with intense emotions such as fear, grief, mourning and anger, and to continue the process and benefit from this process, the therapist’s communication with his patient must have different qualities than the communication he establishes with other people. Therapeutic skills can be called communication techniques used by the therapist for the emotional and psychological well-being of the client. Now let’s examine these therapeutic communication skills together.
1. Paying Close Attention:
The therapist conveys that he respects the client as a human being and cares about what the client says. Close attention is crucial to increasing the client’s self-confidence and creating a safe therapy environment.
2. Open Invitation to Conversation:
It is the therapist’s ability to ask open-ended questions. With these questions, an attempt is made to ensure that the client opens himself up, understands himself, and expresses himself. Open-ended questions focus around the client’s concerns, feelings, and thoughts.
3. Minimum Incentive:
The therapist talks less and the client is encouraged to talk. With this technique, after the client starts speaking, the therapist enables the client to continue speaking by using certain keywords.
4. Mirroring the Content:
This therapeutic communication skill is characterized as restatement. This technique serves to check whether the client’s thoughts are correctly understood by the therapist, to crystallize the ideas by expressing them more clearly, and to convey that the therapist is trying to understand the client’s feelings and thoughts.
5. Focus:
Sometimes during therapy the client talks about something particularly important. When this happens, the therapist can focus on the client’s statements and encourage the client to talk more about that topic.
6. Summarizing:
This skill is used at the end of the sessions, at the beginning of the session to remind the previous session or when moving from one topic to another. Summarizing is the combination of reflecting emotions and content.
7. Silence:
Silence is sometimes the best communication. When used appropriately, this therapeutic communication technique is very useful for the client to process what has been said in his mind, to collect it, to assimilate it, and to become aware of some of his feelings and thoughts.
What are the Components of Therapeutic Communication?
Psychotherapy can be described as exploring the client’s inner world and increasing his awareness of himself and the world. Through the therapy process, the individual is tried to gain the ability to look at his/her feelings, thoughts and behaviors from an outside perspective. In this professional journey, certain conditions must be met and these conditions must come together in order for the therapist to create a therapeutic effect . These therapeutic conditions are also called therapeutic components and can be listed as follows:
Empathy:
Empathy is the ability to perceive and understand the intensity of the other person’s emotions. There are two aspects to empathy. To understand the meaning of what the client says and to convey the client’s feelings to him/her. In other words, it is the therapist’s ability to look at the events through the client’s eyes and understand what the client feels. Therapeutic skills , while empathizing, depend not only on the verbal reactions of the client; It also requires paying attention to your posture, speaking tempo, tone of voice, gestures and facial expressions.
Respect:
Respect; It is the acceptance that the client is free in his thoughts, feelings and actions as a separate person within the framework of the therapeutic relationship and this situation is conveyed to him by the therapist. No matter who your client is; Whether rich or poor, black or white, religious or non-religious, is accepted with tolerance.
Transparency:
Transparency; It means honesty, sincerity, truthfulness. Just like a glass, when you look at it from one side, you can see the other side. When viewed from the perspective of the therapeutic relationship , it contains some fine details and has two sides. The first is to be aware of the emotions experienced and to communicate them if appropriate. It should not be forgotten that it will not be appropriate to convey the message if the person who will receive the message is not ready for it. In other words, conveying some things that the client is not yet ready to hear for the sake of transparency would not be transparency, but disrespect.
Being Concrete:
This therapeutic condition can be described as the therapist motivating and encouraging the client to express specific, specific feelings, values and thought problems instead of general conversations.
The Now and Here of the Relationship:
It is the interaction between the client and the therapist at that moment in the therapeutic relationship . The here and now of the relationshipis crucial to therapeutic communication . Because the client’s relationship with the therapist is a reflection of other social relationships and interactions. In other words, the client’s behavior in therapeutic interaction generally reflects his/her relationship with people in the outside world.
Self-Disclosure:
In the therapy environment , within the framework of the therapeutic relationship ; Self-disclosure is defined as the therapist sharing about his/her own life and feelings in order for the client not to feel alone and to gain insight. When the therapist uses this method, he conveys to the client that he is not a superhuman being and that he can have positive or negative emotions like the client.
How to Perform Therapeutic Communication in Special Situations?
The critical component of all successful services is communication skills. A doctor can effectively convey information and instructions to interlocutors such as teachers, nurses, etc. with therapeutic communication skills. For example, in recent years, the concept of therapeutic play has become very popular in pediatric clinics in order to overcome negative emotions such as fear and anxiety experienced by pediatric patients in the hospital, to relieve children’s tension, reduce pain, and communicate more effectively with them .
Therapeutic communication is among the most critical tools that help a therapist better understand their client through verbal and nonverbal communication and encourage patients to express their feelings and ideas freely. The client can feel safe, believe that he is listened to and understood, open himself up and enter the healing process only when a therapeutic relationship is established with the client and therapeutic skills are applied effectively.
As Erdem Psychiatry, we convey therapeutic communication skills to you in a quality and professional manner with our colleagues who are experts in their fields.
