The Responsive Therapist
How do we teach providers to be radically responsive?
This Substack project, The Responsive Therapist, aims to explore the intersection of psychopathology, case conceptualization and treatment, and most importantly, how to offer effective, responsive psychotherapy.
As a psychotherapist and teacher of therapy graduate students, I think a lot about how to best support other therapists to be more effective in their practice.
Most clinicians early in their career are told that offering evidence-based therapy modalities to their clients will help them feel better. And while focusing on technique is in many ways easier to teach, it leaves out an empirically supported reality: outcome variance for effective therapists is more likely related to therapist characteristics than any particular therapy model. In particular, the domains of relational attunement, warmth, confidence, humor, and flexible responsiveness to the individual patient really matter.