Self-disclosure has been defined as: “the personal disclosure or disclosure of information related to reactions or responses towards the client that arise from the therapist during the session”, that is, these are interventions in which the psychologist talks openly about facts about the client. your biography or what is being discussed in the session. Clarify that self-disclosure always has a therapeutic purpose, otherwise it is simply a matter of relief on the part of the therapist. Depending on the psychotherapy model, self-disclosures are something that has been censored, framed, or encouraged.
Thus, the most orthodox psychoanalysts classify self-revelation within what they call “countertransference”, understanding it as the process in which the psychologist projects his own feelings onto the other, thus breaking the purpose of being a blank canvas, a neutral figure, in which the patient can project his unconscious conflicts, which therefore requires neutrality on the part of the psychoanalyst. While it is true that Kohut, a famous psychoanalyst, criticized this role of distant experience and proposed a close experience in the psychotherapist-patient relationship that can give more room to this type of interventions, to fundamentally promote the empathetic climate and openness of the patient to receive the interpretations.
Sometimes, patients are very engrossed in their narrative or perception of things, and seeing them from a distance in a foreign situation helps them function in different ways.
Cognitive-behavioral therapies consider self-disclosure as something useful and especially focused on the functions of reinforcement and modeling in the face of certain therapeutic techniques. For Goldfried or Hill and Knox, the psychologist who works from this framework usually uses self-disclosure to express his opinion about the patient’s adherence or development with certain techniques “I think you are doing very well” “you seem very brave to me”… or to narrate one’s own experiences in which there is a modeling of ways of interpreting a reality or ways of acting. Sometimes patients are very engrossed in their narrative or perception of things, and seeing them from a distance in a foreign situation helps them function in different ways. Ellis also points to them as a way to create “rapport” and mutual learning about how to cope with common problems.
For humanistic psychotherapies, self-disclosure becomes one of the pillars of the intervention, either because from a Rogerian approach it is one of the therapist’s attitudes essential for change or because from the Gestalt perspective it is understood that the psychotherapist’s sympathy provides validity. ecological to the intervention, since the psychologist is not alien to the experiential process of psychotherapy. Self-disclosure can also be a corrective emotional experience, in which the patient perceives in the figure of the therapist an adaptive emotional response that he did not receive when he needed it, for example, a patient who tells a story of abuse in which no one protected him, feeling that his pain does not matter to anyone, and the psychotherapist confesses that he feels anger towards the person who abused him, helping to give the patient what he needed as a preliminary step to self-support.
This has been one of the great debates in psychotherapy. Those who are in favor of self-revelations postulate that it is evident that the psychologist feels and vibrates in the therapeutic relationship, and that the contents of the topics discussed connect him with aspects of his own biographical history, which, given that it is impossible not to feel towards the other, the best thing is to put it on the table and treat it honestly, using it as another therapeutic tool. There are also frequent arguments about reciprocity in human relationships, so it is difficult to ask a patient to open up enormously and tell all their intimacy to a professional, if they do not at least do it a little too.
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Another of the great arguments in favor of this type of intervention is in favor of empathy and the creation of a good patient-psychologist therapeutic alliance. Self-disclosures help the therapist perceive himself as a more human and close figure. Some even question the usefulness and ecological validity (non-office application and generability) of a relationship in which one of the members does not express her feelings, something that does not occur in the patient’s real relationships in the outside world.
The detractors of self-disclosure, on the other hand, postulate that the therapist must appear objective, preventing his own emotions or distortions from emerging, since the patient turns to the professional as an expert and wants to learn from his greater technical and scientific knowledge. On the other hand, they believe that the role of the psychologist’s expert, in whom the patient places their trust, can be diminished if the most human part of the psychotherapist appears in therapy, which can remove part of that expert effect, which they consider beneficial for the treatment. .
It is evident that the psychologist feels and vibrates in the therapeutic relationship
They also point out that, in order to generate new ways of functioning, new forms of relationships are needed, hence the contribution of the psychologist not expressing data about his or her personal life or feelings. Others also add that with self-disclosures there is a risk that the psychotherapist is the one who seeks to vent his own discomfort, or that the patient begins to ask questions about his life and the focus of the sessions moves away from the problems that concern the patient. . Self-disclosure may also involve the risk that the patient will disapprove of some of the therapist’s disclosures, leading to a breakdown in the therapeutic alliance and trust in the psychologist as a qualified professional to help with their problems.
Research on self-disclosures in psychotherapy
Therapeutic Alliance. Orlinsky, Grawe and Parks demonstrated after reviewing 132 investigations the existence of great consistency between the use of self-disclosure and the establishment of a better therapeutic alliance. This is important, because as Lambert demonstrated and has been confirmed in subsequent research, the Therapeutic Alliance is the greatest predictor of psychotherapy success and the greatest explanatory variable in patient change, ahead of the technique (36%-15 %).
Other research by Teyber indicates that self-disclosure reduces the level of anxiety regarding the therapy situation itself or that, as Beitman and Yue demonstrated, it is particularly useful for achieving the involvement in therapy of more reactive patients.
But not only does it seem to influence the involvement or tranquility in the therapy, but both long-term and short-term therapies are more successful when there are self-disclosures, as postulated by several investigations. Noteworthy among these are those of Barret and Berman who point out that if during the first four sessions there are self-disclosures as a reaction to information revealed by the patient, this leads to a reduction in symptoms.
Long-term and short-term therapies are more successful when there are self-disclosures
However, in the area where there seems to be more solid research on the effectiveness of self-disclosures, it is in the patient’s perception of the competence and closeness of the figure of the psychologist or the influence of self-disclosure on the success of the therapy. .
Thus, patients usually point out self-disclosures as very beneficial for the effect of psychotherapy or that psychologists who used self-disclosures tended to be perceived as more human and real, but above all as more empathetic, credible and expert.
It also seems that a good alliance modulates the usefulness of self-disclosures, thus when the alliance is strong, the self-disclosures made the patients perceive the sessions as more profound and helpful and the psychologist as more expert; when the alliance was negative, the results They were contrary.
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Bibliography
- Barret, MS, Berman, JS (2001) “Is psychotherapy more effective when therapist disclose information about themselves?” Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology.
- Ellis, A. (2001) Rational and irrational aspects of countertransference. In Session/Journal of Clinical Psychology.
- Goldfried, MR et al 2003) Therapist Self-Disclosure in Cognitive-Behavior Therapy. New York: Wiley InterSciencie.
- Hill, CE Knox, S (2002) Self-disclosure. In JC Norcross. Psychotherapy relationships that work. New York: Oxford.
- Knox S, Hess S, Petersen, DA, Hill, CE (1997) “A qualitative analysis of client perceptions of the effects of helpful therapist self-disclosure in long-term therapy.” Journal of Counseling Psychology.
- Kohut, H. (1959). Introspection, empathy, and psychoanalysis: An examination of the relationship between mode of observation and theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
- Orlinsky, D., Grawe, K., Parks, K., (1994) “Process and outcome in psychotherapy”. In AE Bergins & SL Garfield (Eds.) Handbook of psychotherapy and behavior change (4th ed. Pp 270-378) New York: Wiley.
- Sanchez, S. (2011) “Effects of therapist self-disclosure on the therapeutic alliance and client satisfaction.” Thesis. San Francisco University of Quito.
- Teyber, E. (1991) Interpersonal process in psychotherapy: a guide for clinical training. (2nd ed) Homewood, IL. Dorsey Press.