Bringing Psychotherapy to Life Through Caring Connections

by Jon G Allen The health care system privileges specialized therapies designed to treat psychiatric disorders, but many patients want to talk freely about troubles in their lives, and therapists want to enable them do so. This common interest requires a sense of safety promoted by a caring relationship. The first part of the book includes an evidence-based critique of short-term therapies bearing scientific credentials that dominate the field. Do we really need hundreds of them? Meanwhile, a half-century of research attests to the overriding importance of the therapeutic relationship and therapists' interpersonal skills. Our humanity looms large here; science's majesty does not entitle it to a monarchy. Cognitive-behavior therapy is too narrow; we should give full weight to the value of emotional experience and nonverbal connection in therapy and in life. The philosophical shift advocated in the first part of the book includes a view of psychotherapy as ethical-moral work, setting the stage for an ethic of care explicated in the second part of the book. This ethic entails creating caring connections. The book integrates infant research with attachment theory and relational psychoanalytic perspectives to elucidate the development of a capacity to care. Therapists foster reciprocal emotional connections through attention, empathy, and recognition. Verbal and nonverbal connections play coequal roles. Much of care lies beyond words, from infancy onward. Conversational in tone and sufficiently broad in scope to apply to therapists in many professional disciplines, Bringing Psychotherapy to Life Through Caring Connections illuminates the common elements that form the experience of connection in psychotherapy and beyond—experience that is essential to flourishing in life.