By Allyson Burke


Psychotherapy refers to the dynamic between a patient and the person who is treating them. Relational psychotherapy focuses on the role of the patient's relationships when treating mental disorders. It is still a fairly new strand of psychoanalysis but considered to be a very important development.

It was originally used around thirty years ago and attempted to show the importance of a person's internal relationship to the outside world. Advocates of the treatment said that our personalities are shaped by the relationships we had when we were very young, including members of our family and others who came into our lives.

Relational theories depart from most our areas of psychotherapy because it doesn't view a person's instincts as the main driver for their actions. Freud believed that instincts were rooted deep within us and were not shaped by experience. Advocates of relational therapy believe that we are driven by the friendships we would like to have with others. In addition, they believe that we try to reconstruct the relationships from our childhood in order to satisfy our wants.

Psychoanalysts employing relational methods often reject Freud's use of free association. As an alternative, they put their effort into building a good rapport with their patients. They think that psychotherapy is most effective when the relationship with the patient is a healing one. As a result, they think that they can help by breaking the patient's habits.

Therapists who use this technique, study their client's relationships which leave them feeling bad about themselves. They try to find patterns of behavior which mirror an earlier time in the patient's life. These earlier relationships are then studied in order to understand how they impacted the patient's view of the world and of themselves.

It is usually connected to social constructionism. This is the concept that we do not create our understanding of the world alone but with other people. There are two crucial parts to it. Firstly, that we make sense of our experiences by building a model of how we assume the world functions. Secondly, that language is the primary means by which we construct our reality.

A lot of people who would like to have better quality relationships. They engage in therapy because they hope it will help them remove the problems they're having. They believe that their happiness is being ruined by stressful friendships. Lots of therapists suggest that trying to find help is a very courageous step to take because it means you are facing up to your issues. Six to eight sessions is what they recommend as the minimum to find out whether this treatment works for you.

The bond a client has with their analyst is crucial in relational psychotherapy. The client's issues need to be correctly understood otherwise the treatment will have no effect. One problem can be that the treatment becomes dominated by the therapist's agenda rather than the client's. That's why there needs to be an environment of trust. For certain people, the therapy doesn't help so they go and look for other kinds of treatment, often this might include more traditional Freudian techniques.




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