RE-CONSTRUCTIVE THERAPY – AN OVERVIEW

INTRODUCTION:

Psychotherapy is the technique that facilitates or allows people to modify their feelings, attitudes, and beliefs. Psychotherapy often engages a range of strong emotions, is typically kept more private than other experiences, and is really to be found in people’s future about how they envision their lives unfolding. People seek therapy when something has occurred that resist incorporation into their existing self-story which makes that story problematic in some way.

LEVEL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY:

1)  SUPPORTIVE THERAPY:

Supportive psychotherapy aims to reduce or to relieve the intensity of manifestation or presenting symptoms, distress, or disability. It also reduces the extent of behavioral disruption caused by patients’ psychic conflicts or disturbances.

This therapy has been used for patients suffering from a severe case of addiction as well as stress and other mental illnesses. It may be needed briefly or for years or over a period of a month. The therapist reinforces the clients existing coping mechanism. 

2)  RE-EDUCATIVE THERAPY:

A form or stage of psychotherapy in which the patient is taught or, better allowed to learn to himself more effective ways of dealing with problems and relationships. It can be effective only by modifying the patient’s feelings and reactions. The patient gradually learns how to handle a social situation, marital, or occupational problem that has caused stress and anxiety. Examples of this type of therapy include short-term, solution-oriented, reality, cognitive restructuring, and behavior modification.

3)  RE-CONSTRUCTIVE THERAPY:

Re-constructive therapy is contrasted with supportive therapy and it is also distinguished from re-educative therapy. However, the line between the three approaches is not a sharp one, since supportive and re-educative therapy may have a constructive effect and the re-constructive approach always contains supportive and re-educative components. In this therapy, the relief of symptoms is indirectly achieved since it comes about through a revision or reorganization of the patient’s basic attitudes toward himself as well as his relationship with other people.

According to the dictionary, re-constructive therapy is a form of therapy, such as psychoanalysis that seek not only to alleviate symptoms but also to produce alternations in maladaptive character structure and to expedite new adoptive potentials; this aim is achieved by bringing into consciousness and awareness of insight into conflicts, fears, inhibition, and their manifestation. 

It may be required two to five years of therapy and delves into all aspects of clients’ life. Emotional and cognitive restructuring of the self-take place.

Re-constructive psychotherapy is directed toward basic and extensive modification of an individual’s character structure by enhancing his/her insight into personality development and adaptive responses.

TYPES:

1. Freudian psychoanalysis.
2. Neo Freudian and non-Freudian psychoanalysis.
3. The ‘Individual Psychology’ of Alfred Adler.
4. The ‘Analytical Psychology’ of Carl Jung.

Positive outcomes include the following:

1. A greater understanding of self and others.
2. More emotional freedom.
3. Development of potential abilities.
4. Heightened capacity for love and work

NATURE:

1.   The re-constructive style of therapy contains many of the conventional characteristics of psychotherapy in which the counselor focuses on manifest and dynamic content. Manifest content refers to the client’s overt expression – his verbal communication and that aspect of behavior that can be seen – (his expressive movements, postures, initial reactions, and personal mannerisms). Dynamic content is essentially influential – the inferred forces that are presumably purposive for the behavior observed, for example, hostility, fear, guilt, or depression.

2.   The goal of re-constructive therapy, through identifying manifest content and dynamic content is to reshape the client’s learned behavior pattern of coping with non-productive problems.

3.   The re-constructive style of therapy is systematic, discriminating, and objective. The style is systematic in that it has an opening, a middle and an end, contains the following characteristics:

• The counselor makes implicit assumptions.
• The counselor focuses on the dynamics of past events.
• The counselor makes explicit references to that feeling.
• The counselor relates emotions and feelings to the present situation.
• The counselor becomes a supportive person

4.   Re-constructive therapy is non-directive. The client allows and encourages them to verbally express himself.

5.   The effect of re-constructive style on the client was determined by analyzing verbal data, specified by the six dependent variables:

1. Interpretation.
2. Probing.
3. Clarification.
4. Restatement.
5. Reflection.
6. Summarization.

CONCEPTS:

The re-constructive style can be operationalized with the use of the following techniques:

1. Interpretation.
2. Probing.
3. Clarification.
4. Restatement.
5. Reflection.
6. Summarization

 These procedures have been characterized and operationalized by others (Zimmer et al, 1970; Snyder, 1947; Brammer, and Shostrom, 1960).

1. INTERPRETATION:

An interpretation is operationally characterized as a strategy whereby the counselor associates two client’s proclamations together which have been expressed by a client during any session. Interpretations are by and large statementing which connects or clarifies observations.

2. PROBING:

A probe operationally characterized as a method that accommodates an assessment of counselor speculation, identified with a client’s correspondence. Prob is by and large inquiries that inspire additional information from the client.

3. CLARIFICATION:

A clarification is operationally characterized as a strategy that accommodates the repetition of a formerly equivocal or clashing assertion. Clarification proclamations repeat the client’s statement yet suggesting, utilizing explicit action words or inflections, that there is some doubt or question concerning the counselor regarding the significance of the client remarks. The assertions will be an open-ended comment.

4. RESTATEMENT:

A restatement is operationally characterized as a procedure whereby the counselor brings content from the counselee’s previous experience to hold up under upon new content being by and by examining. Restatements will coordinate the counselee’s assertions in a period viewpoint proclamation about past sentiments and behavior to present behavior and emotions.

5. REFLECTION:

A reflection is operationally characterized as a method whereby the counselor repeats the client remark, giving acknowledgment fundamentally to the emotions and the primary substance of the statement. Reflections are articulations that are most straightforwardly identified with the client’s stated intent, observation, and sentiments.

6. SUMMARIZATION:

A summarization is operationally characterized as a procedure whereby the counselor, in the wake of tuning in to the client for a given period, restates need or more than the counselee has expressed. Summarizing articulations by and large coordinate is given data so the client can deal with all the more viably with those perspectives he sees as generally significant.