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Palliative care clinicians enhance the illness experiences of patients and their families through building therapeutic relationships. Many psychological concepts underlie a clinician's approach to a specific patient. Through high-yield tips, this article highlights ten selected psychological elements that palliative care clinicians often use to support patients. As we all (both clinicians and patients) bring our own histories and unique biographies to the work of palliative care, a more explicit focus on the psychological aspects of this work can enhance our own experience and efficacy as providers. With a thoughtful focus on the psychological aspects of how we engage with patients, palliative care clinicians can offer a more meaningful therapeutic encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clients or patients often come to psychotherapy to alleviate psychological symptoms and pain but, paradoxically, soon behave in ways that seem to interfere with the process and progress of therapy. As early as the 1890's Freud began calling this phenomenon resistance and immediately realised that he needed to understand and deal with this matter to achieve therapeutic goals. Our understanding and ways of dealing with resistance in psychotherapy have undergone several developments over the years. Initially, psychoanalysts understood resistance as an obstacle to the therapeutic task and relationship and sought "to remove" it. However, over time, it has been realised that this is impossible, and the resistance also has an important function. In other words, the appearance of resistance was seen as an opportunity to understand the subjective experience of clients and the relational context in which it occurred. Dr. Rhee Dongshick, the founder of Taopsychotherapy, added a wholly fresh perspective in keeping with more recent relational perspectives. He came to see resistance as a therapist-centred concept and that what a therapist feels as resistance is, in fact, the result of the therapist's countertransference, essentially a failure of the therapist's empathy. He fully understood the patient's anxiety about admitting and facing unbearably painful emotions. Therefore, Rhee Dongshick's approach was to "melt" resistances by empathising with the patient's most distressing nuclear feelings with sustained, deeply empathic inquiry. In this paper, the author would like to examine in detail the perspective and therapeutic interventions of Taopsychotherapy in the face of resistance. Hopefully, this will propose meaningful guidelines for the conduct of psychotherapy, comparing these with some other well-known Western approaches to psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the more draining aspects of being a clinical ethicist is dealing with the emotions of patients, family members, as well as healthcare providers. Generally, by the time a clinical ethicist is called into a case, stress levels are running high, patience is low, and interpersonal communication is strained. Management of this emotional burden of clinical ethics is an underexamined aspect of the profession and academic literature. The emotional nature of doing clinical ethics consultation may be better addressed by utilizing concepts and tools from clinical psychology. Management of countertransference, the natural emotional reaction by the therapist toward the patient, is a widely discussed topic in the psychotherapeutic literature. This concept can be adapted to the clinical ethics encounter by broadening it beyond the patient-therapist relationship to refer to the ethics consultant's emotional response toward the patient, the family, or other members the healthcare team. Further, it may aid the consultant because a recognition of the source and nature of these reactions can help maintain 'critical distance' and minimize bias in the same way that a psychologist maintains neutrality in psychotherapy. This paper will offer suggestions on how to manage these emotional responses and their burden in the clinical ethics encounter, drawing upon techniques and strategies recommended in the psychotherapeutic literature. Using these techniques may improve consultation outcomes and reduce the emotional burden on the clinical ethicist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experiences of nine licensed mental health practitioners regarding their work with clients from low-income backgrounds were examined utilizing grounded theory methodology. Themes that emerged from the semi-structured interviews highlighted a rich narrative that portrayed the work as both deeply satisfying and inherently complex. Participants described the personal nature of this work, including countertransference elicited because of their own personal economic contexts and emotional reactions experienced within and outside the therapy room. Their stories acknowledged systematic challenges that act as barriers to treatment. Some participants noted that this has contributed to feelings of disillusionment toward the field as well as fears about the future of the mental health care. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for training, future research, and clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Difficulties with containing or processing emotions brought up in the countertransference response have long been understood as having the potential to cause a rupture in the therapeutic relationship, often with damaging results for the client. As increasing numbers of psychotherapists are becoming interested in mindfulness meditation, and as evidence is building to suggest that mindfulness meditation is an effective way of relating to one's thoughts and emotions in a non-judgemental and non-reactive fashion, the effect this may be having on the processing of countertransference material seems a worthy area of investigation. Method This study explores the countertransference experiences of five psychotherapists who practised mindfulness meditation, using semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using a grounded theory methodology. Results A tentative conceptual understanding of the data was developed, indicating that therapists who practised mindfulness meditation were relating to countertransferential responses with an observing stance, a compassionately curious attitude and a holding of emotion, which brings them into the present moment, resulting in the experience of a deeper therapeutic relationship. Discussion The implications for training and practice are discussed, through the potential of practising mindfulness to cultivate a therapeutic attitude towards countertransference responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emotions experienced by a supervisor—including even his private, 'subjective' fantasy experiences and his personal feelings about the supervisee—often provide valuable clarification of processes currently characterizing the relationship between the supervisee and the patient. In addition, these processes are often the very ones which have been causing difficulty in the therapeutic relationship and, because heretofore unrecognized by the supervisee, have not been consciously, verbally reported by him to the supervisor. This thesis is undoubtedly well known to many persons engaged in supervision, and in everyday use by them in this work; but my own experience indicates that it is far from universally recognized, and it has not been presented in the literature, to the best of my knowledge. It would be at least equally valid to express the principle in the following fashion: the processes at work currently in the relationship between patient and therapist are often reflected in the relationship between therapist and supervisor. But it makes for simplicity of presentation to present this material from the viewpoint of the supervisor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]