Psychotherapy Trainees' Empathic Failures with Older Adults
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Authors
Engelskirger, Jacob F.
Issue Date
2017
Type
Dissertation
Language
en
Keywords
"psychotherapy","geropsychology","empathy","qualitative research","phenomenology"
Alternative Title
Abstract
The aging of the United States population has resulted in increasing demands for psychotherapists who have demonstrated competence in treating older adult clients, as older adults have unique mental healthcare needs. Likewise, graduate-level training programs in geropsychology and geriatric social work will be required to educate and train a new generation of geropsychologists and geriatric social workers in the years to come to provide clinical services to the growing older adult population. The clinical challenges encountered by seasoned therapists treating older adults revolve around a struggle to maintain empathy for those clients. Empathy has been identified as a core component of the therapeutic alliance, and therefore, critical to the therapeutic alliance, which is one of the most important factors contributing to client results from psychotherapy by common factors research. Seven participants self-identified as graduate students in psychology or social work who had experienced an empathic failure with an older adult client during individual psychotherapy. Participants were interviewed using the methodology described by Amedeo Giorgi's (2009) Descriptive Phenomenology, a qualitative psychological research methodology. The consequent text analysis resulted in two " final structures” describing the experiences of empathic failure common among participants: countertransference-based empathic failures and empathic failures resulting from the clinician's inability to build an adequate therapeutic alliance with the client from the onset of treatment. Both structures are described in detail, and implications are discussed for how the research findings can be used to guide the development of more robust and effective geriatric mental health training programs to prepare student clinicians for the demands of their work, and thereby increase the probability that the clinicians of tomorrow will find the practice of psychotherapy with older adults sustainable. Suggestions for future research are also given.