Abstract
This portfolio presents the work completed towards fulfilment for the degree of Practitioner Doctorate in Psychotherapeutic and Counselling Psychology. My professional development during my training to become a counselling psychologist is represented across three dossiers: academic, therapeutic and research. The Academic Dossier includes three essays. The first essay explores whether empathy could be a bridge for counselling psychologists to psychodynamic practice and includes a discussion of empathy in psychodynamic theory and practice. The second essay also considers relational factors, exploring whether a counselling psychologist can be justified putting the therapeutic relationship first in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The third essay explores how mindfulness can be used within Dialectical Behaviour Therapy with clients who have been given a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and who also experience distressing psychosis. A critique of the limited definition of psychosis within the diagnosis of BPD is offered. The Therapeutic Practice Dossier includes a brief description of three clinical placements I have worked at, including summaries of client work and other placement activities. The three placements each offered supervision in different psychotherapeutic models: person-centred, psychodynamic and cognitive behavioural. The dossier also includes the final clinical paper where my personal and professional development during training as a counselling psychologist is explored. The Research Dossier offers three research reports: a literature review and two empirical studies, one qualitative and one quantitative. The literature review explores existing research on clients’ experiences of rupture in the therapeutic relationship. The first empirical study used the qualitative method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to analyse clients’ experience of ruptures in the therapeutic alliance and developed two super-ordinate themes. The first theme focused on what ruptures were for clients, which is the loss of perceived empathy by feeling judged, not understood or diminished. The second theme explored how the participants experienced the rupture as traumatic. The second empirical study used the quantitative methods of logistic and multinomial regression to enquire if working alliance, empathy and client attachment could predict whether ruptures were revealed, resolved, repaired or led to the client leaving therapy after the rupture.