What single thing has prompted the most positive personal change in your life?  As you ponder your answer consider that hundreds of graduate counseling student trainees over a period of 12 years have been asked to answer the same question.  The course was called “The Integration of Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Counseling” and the task at hand, at least in part, was to challenge students to develop their own “Philosophy of Counseling,” or more clearly, “How do you fundamentally propose to help hurting people?”  Why did I begin the course with the earlier question?  The answer lies in both empirical research and over 22 years of personal therapeutic observations.  But more about this in a moment. 

Now, how did you answer the question?  If you are like 94% of graduate student respondents your answer would point to a relationship or relationships that were so influential in your life that you may find them difficult to describe in words.  Often when students were asked to elaborate on their answers, their eyes would drift downward as they delved into deep emotional connections with the material they were attempting to describe.  In this process many came to realize that words were simply insufficient to explain the positive impact of certain relationships in their lives.  Such is the nature of healthy and meaningful connection.  It often has an ineffable, even transcendent quality to it.

To further the point, I would often follow this question with another. “What single thing (event or relationship) has resulted in the most negative or damaging consequences in your life?”  Posing the question in this manner often managed to challenge many in the “non-relationship” group to see the prominent if not preeminent role of relationships in their lives, even if only for their negative consequences.  Either way, the point becomes clear. Relationships, for better or worse, are fundamental in shaping our personal sense of well-being and allowing us to experience a sense of purpose and satisfaction in our lives.

Now this awareness of the importance of relationships in our lives may seem self-evident to consumers of therapeutic services.  But would you be surprised to hear that the broader therapeutic community often spends most of its time focusing on techniques of therapy, many of which are devoid of a relational component or emphasis.  This is not to say that training programs and practicing clinicians do not emphasize “listening skills” or “relationship building” skills in their training and practice settings.  They do.  However, many schools and/or practitioners only give modest attention to such relational matters, choosing instead to focus on more techniques-driven helping models. 

This technique-focused therapeutic environment was given a wake up call in 1997 when the now widely acclaimed study of therapeutic outcomes in the literature done by Miller, Duncan, and Hubble found that only 15% of therapeutic change could be accounted for by technique alone.  Conversely, the quality of the therapeutic relationship was seen as contributing to 30% of therapeutic change.  Interestingly, 40% of therapeutic change was attributed to factors occurring outside of the direct therapeutic process.  (It should be noted here that relationally-minded therapists understand that even these external factors can be influenced by the choice to be more relationally-focused in the counseling process.)  So what is my point?

Would it surprise you that the most empirically supported therapy today across a variety of treatment concerns, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), does not by design give direct attention to relationship issues in a person’s life?  This is not to suggest that we are dismissive of cognitive-behavioral therapy, quite the contrary.  We utilize this approach (along with others) and value its contribution to the helping process.  However, years of clinical observations along with the previously cited disparity between techniques-focused therapies and outcome studies showing the more prominent role of relationships in positive counseling outcomes clearly suggest that more relationally driven helping models needed to be developed.  Thus in 1997 Reconciliation-Focused Counseling (RFC) was born.

Reconciliation-Focused Counseling recognizes that people are driven by a need to experience meaningful and healthy connection with themselves, with others, and with God.  RFC further understands that because human beings are intrinsically relational that the quality of those relationships has a profound impact on the well-being of individuals. Therefore, RFC is intentional in its treatment of these relational systems and understands that it is in the context of meaningful and healthy connection that empirically supported therapies find their most beneficial expression.  Far from being a radical “new” therapy, it is instead simply a way of viewing and approaching the helping process that keeps us focused on what both research and experience tell us are fundamentally important, our relational systems. 

Imagine for a moment that RFC is the lens through which we see and use all other therapeutic interventions.  In this sense, RFC shares the widely held belief that all therapists knowingly or unknowingly have a “lens” (philosophy of counseling) through which they view and approach the helping process.  RFC also understands and supports of the use of empirically supported therapies in the counseling process.  However, what makes the RFC practitioner unique is that they understand the importance of relational systems and the need to be intentional about promoting healthy and meaningful connection in people’s lives.  Like the familiar phrase, “out of sight, out of mind,” the RFC practioner understands that if a therapist’s model of helping does not explicitly view matters of connection as important, these powerful life enhancing arenas often go unattended. Therefore, as a potential consumer of therapeutic services, we feel you deserve to know what our “lens” is and why we feel it is vitally important in our work with others.     

If the ideas summarized here tend to resonate with you and you like the idea of working with therapists who understand the importance of meaningful and healthy connection in your life, then you will likely find our therapists to be a good fit for you.

Asa R. Sphar III, Ph.D., LPC, LMFT

Professor / Chair, Psychology and Counseling Department - NOBTS (1993 - 2007)
Author: Helping Hurting People: Reconciliation-Focused Counseling
Director: Counseling Services of New Orleans, Inc. / Counseling Services of Austin

Reconciliation-focused therapy has been taught to literally hundreds of graduate counseling students over a period of 10 years and it continues to be developed and refined through rigorous empirical investigations.  In 2002 the first book on reconciliation-focused counseling was published.  Subsequently, three attachment scales were designed that serve to objectively measure the quality of a person’s attachments across three relational domains.  These instruments serve to guide therapists in their approach to the counseling task.  To date, these attachment scales have been the subject of empirical investigation by two doctoral dissertations.  In 2002, RFC was presented to the International Conference of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies.