Future Orientation in Successful Therapies: Expanding the Concept of Goal in the Working Alliance

Objective: To better understand how therapists facilitate client goal attainment in therapy, we analyzed therapists' future-oriented actions in good outcome cases in which clients recorded high ratings on goal items in the Working Alliance Inventory-Short Revised.

Method: We selected clients who were within the clinical range (OQ-45.2) at pretreatment, demonstrated reliable change at the end of treatment, and recorded high WAI client goals scores early in treatment. Qualitative analyses of transcripts of the initial three sessions and client posttreatment interviews were integrated into a combined analysis to identify themes across the two separate sets of findings.

Results: Therapist future-oriented activity included: (1) Picking up explicit and implicit intentions; (2) using linguistic devices, such as meta-communication, action language, and hedging; (3) using evocative interventions; and (4) nudging the client into practicing change. Core finding: Therapists aligned with clients' directionality in a forward-driven, gradually evolving process.

Conclusion: Conceptual and clinical implications are discussed.