ABSTRACT
This chapter sets the scene for the book. It explains how the book emerged and its aims and invites the reader to engage in a reflective process whilst reading it. The author asks the telling question “what is change” and provides some interesting definitions. He points out that change is multi-variable, idiosyncratic and personal and that it is central to the work of counselling and psychotherapy. Davis then considers the question of how change is actually achieved in therapy, providing an overview of how the different models of psychotherapy conceptualise change and giving a detailed and critical account of some of the findings of evidence-based studies. He notes how one way to define change models is between those in which relationality and attachment are prioritised and those in which strategies and technique are the overriding factor. Interwoven with this discussion Davis highlights aspects from each of the chapters in the book and the elements that they have in common. He concludes that there appears to be a false distinction between an ontological relational therapy and an epistemological, cognitive-based paradigmatic therapy and that there is a strong case for a more individual basis for client case conceptualisation and a more customised therapy based on the sagacious employment of clinical experience and maturational intuition combined with a range of specific technical skills, in which ‘the model’ becomes less significant than the impact. This involves principally a pattern-matching process of implicit relationality in the service of client growth.
