ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the largest and most comprehensive effort to study psychotherapists, an effort that helps us understand who therapists are and the ways they practice most effectively. Psychotherapy researchers typically focus exclusively on different clinical interventions while ignoring the psychotherapists who make use of them. Examining how therapists generally experience the process of doing therapy themselves, David Orlinsky and his colleagues identified two distinct states of mind and work: "healing involvement" and "stressful involvement". In healing involvement, therapists experience themselves as feeling personally committed, affirming, fully engaged with a high level of empathy, having good communication skills, and enjoying a sense of conscious "flow" during sessions. They feel effective, and they can deal with difficulties constructively when they arise. By contrast, in stressful involvement, therapists experience themselves as feeling bored and anxious during sessions and as having difficulties with clients, which they tend to deal with unconstructively by avoiding engagement.
