The person of the therapist in the practice of therapy

• Main Author: Cadwgan-Evans, Naomi
• Published: City University London 2014
• Subjects: 616.8914
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.616914

Research into the area of therapists' clothing has received only modest attention in the psychotherapy literature. The existing findings are largely outdated and have been inconclusive, emerging from entirely quantitative research designs. This current research seeks to offer a qualitative understanding of how counselling psychologists in training understand therapists' clothing in light of their experiences of being counselling psychologists in training and what this means to them. Participants were eight counselling psychologists in training who took part in semi-structured interviews. Rooted in a contextual-constructionist epistemology, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to analyse the data and three master themes emerged: achieving an appropriate presentation; providing a therapeutic encounter; and negotiating identities: cl personal and professional spectrum. Overall, the themes suggest that the therapists are intent about making the right clothing choices for their practice of therapy, despite feeling uneasy about the amount of attention they pay to it. This is because the)' perceive their clothing to have important meaning for their understanding of the therapeutic encounter with clients, and additionally, for their own feelings and thoughts in relation to being a therapist Further research is needed to extend this area to develop a greater understanding of the complexities that have arisen in relation to these findings. Both limitations of the current study and ideas for future research are discussed.