Michael Jacobs, PhD in Clinical Psychology

Authenticity and empathy are probably the most important qualities for developing a client-therapist alliance. They are both key in making clients feel safe, understood, heard and connected to their therapist. Additionally, this allows me to focus more on a client?s goals for therapy rather than creating my own goals for them. I have been training other clinicians for more than a decade now, and these qualities come up time and time again. I am part of a group at Mount Sinai Medical Center that has developed a Group and Family-Based CBT treatment model. Due to the success of that model, we have been training clinicians around the world. As we refined our training model, we began to notice that while some people did well in our training, others continued to struggle. We came to realize that those who came into training showing more empathy and authenticity as therapists tended to do better overall. While we were able to train clinicians to understand the concepts of our model, those who presented with a less understanding and authentic demeanor struggled with the application. We have devised ways to develop these qualities in clinicians, but we have often found that we prefer to work with less experienced clinicians who are empathic and authentic than highly experienced clinicians lacking these traits. We have focused on this so much because if the therapist and client are not on the same page regarding treatment, there is no way to be helpful. A client will likely terminate therapy if they believe the therapist is not understanding them. Personally, if I?m ever struggling to connect with a client, I always go back to empathy and authenticity. I ask myself if I have sufficiently related to (and validated) how they feel and if I?ve been ?real? and expressed humanity in my responses. People can smell inauthenticity from a mile away, and they don?t like it. I then reaffirm our alliance by clarifying the goals that the client has for therapy.