Step 13. Embracing Personalized Care
It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences are deeply buried. It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement in the process. - Carl Rogers
If we want to optimize psychological care, then we will personalize psychotherapy to the singular client in ways that accord with the compelling clinical experience and the cumulative research evidence. That will generate best practices in mental health.
This is not our personal opinion nor gut intuition nor clinical lore. It is established fact.
There’s an exciting future for preference research, the Cooper-Norcross Inventory of Preferences (C-NIP), routine implementation of preferences into practice and training, as well as personalized or precision treatments. The best is yet to come.
We end this 13-part training path by going back to the beginning: Why bother with assessing and accommodating client preferences?
1. Because doing so is a powerful way of communicating respect and valuing to clients. We thus move from a paternalistic model of care toward a more democratic and collaborative one that acknowledges the centrality of client choice and autonomy.
2. Preference work brings to the fore the client’s hopes, desires, and directions, rather than their disorders and pathologies. It asks the quintessentially human question “What do you want?” rather than “What is wrong with you?”
3. Personalizing care is associated with greater patient engagement and improved treatment outcomes. It works!
4. Honoring preferences embraces individual differences and actualizes cultural diversity. Both practitioners and clients highly value this method of individualizing treatment.
Stated simply, understanding and valuing patient preferences prove human, collaborative, effective, popular, and necessary to clinical practice.
Of course, research evidence amounts to little if it is not enacted in practice and taught in training programs. We implore our colleagues to progress beyond the well-intended slogans and implement what we know works in responsiveness and simultaneously to avoid what does not.
When practitioners successfully do so, a bevy of benefits will almost certainly accrue. We deepen our commitment to ethical, evidence-based, and culturally diverse practice. We narrow the gap between research and practice. We embrace the clinical reality that clients respond differently. We rediscover the individual differences that distinguish our field. We reorient from professional conflict to client benefit. And, most consequential, we become demonstrably more effective with our clients.
That’s the compelling case for personalizing psychotherapy and working with client preferences.
Congratulations! You have completed training on how to assess and accommodate client preferences. We hope that these best practices and tips will aid your active listening journey, particularly for long-term clients. Feel welcome to review this path again and re-vist and reflect on your listener practices regularly.