Posted On September 15th, 2022

As a psychologist or a therapist, how important do you think, is it to help the client define the outcome they wish to achieve from therapy? It is very important, isn’t it? But why is it so important? Let us explore the answer to this question in this video.

There are many reasons why setting therapeutic outcomes is very important, here are the top 5:

1. It is the primary reason for the client to continue with subsequent sessions. Imagine going to a person who asks you to meet them let’s say every week without you being asked what will you like to achieve during these meetings. How motivated would you be to go for these sessions?
2. Clearly defined outcomes help you develop rapport and create a strong therapeutic alliance. Both of these are very important for the client to support you during the therapeutic process and I am sure you already understand that to be able to support the client effectively, you need the client to support you during the process.
3. The outcome or the goal gives the session a sense of direction and guides the therapists in creating a therapy plan. For example:

• Imagine trying to create a plan to meet someone without really knowing where to meet. How do you plan for that?
• Now you may say that I can plan along the way and you are right you can if it was just about you and your life but would you really like to do that with your client, especially when you can just ask the client what they want to achieve. It is a lot easier and more efficient.

4. A well-defined outcome provides clear indicators for both the client and the therapist to measure the effectiveness of therapy. For example:

• Imagine hiring a person for a job who does not know what is the job that they are supposed to do.
• Now at the end of the month, you want them to show you how effective were they in their job. If they don’t know what job they were supposed to do or what you expected from them, how likely are they to show the effectiveness? When a therapist tries to work with a client without knowing what the outcome is, it is like being hired for a job without knowing what the job is.
• Even if you have done an amazing job the client has no way to measure your effectiveness in the long run. Yes, they may feel good as a result of work you have done together but then they can feel good watching a movie or in some cases while watching porn. Momentary feel-good is not a reliable indicator for the effectiveness of therapy by the client having achieved a clearly defined goal is, isn’t it?

5. Lastly, goals help you understand when it’s time to end the sessions that the client is taking with you. Without goals or outcomes, therapy can literally become a never-ending process because neither you nor the client is sure what was the purpose of therapy in the first place.

In the end, I would like you to remember that knowing the outcome that one needs to achieve from therapy is a lot like knowing what fruit you want to grow in a garden. Everything from the seed you will plant to the type of nurturing you will provide to the seed and how much time you need to nurture the seed and the plant before it can relatively sustain itself depends on it.

Original Article : Top 5 Reasons to help clients define therapeutic outcomes