| The therapeutic alliance has been central to psychotherapy process and case conceptualization since the early 1900's. The growing empirical research has shown that the alliance is a robust predictor of therapy outcome. With that finding in mind, a second generation of alliance research emerged focused on alliance ruptures. Much of the empirical data available on ruptures comes from self-report measures. Not only do these measures have the inherent flaws of all self-report measures, they also do not clearly distinguish between confrontation and withdrawal rupture. In this paper, we introduce a new observer-based measure, used to rate withdrawal rupture, confrontation rupture and therapist resolution. Inter-rater reliability is presented and a preliminary look at differences in rupture and resolution between Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Brief Relational Therapy is discussed. The paper is broken down into two parts: 1) The first containing a review of the theoretical concepts underlying the research study; 2) The research study itself. |
