TOTEL Therapy: A Paradigm for a Value‐based Therapy*

Abstract

greater the congruence between participants' expectations about psychotherapy and their actual perception of the values operating within a therapy setting, the more likely they would be to take a problem to therapy. The strength of this finding, however, does not seem at this time to be as great as that provided by individual value rankings in predicting decisions to either enter or remain in psychotherapy.As stated earlier, analyses for this study are still in progress. The preliminary findings suggest that value systems may prove to be effective predictors of patients' behaviors within a therapeutic setting. Provided that the final analysis of data is consistent with the aforementioned trends, extensions of the present study to include actual patient populations would certainly be indicated.The concept of values is troublesome for psychology in general and psychotherapy in particular. More than other people, psychotherapists daily see what appear to be the wide-ranging effects of human values. People change careers, change spouses, change life-styles, and sometimes die for what they claim are their values. Yet, our empirically based conceptions of therapy tend to treat values as peripheral to the change process. In behavioral theory values are conditioned verbal responses. In psychoanalytic theory they are manifestations of defense mechanisms (Rokeach 1973). Even the recent cognitive * An earlier version of this paper was published in Counseling and Values, 1976,21, 2-11. Ronald P. Matross is a research associate with student life studies and planning at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.