Psychotherapy has been conceptualized as a process of social influence (Frank & Frank, 1991; Wampold, 2018). Therapists play a crucial role in cocreating new adaptive meanings and expectations that mobilize clients toward an increased sense of agency and mastery. We argue that these tasks depend on the persuasive power of the psychotherapist. The goal of this article is to provide a brief overview on the literature and research on therapist’s persuasiveness and theoretical contributions for future directions. We define therapist’s persuasiveness as the major verbal and nonverbal therapist skills that facilitate positive treatment expectations and credibility. Accumulated research on the placebo effect, client’s expectancies, charisma, and therapist’s interpersonal skills gives new empirical depth to the construct of therapeutic persuasiveness. In light of these findings, we discuss implications and provide recommendations for therapist training and future research.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has led to changes in every aspect of life. Online therapy creates both difficulties and learning opportunities for therapists. The literature shows that therapeutic presence is an important variable in efficacy and therapeutic change. Attitudes toward online therapy seem to impact the acceptance and adoption of telehealth interventions.

Objective(s): For a case of severe perfectionism, comorbid with complex trauma symptomatology including suicidality, self-harming, and other markers of borderline personality, we demonstrate the use of the empirically confirmed process identified in memory reconsolidation (MR) research for the unlearning and nullification, or "erasure," of emotional and behavioral responses driven by learned expectations and mental models. MR has been proposed as a transtheoretical, unifying mechanism underlying profound psychotherapeutic change. The therapist (first author), under the second author's supervision, used a varied set of clinical skills woven together through a focus on the MR process. Results: The result was a depotentiation of underlying, traumatic emotional learnings and near-total disappearance of perfectionistic and self-harming behaviors, urges and attitudes after 1 year of therapy. Conclusions: Implications of this case are discussed in terms of symptom generation by implicit emotional learnings and MR as a promising framework for advancing the effectiveness and unification of psychotherapy.

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