A Phenomenological Analysis of the Experience of Pivotal Moments in Therapy as Defined by Clients*

Abstract

This study was concerned with the clarification of the experience of pivotal moments in therapy. By pivotal moment is understood an event within the therapeutic process that leads to enduring change experienced as an important improvement in the life-experience of the client. Retrospective descriptions of a therapeutic process were obtained from three clients in which a distinguishable chain of events could be discerned that the clients identified as a pivotal moment. The descriptive material was analyzed according to the descriptive phenomenological psychological method developed by Amedeo Giorgi on the basis of the philosophical phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. The results show that the pivotal moment is experienced as a figural moment within the therapeutic process where a serious challenge to old assumptions takes place, necessitating a break from old cognitive, affective and behavioral patterns in a context of trust and safety within the therapeutic relationship.

Therapeutic change in young people—A qualitative investigation of client and therapist perspectives

“…From a phenomenological perspective, therapeutic change has been categorised as occurring either gradually, suddenly or a combination of both (Fosha, 2006;Gianakis & Carey, 2011). The moment of change itself is elusive, but has been described as the breaching of a kind of psychological barrier (Carey et al, 2007) and being facilitated by attending to problems more fully on intellectual and emotional levels (Giorgi, 2011). Sudden changes have been qualitatively described with terms such as quantum changes (Miller & C'de Baca, 2001) and transformative changes (Friedlander, Lee, & Bernardi, 2012).…”

Discovering lived experiences through descriptive phenomenology

“…In arguing for more than the one 'self' experience evident in philosophy, Giorgi (2009) stated that at least three participants are needed for his method of DP and found more than this difficult to write about (Giorgi and Gallegos, 2005). In other descriptive phenomenological studies, the number has ranged between three and fifteen (Giorgi B., 2011;Broomé, 2013). It has been found that "the most profound insights with in-depth reflections [are discovered with] … about six to 12 cases as 'windows' to, and illustrations of, a phenomenon.…”

“…In the lived experience festival study, once the transcription of the interviews was complete, reading and re-reading the transcripts was necessary in order to get a sense of the whole. This was done within the attitude of phenomenological reduction (Giorgi B, 2011;Giorgi, 2012). This meant that, in practice, the researcher prepared herself by undertaking three positioning tasks.…”

The Descriptive Phenomenological Psychological Method

“…Applications show a broad spectrum of uses in psychology. We can review a short sample of applications on the following topics: decision making (Cloonan, 1971), social anxiety (Beck, 2013), early emotional memories (Englander, 2007), women's depression (Røseth et al, 2011(Røseth et al, , 2013, psychotherapy research (Giorgi, B., 2011), Alzheimer's disease (Ekman et al, 2012), being criminally victimized (Churchill and Wertz, 2015), medical trauma (Wertz, 2011) and even studies in law enforcement (Broomé, 2013). This is only a brief sampling of psychological phenomena to which this method is being successfully applied.…”