Summary of Mendes et al. (2010), Essay Example

Mendes et al. (2010) analyzed the incidence of an important construct, that of the innovative moment (IM), in a context involving emotion-focused therapy (EFT). IMs are defined in terms of “exceptions toward a problematic self-narrative”, that is to say, breakthroughs (p. 692). In an IM, the client “describes or narrates him- or herself differently than one would expect from the problematic self-narrative that brought him or her to therapy” (p. 692). The authors give a typology of IMs: action IMs, constituting new achievements; reflection IMs, constituting new thoughts and feelings; protest IMs, behavioral or mental changes that go against the problem; reconceptualization IMs, which bring new comprehension, and performing change IMs, which entail actual change in behavior, cognition, and the like (p. 693). The authors of this study tracked IMs in both positive and negative outcome cases of clients treated for depression, seeking to figure out whether IMs were positively correlated with positive outcomes in therapy, and to identify other correlations (p. 695).

Mendes et al. (2010) found that in fact, in good-outcome cases much more time was spent on elaborating IMs compared with poor-outcome cases: 30.3% of sessions versus 8.9%, respectively (p. 697). Clients with good outcomes had much higher reconceptualization and performing change IMs than those with poor outcomes (p. 698). I found these insights very interesting, and I think this article does a good job of pointing out some of the differences between successful and unsuccessful EFT outcomes in terms of IMs. This information can indeed help therapists help clients. However, the approach is very data-focused, and I can’t help but wonder how much information it missed out on. EFT is a fundamentally affect-driven approach, one that is based on postmodernist principles. It seems to me, therefore, that there are very real limits to how much useful information one can derive from such an approach, although there is still some very clearly useful information that the authors were able to obtain.

References

Mendes, I., et al. (2010). Narrative change in emotion-focused therapy: How is change constructed through the lens of the innovative moments coding system? Psychotherapy Research, 20(6), pp. 692-701. DOI: 10.1080/10503307.2010.514960