Meeting the demand for evidence-based practice

Like many in the counselling and psychotherapy field, when it comes to research, my preference has always been for language-based, ‘qualitative’ inquiry. A few years ago, for instance, I conducted a qualitative interview study asking therapists about their experiences of in-depth encounters with clients.1 As I sat listening to them describing their feelings of ‘aliveness’ and ‘immersion’ at these moments, I experienced a feeling of deep connection in the interview itself. This, it seemed to me, was what counselling and psychotherapy research could really be about: a deep, relationship-based exploration that, in its methods and values, paralleled our own therapeutic work with clients.