Research into collaborative, pluralistically-oriented therapy processes: A practitioner-friendly narrative review

The collaborative pluralistic framework for counselling and psychotherapy suggests that effective therapy is organised around active client-therapist negotiation around goals, tasks and methods, and that specific metacommunicative attention to these domains within therapy discourse will maximise client engagement in therapy process, and client use of personal and cultural resources. This paper introduces the pluralistic framework, and presents a review and analysis of research that has addressed these themes. Specifically, the paper reviews the literature on the relationship between client outcomes and preferences, predilections, negotiation around the goals of therapy, aptitude-treatment interactions and tailor-made vs. standardised therapies. The implications of these findings for the further development of research and practice around a collaborative pluralistic approach are discussed.