It has been suggested that there are 4 important processes in psychotherapy. These are:
1) ventilation of emotion, which occurs when the patient can give direct emotional expression to the bottled-up feelings that he might have been storing up inside eg anger, guilt etc.
2) support - a listener who does not ridicule or criticize and can be trusted to understand what the patient is saying, may prove very supportive to a patient in distress.
3) acquisition of insight - in psychotherapy this may be loosely defined as the patient experiencing intellectual understanding of his problem combined with appropriate emotion.
4) re-learning - once the patient has gained insight into the inappropriate or maladaptive ways in which he responds to other people he can gradually try out different ways of behaving. In other words he can use his relationship with the therapist as a sort of arena for rehearsing new forms of behaviour and different ways of expressing himself.
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