‘One Step Up, but Not There Yet’: Using Client Feedback to Optimise the Therapeutic Alliance in Family Therapy

As research suggests that there is a strong link between the quality of the therapeutic alliance and the effectiveness of psychotherapy, family therapists should reflect on ways to improve the quality of the alliance. The systematic use of client feedback can be a rich resource as a response to the complexity of the alliance in the family therapy setting. In this paper the focus is on ways in which the client’s systematic feedback can contribute to an optimisation of the therapeutic alliance. We present the Dialogical Feedback Tool (DFT), a simple feedback instrument to be used especially in family therapy sessions in which young children are involved. A case study illustrates how the feedback of clients on their experiences in therapy can help therapists to better attune to family members' experiences and expectations about therapy.Practitioner points The therapeutic alliance in family therapy is complex, especially when children are involved Using a simple feedback instrument can help deal with the complexity of the therapeutic alliance The most important challenge for therapists using feedback instruments is how to integrate the feedback in a constructive way in the therapeutic process