From Experience to Meaning: Redefining Significant Life Events in the Context of Psychotherapist’s Personal and Professional Development : A Mixed-Method Analysis

Details

Supervisors

Zech, Emmanuelle ; de Condé, Hubert

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

To begin with, therapist’s personal experiences plays a role in shaping their professional identity and impacting their therapeutic posture. In this paper, we aim to define what are the Significant events (SE) that are central to the therapist’s development, since the current definition is vaguely defined and quite rarely explored from the therapist’s perspective. We looked at several aspects of these events, including whether they were acute or chronic, their emotional impact and when they occurred across a therapist’s life. For the analysis, we used a mixed-methods approach and used the response of 230 therapists who responded to an online questionnaire. On one hand, we analyzed them thematically to identify acute versus chronic events. On the other hand, statistical analyses explored how these event features related to their perceived impact via correlations, ANOVA, cluster analysis and regression. Our results highlighted that acute events were more recalled than chronic ones, even though we had expected ongoing experiences to be more reported due to their longitudinal aspect. Next, emotional salience was associated with personal impact, but showed a weaker connection to professional impact. Nonetheless, strong correlation between personal and professional impact ratings suggests that meaningful events still influence both sphere. To continue, the cluster analysis identified three distinct emotional appraisal profiles, reflecting varied combinations of valence, perceived consequences, capability, and predictability. Finally, recalled events peaked in young adulthood and adulthood, which is consistent with the reminiscence bump (RB) hypothesis, even though emotional intensity did not significantly vary across life stages. These results highlights the importance of emotionally charged and personally meaningful experiences in therapist development. According to these findings, we concluded that a more nuanced understanding of SE is needed, one that would include ambivalent emotions, relational contexts and the role of acute but frequent events. Lastly, future research should adopt a longitudinal and a cultural approach to explore how therapists define and integrates these experiences into their identity and how it affects them as an individual person and as a mental health practitioner. Keywords: significant events, chronic events, acute events, personal and professional growth, person-of-the-therapist, reminiscence bump, identity formation, emotional salience. Abbreviations: SE : Significant Event(s); ES : Emotional Salience; RB : Reminiscence Bump