Marianne Welmers

Chapter 3 86 Considering the small body of research on therapists’ characteristics contributing to the alliance in family treatment, a replication of our study findings is vital to build a stronger evidence base. Future studies could benefit from investigating family effects as well as effects of interaction between therapist and family members’ characteristics or behaviors in relation to the alliance. Our finding that safety-promoting behaviors of the therapist were associated with less favorable therapist-reports of the alliance seems somewhat contradictory to previous findings on family members’ in-session safety in relation to treatment outcome: further research on the role of safety during treatment may particularly benefit from studying interactions between therapist and client behaviors. Finally, given the vital importance of alliance aspects typical of systemic treatment, an important next step is to investigate therapists’ contributions predicting these systemic aspects. This includes investigating therapists’ contributions to the family’s shared sense of purpose, their sense of safety and problematic differences between family members in their alliance with the therapist. For clinical practice, our results implicate that training and supervision of family therapists could benefit from focusing on behaviors that enhance family members’ engagement in treatment and emotional connection to the therapist. More occurrences of these behaviors in treatment sessions may positively influence family members’ alliances with the therapist, which in turn is likely to improve treatment outcomes. Additionally, training and supervision could bemore effectivewhen accommodated to the trainees’ personality profiles. Increasing trainees’ self-awareness and monitoring of the way their neurotic, extraverted, or conscientious tendencies become too manifest in expressed behavior during sessions might enhance the ability of family therapists in building strong alliances with family members in order to increase treatment effectiveness.