Respect-Focused Therapy (RFT)

Respect-Focused Therapy (RFT) is an emerging theoretical framework used in psychotherapy and psychological counseling that seeks to ground the therapist-client relationship in bilateral respect. It encourages therapists to acknowledge and confront their own biases and internalized belief systems, and actively work to prevent them from impacting client sessions. Grounded in the work of Austria-born author, scholar, and political activist Martin Buber, RFT has mainly been developed as a therapeutic approach by American counselor and mental health researcher Susanne Slay-Westbrook. The framework’s main emphasis is on guiding therapy clients through the tangible experience of feeling respected. Slay-Westbrook believes this helps clients build higher levels of respect for themselves and others, improving the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

Slay-Westbrook first iterated her RFT framework in the 2016 book Respect-Focused Therapy: Honoring Clients Through the Therapeutic Relationship and Process. She has since incorporated RFT into her private practice, and the therapeutic model has begun to penetrate the wider counseling mainstream since the book's publication.

Background

Building rapport with clients is a major focus of psychotherapists and counselors, particularly during the initial sessions of a new relationship. Traditional approaches to rapport-building focus on strategies such as creating a comfortable setting, building a tangible sense of privacy and security, minimizing noise exposure, choosing neutral decor to avoid unwanted distractions and stimulation, providing complete comfort amenities, and allowing clients to share information at their own pace. Counselors are also encouraged to remain mindful of the client’s perspective when entering an unfamiliar counseling environment for the first time and shun communication strategies that impede rapport-building efforts, such as judging, moralizing, issuing orders, or using reasoned arguments to invalidate the client’s concerns.

In the preface to Respect-Focused Therapy, Slay-Westbrook identifies respect as a crucial element that has largely been overlooked by legacy rapport-building strategies. She also noted a lack of academic research into the influence that respect has on therapeutic outcomes and began working to bridge these research gaps. In 2001, Slay-Westbrook published A World of Respect, her first book on the topic, which formed the intellectual foundation for her subsequent development of RFT.

Respect-Focused Therapy also acknowledges the significant influence of Buber’s work, specifically referencing Buber’s “I-Thou” model, first described in his 1923 essay I and Thou. The essay has since become Buber’s best-known and most studied work. In it, Buber interrogates the Apollonian-Dionysian literary and philosophical paradigm, which philosophers and theorists broadly applied to human relationships. The paradigm essentially categorizes all human relationships into two categories: “Apollonian,” which is related to rationality and the intellect, and “Dionysian,” which expresses romantic desire. Buber problematizes the idea that human interest in other people always traces back to an “Apollonian” or “Dionysian” root and instead endorses more complex and nuanced relational approaches. I and Thou was translated into English in 1937, and the ideas in the essay penetrated intellectual thought in the English-speaking world during the 1950s and 1960s as Buber completed a lecture tour of the United States.

In developing RFT, Slay-Westbrook applied the ideas of I and Thou to the therapist-client relationship, using them to build a comprehensive approach with broad applications across many forms of therapy. Slay-Westbrook’s RFT paradigm identifies the central tenets and defining features of respect, and provides mental health and counseling practitioners with specific strategies for incorporating them into their professional practices.

Overview

Slay-Westbrook’s RFT model links respect with empathy, using specific definitions of each term to describe their interrelationship. In defining “respect” as she uses it in RFT, Slay-Westbrook invokes the word’s etymology, noting its derivation from the Latin “respectare” or “respicere,” which translates as “to reconsider” or “to look again.” She thus grounds respect in closer examination of biases, beliefs, and assumptions, encouraging therapists to think of respect as a dynamic, ongoing process in which both the therapist and client accept each other for who they are and do not import ulterior influences or motives into their relationship. Slay-Westbrook also considers “respect” in terms of what it is not, emphasizing that it cannot be commanded or demanded of someone, or based in fear. Similarly, she states that it is not a hierarchical or one-sided feature of the therapist-client relationship but must function bilaterally between both parties to have the desired effect.

In linking respect with empathy, Slay-Westbrook explains her concept of “empathy” as encompassing a genuine effort to understand another person’s emotional reactions, anger, grief, or pain. By drawing these distinctions, Slay-Westbrook explains that RFT incorporates an empathic approach to therapeutic practice that separates the client’s individual identity from his or her emotional reactions to the underlying issue being treated. For Slay-Westbrook, this separation of personal identity and emotional experience is the key to enabling the therapist to neutralize the effect of any underlying biases he or she may be subconsciously importing into therapy sessions.

This foundational philosophy informs the three core principles of RFT identified by Slay-Westbrook. First, the method strives to create an equal balance of power between the therapist and client, rather than concentrating it in the therapist’s hands as traditional models tend to do. Second, the pervasive focus on respect gives clients a tangible source of lived experience that allows them to import and apply the principles of respect to other aspects of their lives. This notion draws on Slay-Westbrook’s observation, informed by decades of research and professional practice, that a lack of respect for oneself and others is a major driver of the underlying issues that guide clients to seek counseling. The third and final core RFT principle notes that a respect-grounded approach more easily allows therapists to transcend perspective-based differences rooted in sociocultural diversity, which functions as an additional check on bias and builds higher levels of sensitivity into the counseling process.

Slay-Westbrook has primarily applied the RFT paradigm to her work in couples therapy and family therapy. However, she emphasizes that the concept has universal applicability across the fields of psychotherapy and counseling. Her ideas have attracted increasing attention from the academic and professional mainstream since the first edition of Respect-Focused Therapy was published in 2016.

Bibliography

Castonguay, Louis G., Michael J. Constantino, and Larry E. Beutler. Principles of Change: How Psychotherapists Implement Research in Practice. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Kaklauskas, Francis J. and Les R. Greene. Core Principles of Group Psychotherapy: An Integrated Theory, Research, and Practice Training Manual. Routledge, 2019.

Lafrance, Adele, Katherine A. Henderson, and Shari Mayman. Emotion-Focused Family Therapy: A Transdiagnostic Model for Caregiver-Focused Interventions. American Psychological Association, 2019.

Landreth, Garry L. and Sue C. Bratton. Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT): An Evidence-Based 10-Session Filial Therapy Model. Routledge, 2019.

Lavender, Anna. The Therapeutic Relationship in Cognitive Behavior Therapy. SAGE Publishing, 2019.

“Martin Buber.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 28 Jul. 2020, plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/#DiaITho. Accessed 11 Jun. 2021.

Slay-Westbrook, Susanne. Respect-Focused Therapy: Honoring Clients Through the Therapeutic Relationship and Process. Routledge, 2016.

Slay-Westbrook, Susanne. “Respect-Focused Therapy: Honoring Pain, Yourself, and Others.” GoodTherapy, 16 Nov. 2016, www.goodtherapy.org/blog/respect-focused-therapy-honoring-pain-yourself-others-1116154. Accessed 11 Jun. 2021.