A preliminary examination of therapist hope as a predictor of clients' distress over treatment.

Therapist and client hope have both been conceptualized and empirically examined as factors that contribute to the reduction of clients' distress in treatment. That is, clients may come to therapy demoralized and without hope per Frank and Frank's contextual model of psychotherapy. Therapy can serve to increase their hope and thereby contribute to the reduction of distress; however, therapists also bring their own individual hope to the therapeutic process. Despite both parties contributing their hope as treatment factors, no research has yet simultaneously examined therapist and client hope. The purpose of this preliminary study was to test the relationships between therapist and client hope with the clients' distress to assess if these relationships hold when both perspectives are modeled. Naturalistic psychotherapy data from 99 clients receiving treatment in a community-serving, doctoral-training clinic were included. Multilevel modeling results indicated that therapist and client hope both significantly and negatively predict clients' distress over the course of treatment. Cross-lagged panel modeling demonstrated that therapists' hope predicted reductions in future sessions' psychological distress. Implications of these significant findings are discussed in connection with therapist and client factor literature, and future directions for the co-occurring examination of therapist and client hope are described. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).