Specifics of psychotherapy with highly self-critical clients

Self-criticism is a major conjoint factor in the background of many psychiatric diagnoses. In terms of psychotherapy, it is crucial that client´s self-criticism substantially weakens the client's response to a treatment. That is why it is so important for a psychotherapist to know more about self-criticism and be more familiar with various ways to deal with it. The previous article Possibilities of intervention while working with highly self-critical client"" provides an overview of various possible interventions in this area. This article is focused on psychotherapy with highly self-critical clients. It contains description of difficulties while doing psychotherapy with highly self-critical clients and reasons for these difficulties, typology of inner critics, basic psychotherapeutic approaches dealing with self-criticism and general principles of psychotherapy with the critics.

Júlia Halamová, Department of Applied Psychology, Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovak Republic e-mail: julia.halamova@gmail.com