What happens in therapy with sexual offenders? A model of process research.

This paper presents two studies (one single case and one comparative study) examining change processes within individual therapy sessions as well as during the course of treatment. The Therapeutic Cycle Model (TCM), developed for general psychotherapy to objectify change events in the course of psychotherapies, is applied to transcribed tape recordings of therapy sessions with sexual offenders. The TCM focuses on emotional experience and cognitive mastery and uses computer assisted text analysis. In addition to the TCM approach clinical ratings are used as independent criteria. The predicted relationship between the phases of the TCM and scores on the respective scales of the clinical ratings were supported.