Keyness and Collocations of Therapeutic Rupture Types: A Pilot Study

This study was designed to examine the therapeutic alliance and specific rupture types that counselors experience in a counseling session by employing a cross sectional analysis of a linguistic corpus created from transcriptions of mock counseling sessions. A corpus linguistic program called #Lancsbox 6.0 was used to analyze the collocates of the top words found in therapeutic rupture types. Results of this study show that the word “just,” which was often used as part of a less direct filler expression, was the most frequent word in the confrontation rupture corpus as well as a top five word in the withdrawal and mixed rupture corpuses. Regarding the withdrawal rupture corpus, the node word “know,” a cognitive-oriented token that could create emotional distance, had four high intensity words (collocates), two of which (“I” and “you”) were shared with a confrontation type corpus. Regarding the mixed rupture corpus, the most common word “like” was often used as a preposition and was implicated in low empathy encounters and did not appear as a collocation in the confrontation or withdrawal rupture collocation analysis. Implications for both counseling and research are discussed.