Adelphi University

The Center for Alliance-Focused Training at the Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University.  The mission of the Center for Alliance-Focused Training (AFT) is to advance the practice of psychotherapy by training therapists to foster strong therapeutic alliances.  AFT equips clinicians to cultivate collaborative relationships with their patients, as well as to recognize and repair alliance ruptures, with the ultimate goal of enhancing therapeutic processes and outcomes. The Center supports research on AFT and ways to further refine it, as well as research on rupture repair processes and the development of measures for assessing ruptures and repairs.  The Center also disseminates AFT via workshops, individual and group consultations, and supervisor training.

 

The Center is led by Co-Directors and Adelphi faculty Dr. Christopher Muran and Dr. Catherine Eubanks, and includes Adelphi professor Dr. Emma Freetly Porter, Adelphi graduate student research assistants, and colleagues from other universities and hospitals who have been trained as AFT supervisors and whose research students also collaborate on Center initiatives.  The Center builds on over three decades of federally funded research and training that was conducted at the Brief Psychotherapy Research Program at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in New York City.

 

The primary aim of this site project is to comprehensively examine the impact of AFT on supervisor, therapist, and patient relational virtues such as humility, curiosity, and compassion, which are integral to successful rupture repair.  We will evaluate process at multiple levels: therapy, supervision, and metasupervision.  In collaboration with our colleague Dr. Anna Babl, a faculty member at the University of Leiden, we will also examine the impact of an online, asynchronous training based on AFT, with the long-term goal of providing the mental healthcare workforce with accessible and evidence-based training in rupture recognition and repair.