Constructivist Therapies: Overview

Constructivist therapies focus on how people construct meaningful ways of understanding themselves and the world, which they use to guide their lives. Constructivist therapists assume that what each person knows is not a reproduction of the world as it is but a humanly invented interpretation. In constructivist theory, the meaningful understandings people rely on to make sense of events are products of their internal processes rather than direct reflections of an outside world. While the outside world may trigger people’s meaning-making processes, it is those processes, rather than the world alone, that determine how they understand and experience events. Thus, from a constructivist perspective, people never know the world directly, but only indirectly via their constructed understandings of it. Effective therapy involves helping clients loosen ...