Management of therapist directiveness in integrative psychotherapy: A corpus-assisted discourse study

Healthcare practitioners often face the dilemma of whether to provide advice during medical consultations due to concerns around affecting patients’ autonomy in decision making. Healthcare practitioners’ directiveness in patient–practitioner interactions may influence the success of medical consultations. Research has revealed that healthcare practitioners employ various communicative strategies and linguistic patterns to manage directiveness in medical consultations, such as the notions of likelihood and uncertainty, use of information, and politeness. Nonetheless, few scholars have examined how psychotherapists manage directiveness in counseling or psychotherapy sessions. Directives are inevitable speech acts in counseling or psychotherapy. Therapists may encounter challenges when producing directives, such as preventing clients from seeking their own solutions or clients becoming excessively dependent on therapists’ suggestions. Drawing upon the systems of mood and modality in systemic functional linguistics, this article employs a corpus-assisted approach to investigate therapists’ directives in terms of phraseological patterns, use of modality, and corresponding interpersonal meanings. Results reveal that therapists tend to manage directiveness by forming indicative directives and using low-value modulation modality. This article is the first corpus-assisted study to contribute to an understanding of therapist directiveness in psychotherapy from a lexico-grammatical perspective.