Psychological assessment as an intervention with couples: Single case application of collaborative techniques in clinical practice

Psychological assessment tools yield valid, reliable, and useful data for clinical psychologists. Nonetheless, clients often lack appreciation of their utility to understand and cope with their daily life challenges. Collaborative/Therapeutic Assessment (C/TA) models have shown that assessment results might be used as brief therapeutic interventions through collaboratively sharing testing data with clients. In this article, we focused on two collaborative techniques, namely intervention sessions and summary sessions, as potentially able to increase assessment utility for clients, providing them with life-changing, experiencegrounded feedback based on assessment results. The application of these techniques to a clinical case with a couple suggested that both techniques might be beneficially applied to enhance clients' empathy and compassion, to promote new insights about life challenges, and to sustain the development of new narratives and life meanings. C/TA techniques appear to be effective brief therapeutic interventions and their application in everyday assessment practice may be warranted.