Theoretical orientation test

http://ww2.odu.edu/~eneukrug/therapists/survey.html

I found this pretty interesting. I scored highest on Gestalt (90%) followed by Narrative (88%) and Person-Centered (80%). I was lowest on psychoanalysis at 40%.

That was interesting. Some of the statements seemed so foreign to me that it was pretty clear I wouldn't be oriented in those directions. No real surprise in the result for me though. Very strongly behaviorally oriented, followed by psychodynamic. The other two were way below those.

Wow-- I'm evenly split between Psychodynamic/Cognitive behavioral/ and Existential humanist----lowest score was in P{ost Modern. Call me old school.

Neat. Highest score on cognitive-behavioral, 76% (46% pure behavioral, though). Psychodynamic came in at 45%. Low scores in the postmodern stuff.

I'm not surprised that I scored so high on CBT. I'm ace at rationalizing. Not so good at dealing head-on with emotions and trauma stuff. I'm in psychodynamic therapy, and slowly working on bridging the enormous rational-emotional gap in my brain, and dropping what my T has referred to as "a very sophisticated web of defenses." I suspect that I wouldn't benefit much from CBT, even if it has a certain appeal.

That was very interesting. Some of the statements were like gibberish to me!

My highest score of the 4 main areas was 70% in the Existential-Humanist category.

In the sub-categories, I was highest in Person-Centered (86%), Existential (81%), Reality Therapy (60%) and Solution-Focused (56%).

Very interesting! I would like to give it to my T and see how closely we match. Maybe this would be a good way of predicting goodness of fit between a therapist and a client.

Existential Humanist (75%)
Psychodynamic (73%)
Cognitive-Behavioral (67%)
Post Modern pretty low (55%).

I have no idea as to what these results mean except that i'm in the right "realm" of therapy.

I vote for sunrise's "some statements were like jibberish" observation and teal's "I'm in the right 'realm' of therapy" comment. Pretty much what I felt about it.

interesting - my beliefs strongly align with Behavioral and Cognitive-Behavioral (90%+ on those two)...however, it's a therapeutic approach that I can't stand and don't find any benefit from. I can incorporate some aspects of it in to my therapy, but using that as my only approach wouldn't be sufficient for me.

My next two were about evenly tied between psychodynamic (high in individual psychology) and existential humanist (high in person-centered). These are the two areas that my T focuses most on and have been the most helpful for me.

It's interesting to me that just because you may follow a line of thinking similar to a particular therapy orientation, it doesn't mean that will actually be the best fit for you therapeutically.

Nice little quiz, I enjoyed taking it.

For the 4 overall categories I had 61% Psychodynamic, 79% Cognitive Behavioral, 78% Existential Humanist, and 74% Post Modern.

As for my top scores in each school of thought they were... 66% Individual Psychology, 91% REBT, 85% Person Centered, and 88% Narrative. The results don't really surprise me a lot as I love Phenomenological (Narrative based) psychology and while not a big fan of Cognitive Psychology I do ultimately have overlaps with the Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy due to my Phenomenological education and Psychology education.

My bottom in each category were 53% Analytical, 71% Behavioral, 71% Existential, and 60% Solution-Focused.

I was highest on Existential Humanist (58%) and Post Modern (57%) and lowest on Psychodynamic (53%) and Cognitive- Behavioral (48%)

Existential-Humanist- 75%
Psychodynamic- 70%
Cognitive Behavioral - 67%
Post Modern- 61%

Seriously tho, 72 questions! Maybe cos I'm very tired but most of those questions i had to read and re-read... had no idea what they were saying.

Interesting! I had 73% psychodynamic (with 86% analytical - is that spot on or what?), 73% cognitive-behavioral, 71% existential, 37% post-modern.

Really interesting, and fits with what I would have guessed for myself:
Overall, Existential Humanist 87%, Psychodynamic 76%, CB 75%, Post Modern 66%.

Highest sub-scores: Existential 90%, Gestalt 88%, Person centered 85%, Analytical 81%.

Lowest sub score: Solution focused 58%.

My T was largely Existential Humanist in perspective, and Psychodynamic and CBT in modalities. I suspect there may be some correlation in attunement if scores are similar between T and client, but not necessarily related to progress.


BTW--why does PC insist on marking "analytical" as misspelled???

I didn't get as high results as most of you (maybe I am too careful with using 0 and 10 values )
Psychodynamic - 53%
Cognitive-Behavioral - 60%
Existential Humanist - 55%
PostModern - 47%

The highest sub-score - Behavioral (76%)
The lowest sub-score - Solution-Focused (38%)

Feralkittymom: In my case "analytical" is not marked as misspelled...

Ooh, thanks for that. That was mucho interesting!

Very interesting.

I got 83% in individual psychology (I kind of expected it ... I really should train to become an Adlerian psychotherapist sometime. Been considering it for a couple of years), person-centered therapy (I knew that much about my beliefs ), and narrative therapy (I'm not very familiar with its specifics but I do use narratives and language a lot and think similarly). They all tied.

I got a surprising 80% in psychoanalysis. Followed by 73% in existential therapy as well as Gestalt therapy.

Oh, and interestingly, I got 76% in both Existential-Humanist AND Postmodern, closely followed by 74% in Psychodynamic.

This is a very interesting test. I wish it had more orientations though and wish it had body psychotherapies too.

In the categories - narrative, existential and individual psychology were the highest for me and behavioral, cognitive/behavioral, gestalt, psychoanalysis and reality were all the lowest at 31%. It was interesting to me the similarity in my low scores across the categories.

And all of mine came back under 60%. I had no overwhelmingly large percentage of any of them.

It was a fun quiz to take but like some of the others I found their questions to be gibberish.

I scored: Psycho. Dyn. - 61%
Cog.-Behav. - 60%
Ext. Hum. - 56%
Post Mod. - 35%

Definitely a fence-sitter, me.

To me many of the question were so vague they almost had no functional use in evaluating anything... I mean how can you evaluate something when misunderstanding is so integral to the process?
idk... still fun! So thank you.

(BTW, I think that the word "Analytical" is a relatively new construct as a word. Analytic was the older, proper usage... it's antonym would have been something along the line of "illogic". Funny thing is that both words show as misspelled on PC, luckily they allow us to add them to our dictionary.)

I know this post is old, but I found it interesting.

All my answers were a little biased, as I am a Psych major and was able to match almost every question to its theoretical perspective, but it was fun!

63% Psychodynamic
78% Cognitive-Behavioral
63% Existential Humanist
56% Post Modern

I enjoyed this quiz a lot! I got:

81% in psychoanalysis --> 72% psychodynamic, 69% existential, 55% cognitive and 45% postmodern.

The type of therapy I've been into is psychoanalytic psychotherapy, so I guess it matches my results..

Unlike most people here, I did not like this quiz. It was long and I did not understand some of the statements. But I also didn't like it because it reminded me once again of how much we don't know about mental health/illness and how many different schools of therapy are out there. While sometimes having options and variety feels good, other times it makes you put less trust in therapists because you think they could be wrong and who is to say the source of your problems are your personality or how your parents treated you or something biological or sociological or whatever.

I really hope that soon enough, therapy becomes more unified and less diverse. So it becomes less subjective and more objective, like other sciences.

Like others, I found some of the questions to sound like gibberish. I had to re-read them several times to figure out what they meant. For me, those were the questions about narrative and post-modern therapies.

My score was based entirely on those thinkers who have been influential in my life, starting with my self-help reading in junior high school right up to the present.

I scored highest in REBT and Reality therapy. No surprise there. I've been reading Albert Ellis and William Glasser from my late teens until the present.

Other important influences were Aaron Beck (and David Burns) and BF Skinner, in the cognitive and behavioral areas. I started reading them as a young adult to the present.

Next came Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Victor Frankl and Rollo May, as well as Fritz Perls. I studied them all, beginning with checking out library books in junior high school. I also studied Freud, but as I got older, and better able to understand, I gravitated toward Jung and Adler.

Victor Frankl (existential therapy) opened my eyes in my early 20s to the idea that one can find meaning in even the most brutal of situations. He was a holocaust survivor and if he could find meaning and reasons to continue living and to love in that experience, it made me realize I could not only survive, but thrive, no matter what had happened to me. I haven't had a single thought that life is unbearable or a single urge toward self-destruction since reading (and re-reading) Victor Frankl's Man Search For Meaning. And some really bad things have happened. External things, objectively horrifying, and thanks to Victor Frankl I knew I could bear them although I was suffering.

It's probably the most influential book I ever read. It made me realize what I wanted to do with my life. Dr. Albert Ellis (REBT) and Dr. Bill Glasser (Reality Therapy and Choice Theory) told me how to do it.

The others provided me with fine-tuning, details and enjoyment.

That was a very enjoyable survey. Thank you for sharing it with us.

I scored highest in Existential and lowest in Solution Focused, though having said that my scores were very similar for all of them. Unsurprising really, because the more I read about the different theoretical orientations the more they sound like different ways of saying the same thing.

I didn't like the quiz either. I found it somewhat disheartening. Maybe it's because of the different schools, as you pointed out. I don't think therapy can ever be a science, though; at least, I hope not. So much of what works is about the relationship between therapist and the individual. Unless the therapist is doing short-term goal-driven therapy, that is, in which case someone has to really want that approach to make it work.

I did not take it all that seriously - but I sort of thought it was fun. My scores were all fairly close together and not very high.