Jourard's "Self-Disclosure Theory" is a therapeutic model of humanistic treatment where total disclosure is encouraged between the client and the therapist.[2] The therapist would also disclose himself to the client in reciprocation, however, the therapist, being a psychologist, would rely on training and the concepts of psychological theories to relate to the client. According to Jourard, disclosure is important in any relationship, as it fosters openness, healthy relationships, and an enthusiasm to grow within the personal and social sphere.
Sidney Jourard used the concept of transparency to mean self-disclosure. He felt that the only way one could come to understand himself or herself was through disclosure to significant others. This requires a dropping of defenses, pretense, social performance and other protections against authenticity.
Sidney Jourard Theory Of Self Disclosure
Transparency requires honesty and courage. Becoming more transparent is an on-going process. So in this sense, the transparent self is not the parts of self that are revealed, but the dynamic process of moving toward authentic self-disclosure.
Disclosure as a phenomenon was first investigated by Sidney Jourard (1971). The process was originally defined as telling others about the self. Since then, an extensive amount of information about disclosure has been produced, leading to significant shifts in the way we think about this phenomenon (Derlega et al. 1993; Petronio in press). One change has been to consider disclosure as a process of revealing and concealing private information. Making this change raises many questions about how people decide to disclose or remain private and helps us better understand the process within romantic relationships, marriage, and families (Burgoon 1982; Holtgraves 1990; Petronio 1991, 2000).
Because marital partners and families regulate both disclosure and privacy, it helps to have a framework to understand how people make decisions about this process. The theory of Communication Privacy Management (Petronio, in press) defines our revealing through the process of balancing disclosure and privacy. Briefly, the theory proposes that we manage the flow of our private information in relationships by constructing personal, dyadic, and group boundaries around private information. These metaphorically constructed boundaries allow us to identify who has ownership rights and control over the information; who does and does not have access to it; and how it should or should not be protected from those outside the boundary.
Researchers have consistently found that females tend to show more self-disclosure than males. Although a relatively small effect, this gender difference can be moderated by target, measure, or topic. For example, women disclose much more to those with whom they have a relationship (e.g., a friend or parent) than do men. Developmental researchers have found that as adolescents enter puberty, they disclose increasingly more to peers than to parents. Research also suggests that cultures with a greater emphasis on nuclear and extended families (e.g., Hispanic populations) are more self-disclosing than cultures with less closely knit social or family structures (e.g., non-Hispanic white Americans). Members of Eastern cultures (such as China and Japan) tend to report less frequent self-disclosures than members of Western cultures (such as the United States).
In addition to positive consequences for relationships, disclosing emotional self-related experiences has positive effects on physical health. However, sometimes disclosing a personal secret can lead to negative relationship consequences. For example, self-disclosures can make a person vulnerable to the rejection, indifference, alienation, or exploitation of others. In more applied settings, there is much discussion and debate about whether and to what extent therapists should self-disclose to their clients. The nature of self-disclosure in online relationships has also seen increased attention from researchers.
In 1958, five years after earning his doctorate in psychology, Jourard jointly authored his first professional paper on self-disclosure. In this study, Jourard and his colleague Dr Paul Lasakow created the first questionnaire on this trait and ever since, it has remained the prototype for research in this field. The following year, Jourard produced a detailed theoretical paper on self-disclosure, and it generated tremendous, enduring impact.
Jourard's "Self-Disclosure Theory" of humanistic therapy is a therapeutic model of humanistic treatment where total disclosure was encouraged between the client and the therapist. The therapist would also disclose himself to the client to reciprocate; however, the therapist, being a psychologist, would rely on training and the concepts of psychological theories to relate to the client. According to Jourard, disclosure is important in any relationship, as it fosters openness, healthy relationships, and an enthusiasm to grow within the personal and social sphere.
Behavioral, Cognitive, and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies have all recognized the value of self-disclosure in treatment, potentially improving modeling, reinforcing, normalizing, improving therapeutic bonds, and increasing the chance of positive outcomes (Metcalf, 2011).
By disclosing private details about ourselves as therapists, we draw the client into a collective privacy boundary. And in response to this process of self-disclosure, the shared boundary never shrinks back to being a personal one again (Masaviru, 2016).
But the questions regarding self-disclosure do not end there. Timing and frequency are also crucial. Finding the right point during a session requires skill and experience, especially when a client requires multiple interventions. Early disclosures should help build rapport; however, research suggests they can also be valuable during termination.
While undoubtedly there are risks to engaging in self-disclosure, the feedback from clients is that there are also many positives resulting from sharing personal experiences, beliefs, and feelings (Barnett, 2011).
While reference to self-disclosure is not detailed, it is clear regarding the need to avoid exploitation or harming your client. The general principles behind counseling ethics remind the therapist of the importance of (Barnett, 2011):
Done well, self-disclosure helps clients and therapists align with one another while introducing new perspectives, strengthening the therapeutic alliance and increasing the chance of successful change.
You cannot collaborate with another person toward some common end unless you know him. How can you know him, and he you, unless you have engaged in enough mutual disclosure of self to be able anticipate how he will react and what part he will play?
While the traditional tools vary on several aspects, such as topics, breadth of disclosure, or the target partner, they all share two important features: the basic conception that SD is a stable personality trait, and the ensuing reliance on self-report questionnaires. Self-report SD questionnaires have important practical advantages: they are easy and quick to administer, they are highly reliable, and their validity as a subjective measure is very good. Moreover, the use of self-report SD questionnaires has proven to be very productive in studies that employed it as a dependent variable or even manipulated it as a pseudo-causative independent variable in many fields of psychology. Thus, accumulating research has demonstrated that such questionnaires are highly informative and sensitive to individual differences in SD (e.g., Horesh et al., 2012; Kahn et al., 2012). In sum, self-report tools aim to appraise the persistent tendency, and, by definition, their context sensitivity is low, as they were not designed to measure transient factors involved in SD. Hence, self-report tools reflect a generalized, cumulative, and retrospective perception of SD, but they lack sensitivity to situational factors that may affect it.
A different approach to evaluating situated SD focuses on behavioral measures. Pedersen and Breglio (1968) were perhaps the first to apply this approach to investigate SD. They asked participants to answer questions about different topics (similar to the JSDQ topics) and simply counted the number of words participants produced in response to each question as an indicator of SD. Similarly, Jourard and Friedman (1970) measured the duration of time spent in self-disclosure. More recently, this approach was used in studies of computer-mediated communication to investigate reciprocity in SD (e.g., Joinson, 2001; Barak and Gluck-Ofri, 2007). Thus, behavioral measures such as duration and word count of verbal disclosure were regarded as measures of the quantitative aspect of SD. One of the major advantages of such behavioral methods is their capacity to record subtle and short-term fluctuations in behavior. Hence, they would appear to be very useful for investigating situational factors that modulate SD.
Self-disclosure refers to the process of revealing personal, intimate information about oneself to others. Through self-disclosure, two individuals get to know one another. Self-disclosure is considered a key aspect of developing closeness and intimacy with others, including friends, romantic partners, and family members. However, self-disclosure also functions as a way for people to express their feelings about a situation, to give others their thoughts and opinions about a topic, to elicit reassurance about their feelings, or to get advice.
I was most interested to read the article on self-disclosure by Ruddle and Dilks (June 2015). Although this phenomenon (formerly with SD as its abbreviation but seemingly now growing an extra letter as TSD) has been researched quite extensively over the years, its roots in humanistic psychology have perhaps led to it being regarded as somehow non-mainstream. In my years of practice as a clinical psychologist it has neither featured in training curricula nor in academic lectures. 2ff7e9595c
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