Abstract

This study was designed to examine what they experienced and how different they are from each other in perceptions when the novice therapist and clients faced premature termination in counseling. I interviewed novice therapists and clients who experienced premature termination and analysed by consensual qualitative research. As a result, typical procedure of premature termination was like this: first, novice therapists began counseling without explaining to the clients about what was the counseling purposes or how many times they would meet. Sometimes they leaded counseling dominantly, or showed passive responses. It caused premature termination which due to passive attitude of therapists to their clients' behaviors such as calling for quitting counseling or no-show. At the post-termination, novice therapists mentioned that they felt regret, self-accusation, dissatisfaction, tended to blaming clients' attitudes, maintained negative feelings from the premature termination. At the typical methods of premature termination experiences, clients started to keeping comfortable mind to novice therapists and they also had sympathies, understanding to novice therapists in the beginning stage. On the other hand, clients felt negative feelings to excessive leading time of counselor when clients didn't want to talk with. In fact, this led to premature termination. The positive result was novice therapist did understand client, but the negative result was dissatisfaction about therapists, and experiment made client be discomfortably. The distinctions of perception between beginning therapists and clients are that clients had much concrete expectation which novice therapists never had anticipated to their counseling. During the counseling, therapists realized clients' hostile, negative attitudes very well, but didn't realize inactive, passive attitude. Most of novice therapists reported they got and maintain negative feeling from the experiments. On the other hand, clients reported that they felt positive and negative feelings spontaneously, and they could be divided into two groups keeping negative mind and positive mind from the experiment.