Your Personality is Holding You Back: Nuanced Associations of Self-Disclosure in Psychotherapy

Abstract

Background: Alongside the hindering of therapeutic progress, client dishonesty in psychotherapy, particularly that of minimising one’s own distress, may have harmful implications on the client. Previous studies have called for greater attention towards the matter of client trust and sense of safety to encourage self-disclosure. Additionally, clients with certain psychopathological behaviours most in need of therapy may be least likely to self-disclose. Objective: Different reasons cited for non-disclosure may require different strategies to encourage self-disclosure for different clients. This dissertation investigated the relationship between personality nuances, and tendencies towards self-disclosure and various non-disclosure reasons, to aid in therapists’ understanding of clients’ idiosyncrasies. Personality nuances would enable a more informative understanding of this relationship than previously discovered, alongside a novel understanding of the relationship between personality and various non-disclosure reasons. Self-disclosure’s associations with some psychopathologies were additionally explored. Methods: 283 participants completed selfreport surveys. Prediction models based on zero-order correlations were used to investigate nuances’ ability to predict the various ‘outcomes’ in this study. Top-15 key nuances that highly correlated with each ‘outcome’ were identified. To examine the relationships between self-disclosure and psychopathologies, correlations between their personality correlation profiles were conducted. Results: Self-disclosure, several non-disclosure reasons and some measures of psychopathology were well-predicted by personality nuance items. Collections of key nuance items highly related to self-disclosure and non-disclosure reasons were identified, which were well-able to predict their respective ‘outcomes’. Only psychopathy was related to low self-disclosure, of the psychopathologies. Findings from this study show promise for the construction of a personality nuance scale based on nuance item-pairs.