Sage-Tips

How do you deal with a hostile patient?

7 Tips for Handling Difficult Patients

1. Don’t Get Defensive.
2. Watch Your Body Language.
3. Let Them Tell Their Story and Listen Quietly.
4. Acknowledge the Situation.
5. Set Boundaries.
6. Administer Patient Satisfaction Surveys.
7. Be Proactive.

How do you deal with unmotivated patients?

7 Tips for Dealing with Difficult Patients

1. Focus on engagement from the beginning.
2. Make it a collaboration.
3. Collect feedback—and act on it.
4. Make the homework more palatable.
5. Remain empathetic.
6. Avoid confrontation.
7. Know when enough is enough.

Can a therapist refer a disliking patient to a colleague?

If the awareness of the dislike for the patient comes during the initial consultation and the therapist is not inclined to work with the patient, it may be relatively easy to refer the patient to a a colleague.

What should you do when your therapist dislike your client?

• Use your feelings to move therapy forward. Muran advises using metacommunication — communication about the communication — when your client is obnoxious or aggressive. “It’s important to explore the experience of dislike and try to figure out what’s going on,”” he says.

Can you refer a patient to a therapist who doesn’t like you?

“I think it would be a toxic experience for a patient, unless the therapist were super-humanly able not to express it, to sit with a therapist who didn’t like you,” she says. Be careful to refer the client in a way that is not damaging to the patient.

Is it normal to dislike your patient?

“There are certainly plenty of moments when you dislike your patient or dislike the position they’re taking,” he says. “Very frequently that is a momentary thing.” Muran says he’s seen many instances where initial dislike turned to regard over time and that a difficult beginning does not preclude working together.