Psychological Testing Services Philosophy
Community Institute for Psychotherapy offers psychological testing at sliding scale fees for use as an adjunct therapeutic tool for understanding adult individuals in ongoing psychotherapy with CIP intern therapists or with therapists in the community. We maintain that thoughtfully conceived, culturally sensitive, skillfully administered, and carefully interpreted psychological testing provides clients and their therapists with a valid and valuable means to learn about aspects of themselves, their thinking, feeling, perception, level of psychological development, adaptation, and potentials that may not be understood through psychotherapy alone.
Some of the issues for which clients and therapists have found psychological testing to provide highly useful insights include intellectual capacities, personality structure and function including dynamic and diagnostic formulations, patterns of interpersonal relationships, coping styles and defensive operations, reality testing, risk factors, and suggestions for ways in which the psychotherapeutic relationship might be approached most effectively.
Therapists who request testing at CIP are encouraged to develop specific questions which they wish the testing to address. The tester, a pre-doctoral intern under experienced, licensed supervision, approaches the testing project with the goal of answering these questions, if possible, and thus meaningfully tailoring the process to meet the therapist’s and client’s specific requests for information or guidance.
Testing Process
It is highly recommended that the therapist and client together develop one or more questions that they wish to have answered through psychological testing. The therapist then sends those questions to the Intern Testing Coordinator at CIP. A pre-doctoral intern will be assigned to do the testing and will talk with both the therapist and the client in more detail about their questions. The client will schedule a minimum of two testing sessions with the intern, each lasting two to three hours.
After reviewing the test results and preparing a report, the intern will contact the therapist and client to schedule a feedback interview. In most cases, the intern will meet with the therapist and client together to discuss the results of the testing and give each of them a written report of the results.
