The question of which is more critical, the treatment modality or the counselor-patient relationship, in psychotherapy has always been questioned. A meta-analysis by Bowers and Clum (1988) found that therapy with a focus on both the therapeutic relationship and treatment modality had a combined effect size of .76, while therapy with treatment modality focus only had an effect size of .55. Thus, empirical data warrants that both the technique and the relationship weigh in the effectiveness of psychotherapy, with the common factors of therapy, the therapeutic relationship focus, contributing .21 standard deviations to the effect size. Based off the broad finding that most forms of psychotherapy confer equivalent outcomes when compared, some have
