Is the therapeutic alliance just about liking your therapist?

No. Researchers describe the alliance as having three parts: agreement on the goals of therapy, agreement on the tasks or how you will get there, and the personal bond. Setting an intention feeds the goals part, so it is more than rapport.

Is it the goal that matters, or the bond with the therapist?

The 2018 review measured the alliance as a whole, so it does not separate the two. What it shows is that the overall alliance, which includes agreement on goals, tracks with better outcomes across many kinds of therapy. Naming an intention strengthens one recognized part of that whole.

Intention

Why do therapists ask you to set an intention?

Q: How strong is the link between the alliance and therapy outcome?

In the 2018 review of 295 studies, the alliance-outcome link was r = 0.278, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.256 to 0.299. That is a modest but very consistent relationship, and it is one of the most repeated findings in psychotherapy research.

Short answer

Therapists ask because naming what you want to work on is part of building the therapeutic alliance, the shared, working bond between you and your therapist. A 2018 review of 295 studies and more than 30,000 people found that the strength of that alliance was one of the steadiest markers of how therapy turned out.

The research

Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, volume 55, issue 4, pages 316 to 340.

Sample 295 studies, more than 30,000 people in therapy

Published 2018

Journal Psychotherapy

Christoph Flückiger and his colleagues pooled 295 separate studies, published between 1978 and 2017, covering more than 30,000 people in therapy. They asked one plain question. How strongly does the alliance between a client and their therapist relate to how therapy turns out? The alliance is the working bond between the two of you, and researchers describe it as having three parts: agreement on the goals of the work, agreement on how you will get there, and the personal bond between you. Setting an intention is the first of those three, the goals part, made concrete. Across all 295 studies, a stronger alliance went with better outcomes. The size of that link was r = 0.278, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.256 to 0.299. That is a modest but very steady relationship, and it held across different kinds of therapy, different problems, and different ways of measuring the alliance. It is one of the most repeated findings in all of psychotherapy research. What the review cannot tell you is which way the arrow points. A strong alliance may help therapy work, or therapy that is working may build a strong alliance. Most likely both are true at once.

Read the paper

What does this mean for you?

When a therapist asks you to set an intention, they are helping you build the goals part of the alliance. You are naming, out loud and together, what this work is for. The research suggests that is not a formality. The alliance is one of the steadiest predictors of how therapy goes, and agreement on goals is one of its three building blocks.

Be clear about what the study does and does not show. It measured the whole alliance, not intention setting on its own. Nobody isolated the single act of naming an intention and showed it changes an outcome. What the review shows is that the broader thing your intention feeds into, a shared and agreed sense of direction, tracks closely with better results.

The link is also a correlation, not a promise. A strong alliance and good outcomes travel together, but the study cannot say that one causes the other. The honest read is that arriving with a named direction, and agreeing on it with your therapist, is linked to the kind of relationship that tends to help. It is worth doing, and it is not a promise on its own.

There is one more reason therapists ask. An intention gives the work a center of gravity. It is something you can both return to when a session drifts, and something you can carry into the days between sessions, when the details start to blur. Naming it is how a private hope becomes a shared goal.

The takeaway

Say what you want to work on, out loud, with your therapist. Agreeing on the goal is part of what helps.
Keep it specific and yours. An intention you actually mean gives the work something to organize around.
Remember the limit. A shared direction is linked to better therapy, not a promise of it.

Terms in this page

Intention setting Mental readiness Between-session support

This is the work Asendar™ was built for: a steady place to name what you are working toward, so a private intention becomes a shared direction you can return to between sessions. If you want a simple read on where you are starting from today, take your Mental Readiness Score.

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Explore more in the Intention pillar