Choosing Memento Vivere

Theoretical Orientation Explorer — Saved Profile

A 76-item educational self-discovery assessment for counselors-in-training, scoring 15 theoretical orientations and generating a saved developmental profile with top-three, dimensional, integration, and supervision insights.

About this assessment

What it measures

A 76-item educational self-discovery exercise that maps current kinship with 15 counseling theories. It describes preferences in how you understand people, build relationships, and support change; it does not measure competence or establish a fixed professional identity.

Why it helps

The profile can help you choose a provisional theoretical home base, notice philosophical tensions in an integrative approach, identify blind spots, and bring focused questions into supervision or class.

How to answer

Answer from your present convictions rather than the answer that sounds most professionally acceptable. All 76 items are required. Your responses and results will be securely saved to your CMV client record; the AI synthesis receives your scored domains and your item answers so the feedback can speak to what you actually endorsed, but never your name, client code, or contact details.

Stored assessment: Your responses and results will be saved to your CMV client record so they can be reviewed over time and discussed in supervision or therapy. A score-only summary of the 15 orientation domains may be sent to the configured AI service for individualized synthesis; your name, client code, and item-level answers are not included.

Rate each statement from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Answer from your present convictions about people and change rather than what you think you should believe. The Theoretical Orientation Scale © Smith, 2010 is an educational self-discovery tool with no claimed psychometric validation. Results are not a diagnosis or a definitive classification.

If you prefer not to save or transmit any responses, use the browser-only private explorer.

Question 1 of 76
Transference is valuable in therapy because it provides clients with the opportunity to reexperience a variety of feelings from early childhood.
Question 2 of 76
The social determinants of personality are far more powerful than psychosexual determinants.
Question 3 of 76
A therapist should challenge clients with the ways in which they are living an unauthentic life.
Question 4 of 76
I like to devise experiments designed to increase clients’ self-awareness of what they are doing and how they are doing it.
Question 5 of 76
It is important to ask clients about their earliest recollections.
Question 6 of 76
It is important to state therapy treatment goals in concrete, specific, and objective terms to best help clients.
Question 7 of 76
Although it is desirable to be loved and accepted by others, it is not necessary.
Question 8 of 76
Therapy should emphasize clients’ interactions with their families.
Question 9 of 76
The basic problem of most clients is that they are either involved in a present unsatisfying relationship or lack a significant relationship.
Question 10 of 76
A good client–therapist relationship is a necessary but not sufficient condition for behavior change to occur.
Question 11 of 76
The conditions that the therapist offers during therapy are far more powerful than the techniques he or she uses.
Question 12 of 76
The appropriate goals of therapy are social change and individual change.
Question 13 of 76
Although we all encounter certain circumstances in life, we are not victims of our circumstances. We are what we choose to become.
Question 14 of 76
Therapy should focus on the client’s feelings, present awareness, and blocks to awareness.
Question 15 of 76
Cognition is the major determinant of how we feel and act.
Question 16 of 76
Too much therapy is problem focused rather than solution focused.
Question 17 of 76
A therapist’s congruence or genuineness is one of the most significant conditions for establishing a therapeutic relationship.
Question 18 of 76
It is important to know a client’s position in their family of origin so that I can better understand the roles they have adopted in life.
Question 19 of 76
Instead of talking about feelings and experiences in therapy, I believe that it is more important for clients to relive and reexperience those feelings during the therapy hour.
Question 20 of 76
When an individual in a family has problems, a therapist might help by examining family communication and relationship problems.
Question 21 of 76
Clients are ready to terminate therapy when they understand the historical roots of their problems and when they have clarified how their early childhood problems are affecting them in the present.
Question 22 of 76
The major themes of psychotherapy deal with a search for meaning, freedom and responsibility, isolation, alienation, death and its ramifications for living.
Question 23 of 76
Each person develops a unique lifestyle, which I will examine during therapy.
Question 24 of 76
Therapists should encourage clients to take responsibility for how they are choosing to be or live in their world.
Question 25 of 76
A therapist helps produce change in clients by restoring healthy family organizational structures.
Question 26 of 76
The most fundamental goal of therapy is to create a psychological climate of safety in which clients will feel safe enough to drop their defenses.
Question 27 of 76
Therapists should pick and choose from different theoretical systems for the purpose of integrating them.
Question 28 of 76
It is important for therapists to counsel clients with their families.
Question 29 of 76
Working on clients’ weaknesses rarely produces excellence. If one is looking for excellence, one has to focus on clients’ strengths.
Question 30 of 76
Denial, repression, intellectualization, and other defense mechanisms are central to understanding therapy.
Question 31 of 76
It is important to teach clients techniques to help them deal with issues.
Question 32 of 76
There is no one best theory when it comes to therapy.
Question 33 of 76
I don’t believe that a therapist should be skilled in only one theory of psychotherapy.
Question 34 of 76
People strive for self-actualization.
Question 35 of 76
Irrational beliefs are the primary causes of emotional disturbance.
Question 36 of 76
People learn both adaptive and maladaptive behaviors.
Question 37 of 76
Successful living is connected to the degree of social interest that clients display.
Question 38 of 76
The client is the expert on his or her problems rather than the therapist.
Question 39 of 76
Human behavior is determined by patterns of reinforcements and punishments in the environment.
Question 40 of 76
Events themselves do not cause emotional disturbances. Instead, it is our evaluation of and beliefs about these events that cause our problems.
Question 41 of 76
It is the client’s responsibility, not the therapist’s, to evaluate their current behavior.
Question 42 of 76
All of the following are basic psychological needs: belonging, power, freedom, and fun.
Question 43 of 76
Sometimes people choose to be depressed; they engage in depressing behavior.
Question 44 of 76
It is important to intentionally include a stage in counseling that helps to instill hope within the client.
Question 45 of 76
An appropriate goal for therapy is to conduct conversations with clients that help them develop new meanings for their feelings and behaviors.
Question 46 of 76
Clients are sometimes stuck in a pattern of living a problem-saturated story that has not worked for them for some time.
Question 47 of 76
A useful counseling strategy is to help a client create a more satisfying life story.
Question 48 of 76
The therapist should be viewed as only one source of information instead of as the expert.
Question 49 of 76
Clients’ stories assume hold over their lives only when there is an audience to appreciate and support such stories.
Question 50 of 76
Therapy should help clients engage in externalizing conversations.
Question 51 of 76
Clients are best understood through assessing the interactions between and among family members.
Question 52 of 76
Gender role analysis is an important therapeutic technique I intend to use.
Question 53 of 76
Counseling should focus on a client’s strengths rather than on their problems.
Question 54 of 76
Culturally skilled counselors are not limited to only one theoretical counseling approach but recognize that helping strategies may be culture bound.
Question 55 of 76
Emphasizing even one client’s strength may function to counteract two negative events that took place in his or her day.
Question 56 of 76
It is important for therapists to help clients manage their weaknesses rather than eradicate them.
Question 57 of 76
Change takes place during therapy because the therapist helps the client gain insight into the way he or she relates to others based on childhood experiences.
Question 58 of 76
One of the functions of the therapist is to pay close attention to the client’s body language and unfinished business.
Question 59 of 76
The purpose of therapy is to bring the unconscious to the conscious level.
Question 60 of 76
It is important for me to become knowledgeable about the ways that oppression and social inequities can operate on individual, societal, and cultural levels.
Question 61 of 76
Mutual trust, acceptance, and warmth are important when building the therapeutic relationship.
Question 62 of 76
We must learn to fulfill our needs and to do so in a way that does not deprive others of their ability to fulfill their needs.
Question 63 of 76
One goal of therapy should be to help clients recover meaning in their lives.
Question 64 of 76
It is important for me to learn about indigenous models of health and healing and be willing to collaborate with such resources.
Question 65 of 76
I would like to use the miracle question as one of my counseling techniques.
Question 66 of 76
Culturally skilled counselors seek to become aware of their own personal culture and recognize that culture may impact the counseling relationship.
Question 67 of 76
Therapy should focus on client awareness, contact with the environment, and integration of these forces.
Question 68 of 76
In therapy, the client controls what behavior he or she wants to change, and the therapist controls how the behavior is changed.
Question 69 of 76
I intend to learn several theories well so that I can meet the needs of a diverse group of clients.
Question 70 of 76
I feel comfortable using techniques from several different theoretical approaches to counseling.
Question 71 of 76
I don’t believe in the existence of a construct called personality. Instead, I believe that we construct stories about our lives.
Question 72 of 76
Many problems that men and women face are caused by their adoption of societal gender roles.
Question 73 of 76
Change in any one part of the system affects all parts of the system.
Question 74 of 76
Culturally skilled counselors become knowledgeable about the cultures of the clients with whom they work.
Question 75 of 76
Women therapists are often more sensitive to women’s issues than are men therapists.
Question 76 of 76
Therapists should understand how sexist and oppressive societal beliefs and practices affect women clients in negative ways.

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© 2026 Jonathan Procter, Ph.D., LMHC — Choosing Memento Vivere
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