Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
In a recent paper, McGee, Del Vento, and Bavelas (2005) wrote about how therapists' questions constitute a form of intervention. By that, they mean that therapists' questions often carry with them a framework of presuppositions that constrain the client to answer in such a way as to ratify, and hence to affiliate with, the presuppositions informing the questions. Such affiliation involves the co-construction or sharing of the perspective of the therapist. But sometimes clients resist sharing therapists' perspectives, a situation known to even highly experienced therapists: “What therapist is not familiar with the experience of feeling his or her body tense as a client replies with ‘yes, but’ to everything that is discussed?” (Lipchik, 2002, p. 17).
How much more stressful, then, might it be for training therapists to manage such resistance? The impetus for the particular study on which this chapter is based was provided by a masters student in a university-based programme in couple and family therapy. As part of their internship, students in this programme work as individual therapists, and sometimes as co-therapists, providing counselling that is supervised by a programme faculty. This student was participating in a research project I was conducting using conversation analysis (CA) to study therapy interactions between training clinicians and their clients.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.