Abstract
Within emotion-focused therapy (EFT), the client’s ability to express and reflect on core emotional experiences is seen as fundamental to constructing the self and to entering into a change process. For this study, we 1) examine storytelling contexts in which clients do not disclose the emotional impact of their narrative, and 2) identify the interactional practices through which EFT therapists subsequently call attention to what the client may have felt. In doing so, we examine client stories drawn from video-taped individual psychotherapy sessions involving clinically depressed clients. Client stories and therapists’ responses to these stories were analysed using conversation analytic methods. Three different therapist response types were identified: eliciting, naming and illustrating the emotional impact of the client’s prior narrative. These responses also were found to differ in terms of how effectively they could display empathy and secure affiliation with clients. The implications of this work for therapeutic practice are discussed.
Keywords
Introduction
Evaluative and emotive expressions imbue narratives with significance and make the point of the story apparent to recipients (Labov and Waletzky, 1967). When tellers display their emotions, assess situations and evaluate the behaviour of themselves or others, the telling is rendered more vivid and personal, thus allowing story recipients to more fully access and affiliate with the story’s affectual landscape (Günthner, 1997; Stivers, 2008). Storytelling is seen by many psychotherapy researchers as a fundamental component of the therapeutic process: client stories not only provide opportunities for therapists to engage with and co-develop clients’ accounts of their troubles, they also work to construct a certain image of the self, or identity, and thus can provide an indication of the client’s well-being (Angus and McLeod, 2004). By relaying significant past personal episodes through narratives, clients and therapists are able to create shared contexts of affiliation and understanding, thus facilitating the creation of strong personal bonds and a positive therapeutic alliance (Angus et al., 2004).
In experiential psychotherapies, such as emotion-focused therapy (EFT; Greenberg, 2002, 2010), therapists tend to pay particular attention to client emotional displays during storytelling. For Greenberg (2010), EFT principles centrally involve guiding clients’ ‘emotional processing’ in terms of facilitating awareness, expression and reflection of clients’ core emotional experiences. Thus, when clients narrate their personal experiences, emotion-focused therapists will not only be concerned with understanding ‘what happened’, but with ‘what the client felt’ in relation to the troubling event (Angus and Greenberg, 2011).
When disclosing their troubles, however, clients do not always make explicit how the significant events of the story have impacted on them emotionally; that is, it may not be clear whether these story events have left the client feeling sad, disappointed, angry and so on. These contexts in which clients do not verbally disclose what they felt have important implications for psychotherapies with an experiential focus. First, the client’s affectual treatment of personal events – as displayed through an affectual stance (Stivers, 2008) – may be considered incomplete or even underdeveloped. Second, these tellings may implicate the relevance of subsequent emotion-focused work that calls attention to what the client felt. And third, not making the emotional impact of the events explicit may also compromise the achievement of intersubjectivity and affiliation; that is, in these contexts therapists may have difficulty in understanding the full significance of the narrative, which may impede the therapist’s ability to effectively respond with empathy and affiliation.
For this study, we use the methods of conversation analysis (CA) (Sacks, 1992a, 1992b; Schegloff, 2007) to examine instances of client storytelling that were culled from video-taped EFT sessions involving clinically depressed clients. Our analyses will primarily focus on the ways in which client affectual stances are displayed and negotiated over sequences of talk in EFT by showing 1) how clients use multi-modal interactional resources to build up an affectual stance during storytelling, and 2) how emotion-focused therapists – as recipients of the client’s story – work at portraying and developing the emotional impact of the narrative by drawing attention to what clients may have felt. Therapist responses that engaged with the client’s affectual stance – and especially the ‘emotions’ that were displayed through talk and other non-verbal resources – were found to differ in terms of how effectively they could display empathy and secure affiliation with clients. In the concluding section, the implications of this work for therapeutic practice are discussed.
Storytelling, affectual stance and affiliation
Stories may be employed during talk to perform a wide range of different actions. As Schegloff (1997) has pointed out, people tell stories to do things such as complain, account for own conduct, convey troubles or tell a joke. The action a story performs and the specific way in which the story becomes discursively designed provides a recipient with access to the teller’s unique portrayal of personal experience and, in particular, to the ways in which the teller has positioned her- or himself (and others) in terms of authority, knowledge, affect or identity. A teller’s positioning with respect to these various dimensions generally falls under the rubric of stance or stancetaking (see Jaffe, 2009, for an extensive overview). Interactional approaches tend to view stancetaking as locally occasioned and ‘emergent’. In this way, speakers may take up positions that index differential rights and responsibilities – regarding knowledge, affect, identity and so on – and these positions may be negotiated or even contested in and through talk (Goodwin, 2007; Heritage and Raymond, 2005).
Stories tend to contain explicit evaluative components in which tellers convey their assessments of certain situations, their own personal feelings and their appraisal of others’ actions. These evaluative components are generally seen as indexing the teller’s affectual or emotional stance (Günthner, 1997; Stivers, 2008). A wide range of interactional resources for doing affectual stance work in stories has already been identified in the literature. These include story prefaces (Jefferson, 1978; Sacks, 1992a, 1992b), prosody (Günthner, 1997; Stivers, 2008), ‘extremely formulated’ and metaphorical expressions (Günthner, 1997), reported speech (see Drew, 1998; Günthner, 1997; Holt, 2000; Holt and Clift, 2007; Labov, 1972), reenactments (Sidnell, 2006) and facial expressions (Ruusuvuori and Peräkylä, 2009). Stories that involve complaints about a non-present third party (i.e. ‘complaint stories’) have been found to be heavily saturated with evaluative meaning (Drew, 1998; Günthner, 1997). According to Günthner (1997), everyday complaint stories facilitate intense co-alignments between teller and recipient that are characterized by ‘emotional reciprocity’ and ‘dialogues of indignation’.
Successful storytelling requires the cooperative participation of others present. Story recipients need to 1) recognize that a story is about to be launched and that the teller will need to take an extended turn at talk to successfully bring the story to completion, and 2) produce a relevant response to the telling, one that displays suitable understanding and affiliation with the story (Bavelas et al., 2000; Coates, 1996; Jefferson, 1978; Lerner, 1992; Mandelbaum, 2013; Sacks, 1974). Stivers (2008) has described two main interactional issues that story recipients need to address when storytelling gets underway. The first involves aligning with the in-progress activity of storytelling and the second concerns displaying affiliation with the teller’s affectual stance. Further, these two interactional issues – alignment and affiliation – are managed by different response tokens. Whereas alignment tends to be displayed through vocal continuers such as ‘mm hm’ and ‘uh huh’ (Schegloff, 1982), affiliative responses that claim token access and understanding of the teller’s stance are accomplished through nods. Stivers (2008) has also argued that by offering provisional support for the teller’s displayed affectual stance, nods in mid-telling project ‘preferred uptake’ and a matching of the teller’s stance from recipients at story completion. Some attention has already been given to recipient responses following complaint stories in everyday contexts and to whether the responses affiliated or disaffiliated with the teller’s stance (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Günthner, 1997). Affiliative responses included claims of understanding, congruent negative assessments and accounts that justified the teller’s stance, whereas disaffiliation was conveyed through factual follow-up questions, minimal responses and withholdings.
The question of how therapists respond to and affiliate with the affectual stances conveyed through client stories is an important one. In narrative-informed EFT, stories are viewed as crucial sites in which strong personal bonds between clients and therapists may be created and maintained (Angus and Greenberg, 2011). During psychotherapy, clients disclose distressing personal events and therapists are called upon to empathize with and validate the client’s ‘emotionally-permeated’ experience. In doing so, emotion-focused therapists work at building and strengthening a collaborative alliance in which the therapist may not only be present as ‘witness’ to the client’s troubles, but may also work at shaping and co-editing the client’s lived experience (Angus et al., 2004). Thus, an examination of the practices through which therapists draw attention to the affectual stances that are implicitly or explicitly conveyed via storytelling will shed important light on how empathic relations may be achieved and how ‘core emotional themes’ emerging from the telling of stories may be developed and transformed.
Data and methods
The data for this research consist of 15 video-taped one-hour sessions of emotion-focused therapy (EFT) taken from archival material that was collected for the York I Depression Study (Greenberg and Watson, 1998). 1 Clients diagnosed with clinical depression were offered a total of 20 sessions of EFT treatment. For this study, five complete cases were examined and, for each case, three sessions were selected for analysis – one each from the beginning, middle and late period of treatment, bringing the total number of sessions analysed to 15. 2
All video-taped sessions were transcribed using Jefferson’s (2004) transcription conventions (see also the Appendix for a summary of the transcription symbols that we have used). With these conventions, we are able to illustrate how diverse features of talk are delivered (i.e. hesitations, laughter, voice quality, intonation) as well as various aspects of bodily conduct involving gesture, nodding, body posture and facial expression. Thus, because affectual stances are realized multi-modally in conversation (Ruusuvuori, 2013; Stivers, 2008), and because bodily behaviours (e.g. nodding, facial expressions) but also laughter have been shown to be essential resources for negotiating affect and affiliation between therapists and clients (Bänninger-Huber, 1992; Muntigl et al., 2012, 2013), it is important that our transcriptions of psychotherapy talk include a detailed description of how these different interactional resources are implemented within sequences.
Using the methods of conversation analysis (CA) (Sacks, 1992a, 1992b; Schegloff, 2007), we identified and analysed 105 instances of client storytelling from the five chosen cases. Within CA, storytelling is seen as an extended turn that is locally occasioned, sequentially implicative and co-produced by speakers and recipients (e.g. Mandelbaum, 1989, 2013). In our data set, stories revolved around a particular client ‘trouble’ (see Jefferson, 1988, on ‘troubles talk’) and, more specifically, tended to function as a complaint about a non-present third party (Drew, 1998; Günthner, 1997). Our interactional unit of analysis consisted primarily of two sequential slots in which clients would recount a past personal event followed by therapist responses to ‘hearably complete’ tellings; that is, after the teller had produced a narrative climax (see Günthner, 1997). Within this sequence, the main focus was placed on clients’ affectual stance displays and on therapist responses that targeted what the client felt during the event. But because our interest was in the collaborative construction of stories and emotions, we extended our analytic focus to include therapist responses in mid-telling and also how clients would respond to therapists in next turn. Thus, within this sequential context of storytelling, we paid particular attention to how the client’s displayed affectual stance was built up and negotiated and how affiliation around the client’s stance was accomplished moment-by-moment.
Three types of therapist responses
In the stories analysed, although clients would convey an explicit affectual stance in which they would complain about others’ actions – and often treat them as moral transgressions (see Drew, 1998), the way in which these actions affected the client in emotional terms was left inexplicit. In these contexts, it was found that emotion-focused therapists would respond to the client’s telling by drawing attention to what the client felt. We identified three types of therapist responses that targeted the client’s tacit feelings and emotions. These involved eliciting, naming or illustrating the emotional impact of story events on the client. We found that ‘illustrating’ responses would not only display the strongest form of affiliation with the client’s affectual stance, but would also garner subsequent affiliation in the client’s next turn. By themselves, eliciting responses indexed the weakest form of affiliation and, further, seemed to challenge the ‘completeness’ of the narrative; that is, they created an implication that there is more to the client’s story than was said.
Eliciting the emotional impact from the client
Elicitations tended to come in two different formats. In the first, therapists would design their turns as questions that directly prompted the client to identify the emotional impact: ‘What did you feel?’; ‘How did it end up leaving you feeling?’ In the second, the therapist would first summarize or provide the gist of the client’s stance through a formulation (Antaki et al., 2005), before eliciting the emotional impact. We argue that the latter format does more affiliative work than the former. Each of these elicitation formats are discussed below.
Question-elicitation: ‘What did you feel?’
An example of a therapist response that directly prompts the client to name the emotional impact is shown in Extract 1. Here, the client Sofia is recounting a conversation with her mother during a recent visit they made to an outdoor festival. The context for this conversation is that Sofia’s husband has rejected her invitation to join them.
Extract 1 – 304.19(4)
Sofia begins by conveying some general features of the story’s setting: She and her mother were out together walking at night and, further, the night is assessed as ‘beautiful’. From line 06 onwards, she then reports on the dialogue she had with her mother using direct reported speech. By quoting what was said, the act of narrating is rendered more vivid or dramatic, thus providing recipients with unique access to the story details and fostering recipient involvement in the story’s production (Holt, 2000; Labov, 1972; Schiffrin, 1981; Tannen, 1986, 2007). This is because the direct reported speech does more than merely inform; rather it shows the recipient how something was said by portraying the reported speaker in a particular way (such as through the use of prosody or voice quality; see Besnier, 1993; Günthner, 1999). At the same time, the marked prosody of the reported utterance makes it possible for tellers to convey their own implicit attitude towards the utterance (Holt and Clift, 2007; Labov, 1972; Schiffrin, 1981), thus creating what Günthner (1999) refers to as a ‘layering of voices’.
Sofia’s direct reported speech (‘mum … >look at the
Sofia’s response to the therapist’s extension is ambivalent. On the one hand, she offers upgraded agreement by producing an emphatic ‘
After having produced the ‘punchline’ of her story and having secured affiliation with the therapist, Sofia closes off the reported dialogue between her and her mother (‘so we-I went h↓ome,’), thus making a bid at ending the story (line 24). CA research has shown that story closings create opportunities for recipients to respond by demonstrating their understanding of the story (Jefferson, 1978; see also Sacks, 1992, on ‘second stories’), thus displaying greater affiliation with the affectual stance built up through the telling (Stivers, 2008). But what the therapist does instead is elicit Sofia’s reaction to what the mother had said (‘wha=did you wha- what
Formulation preface as a step-wise entry into elicitation
As we have seen in the prior extract, clients may articulate their affectual stance through direct reported speech in which some third party’s morally deviant conduct is made evident to the therapist. Another resource that clients may draw from in displaying an affectual stance is what Sidnell (2006) has termed reenactments. This involves a teller’s re-presentations or depictions of an event and is often realized through nonverbal means involving gestures and facial expressions. Reenactments are also initiated through a ‘frame shift’ in which tellers withdraw their gaze from the other participants in order to make their conduct more visible, as it happened. According to Sidnell (2006: 383), ‘gaze, talk and gesture are combined to reenact the event being described’. In Extract 2, we show how a therapist affiliates with a client’s affectual stance – realized through the client’s reenactment – before launching into an elicitation that targets the emotional impact on the client. In this way, therapists are able to secure affiliation around the client’s expressed affectual stance before probing the more implicit kinds of emotions that the story event may have set in motion. This extract involves a different client named Paula. Prior to her telling, she had noted that her relationship with the man she is currently dating reminded her of how she was mistreated by her father. As an example of this strained relationship, she had previously detailed how she felt unable to approach the man when she found him sitting with a group of people at a cafe. Paula returns to the same situation in this excerpt to discuss his unwillingness to talk to her, despite appearing to be conversing easily with others at the cafe.
Extract 2 – 312.09(6)
Paula begins with a complaint sequence in which she criticizes her boyfriend’s actions – referred to as ‘
At this point, the therapist responds to Paula’s talk with a formulation (Antaki et al., 2005) that attends to and offers the gist of Paula’s general reaction to the boyfriend’s actions (‘
Naming client emotions
When responding to client storytellings, therapists were also found to put into words how the client may have been affected emotionally from a certain story event. One such practice involves naming the client emotion, in which therapists would express the emotional impact through clausal constructions such as ‘you felt X’. Examples include ‘so you were just feeling pre:::tty:: frustra:te:d a::nd resigned’, ‘you felt really. (.) a
In the discussion leading to Extract 3, the client Kristina and the therapist have established that Kristina receives no appreciation or support from her husband. Kristina then launches into a story in which she recounts a specific instance of her husband failing to introduce her to one of his students at the opera despite clearly acknowledging the daughter’s presence. She designs her story as a complaint sequence that implicitly conveys the moral offence of the husband’s actions, but she does not express how his misconduct had affected her.
Extract 3 – 014.01(5)
At the beginning of the extract, Kristina assesses her general experiences with her husband as frustrating, which then seems to provide the impetus for her to begin her story at line 06. The crux of the story centres around the husband having encountered someone whom he knew at the opera. Kristina gradually provides the therapist with access to who this person was and subtly involves the therapist in co-constructing the person’s identity; for instance, in line 06 she mentions that ‘he met somebody there’ and then pauses. The word ‘somebody’ works here as a prospective indexical (Goodwin, 1996), signalling that more detail is forthcoming from the speaker. After the pause, Kristina then continues her turn by elaborating with ‘one of his students’ (line 08). It is here that the therapist then begins nodding, thus displaying her understanding of who is being referenced. What follows is another short pause in which the therapist continues to nod. This then leads Kristina to provide yet more information about the student (‘you know from (0.6) uh- ((name of university))’). Thus, it appears that by initially withholding from responding until Kristina had provided more detail and then by responding through nods when added information was presented, the therapist and Kristina worked together to build up an appropriate description of one of the story characters, thus providing more granularity to her telling (Schegloff, 2000).
After having described the relevant features of the story setting, Kristina then begins to recount the events leading up to the husband’s misconduct: the husband and the student first exchanged ‘formalities’ and then he introduced his daughter to the student. The way in which the husband introduced the daughter deserves some mention. Kristina describes the husband’s action as having ‘pushed’ the daughter in front and uses an accompanying gesture to reinforce this physical movement. By pushing, therefore, the husband may be viewed as having applied undue force and, by implication, as being somewhat brutish. The spatial reference to ‘in front’ is also noteworthy, as it implies that she, Kristina, is left ‘behind’ and thus has a lower social standing in the eyes of all conversationalists. Following Kristina’s account of what happened is a pause (line 15) in which the therapist could make an assessment relevant response but does not. This then leads the client to make the husband’s transgression explicit: ‘an (0.3) an they- he introduced
The therapist’s response also was successful at securing affiliation from the client in the following turn, as seen from line 21 when the client produced an overlapping assessment that was upgraded in strength (‘it’s
Illustrating client emotions
Another technique for expressing the emotional impact on clients is for therapists to use elaborate or vivid language in illustrating what clients had felt. Rather than naming the emotion, here therapists use graphic terms, metaphorical expressions or nonverbal resources to more vividly convey the feeling that the client may have had. These multi-modal practices work empathically by revealing the therapist’s depth of understanding of what the client felt. In doing so, they tend to invite an affiliative response from the client, one that confirms and engages with the therapist’s prior turn.
Consider Extract 4, which follows a bit later in the session from Extract 2. While still on the topic of her boyfriend, Paula tells the therapist about a comment he had made discouraging Paula to become too intimately involved with him. Although Paula’s talk clearly conveys the boyfriend’s action as indexing a moral transgression, here again she seems unable to clearly articulate her own emotional reaction to the boyfriend’s misconduct.
Extract 4 – 312.09(8)
At the beginning of this extract, Paula complains that the boyfriend generally tries to set her up (‘there are
The moral offence is recounted in lines 14–16 through direct reported speech – ‘I the complainant leaves the complained-about’s words to ‘speak for themselves,’ as it were. … Hence, the complained-about behaviour is animated in such as way that the recipient can appreciate how rude, unjust, and thoughtless the other was, without the complainant needing to categorize the particular offence that was thereby committed.
The therapist, however, does not offer an assessment relevant response, but instead initiates repair by seeking confirmation about the identity of the person who committed the misconduct. The therapist also slightly reformulates the original referent used by Paula in Extract 2 (‘this
The therapist’s withholding from displaying affiliation with the boyfriend’s misconduct then seems to set in motion an extended turn in which Paula slightly expands on her narrative. First, she specifies the time frame of the story (i.e. about two months ago) and then she provides some insight into how she had responded to her boyfriend. She begins by making a non-specific formulation (‘I’m thinki:ng, <o(.)ka:y,>’) but then, in line 28, she produces a reenactment that provides the therapist with more access in terms of how she felt. The design of her reenactment is similar in structure to what Sidnell (2006) has observed; that is, the left-side boundary contains a direct reporting verb (‘I was just like’) and the right-side boundary contains the demonstration of the action: opens mouth, shakes head while producing gasping-type sounds. Following the reenactment, Paula then returns her gaze to the therapist while making a meta-commentary that assesses the boyfriend’s action (‘what’s going
When engaging with the lived experience conveyed through the client’s story, therapists may also draw from nonverbal resources such as gesture to more graphically display the emotional impact on the client. Consider Extract 5 with the client Kristina, in which she recounts an incident involving her husband that she considered offensive.
Extract 5 – 014.13(1)
At the beginning of this excerpt, Kristina produces a potential story opening in which she recalls an offensive remark made by her husband (lines 06–07). Immediately thereafter, she downplays her own role in this incident by defensively detailing her own conduct (Drew, 1998); for example, first she claims not to have remembered what she said (line 11), then she refers to it as a joke (line 11) and, finally, casts her initial comment to her husband as ‘°like° everyday talk?’ (line 19). Thus, Kristina’s request for the husband to ‘move over on the sofa a little bit’ is formulated to be construed as innocuous and certainly not as warranting an upset reaction from the husband. But then in lines 22–25, Kristina provides the husband’s perspective by revealing his rationale for being upset; that is, the husband felt that she was sending him back to work in the evening, rather than letting him watch television. Afterwards, in line 27 onwards, Kristina shifts into direct reported speech to proceed with her story. First, she elaborates on his response that accuses her of trying to send him back to work (‘>uh he=said.< .hhh uh should I go: uh::m. (1.3) back (0.4) to transl
Although the therapist could, at this point, start engaging with the client’s affectual stance by exploring the emotional impact of the husband’s remark, she adopts a different approach. Instead, the therapist first withholds from responding and then produces a quiet-voiced continuer (‘°°hm.°°’) that is accompanied by a single moderate nod. Through this practice, the therapist seeks to elicit more granularity from the client in order for her to more fully develop her affectual stance (compare Extract 2 involving the client Paula, in which a different therapist uses the same practices to elicit Paula’s reaction to her boyfriend’s misconduct). As a result, Kristina offered more granularity to her description by describing her husband’s effect on her (‘I don’t really know what to say (anaymore.) …
Conclusions
From an EFT standpoint, a change process gets underway when clients – with the help of therapists – are able to work with their emotions. The client’s exploration of intense feelings of vulnerability and emotional pain may also have an added benefit of providing a context of safety and a sense of trust in the client’s conversational partner, the therapist. Investigations that have addressed the interrelationship between story telling and emotion processes in EFT treatments for depression have established that the transition towards a more emotionally differentiated view of personal experience seems most successful when it was first preceded by the client’s active exploration of their own experiential responses to a personal story disclosure (Angus, 2012; Angus et al., 2012). Further, these transitions towards a more in-depth understanding of how one’s emotions are coupled to own experience are argued to stimulate the emergence of new and more elaborate perspectives on self and others in the world (Angus et al., 2004).
This study has contributed to our understanding of how emotion work is accomplished in EFT by illustrating therapist practices that draw particular attention to how depressed clients felt in contexts of storytelling. Through the fine-grained lens of conversation analysis, we have shown how clients draw from a wide range of interactional resources to build up their affectual stance and, subsequently, how therapists respond by working with the client’s prior affectual displays. It has been observed that in everyday complaints, storytellers often report their overt reaction to another’s misconduct by expressing their outrage (Drew, 1998; Günthner, 1997). The depressed clients in our sample, however, would repeatedly refrain from considering how they felt in response to someone else’s wrongdoing. In other words, although clients were able to construct a well-defined stance by fully elaborating on another’s moral transgression, what seemed to be missing is a clearly articulated statement of how these transgressions affected them, the clients. Confronted with these specific affectual stance displays, emotion-focused therapists would respond by targeting the emotional impact brought on by the misconduct. Within EFT, therefore, indicating ‘how I felt’ is treated as an essential component of a telling, and when this is not mentioned, it will be oriented to by therapists as relevantly absent.
Therapists were found to draw from three different response types when focusing on the clients’ emotions – eliciting, naming and illustrating. These responses displayed varying degrees of affiliation with the clients’ prior affectual stance displays, with eliciting conveying the lowest and illustrating the highest amount of affiliation. In fact, eliciting practices on their own could even be regarded as disaffiliative because they do not directly engage with the client’s affectual stance. Instead, they reposition the affectual focus towards how the client felt, often in contexts where the client had laid prime emphasis on another’s moral offence. It was observed, however, that therapists sometimes prefaced their elicitation with a formulation that displayed empathy with the client’s grievance. With this practice, therapists could secure affiliation around the complaint before launching into an elicitation that targeted the client’s feelings. On the other end of the affiliation continuum, illustrating responses often used vivid descriptive language, metaphors or gestures to reveal the therapist’s intricate grasp and appreciation of the story’s emotional impact on the client. By establishing an empathic context in which therapists demonstrate their understanding of the client’s emotions, illustrating responses – but also naming responses – seemed to create a next opportunity for clients to offer affiliation with the therapist’s turn through upgraded forms of confirmation. Elicitations, by contrast, prompted clients to perform additional affectual work, rather than primarily confirm or affiliate with the therapist’s prior action. Naming the client’s emotion also did not always lead to an affiliative uptake by the client; that is, clients at times would disagree with the therapist’s reading of how the client felt, thus compelling the therapist to repair the disaffiliative moment at the next opportunity. It seemed, therefore, that illustrating responses operated most effectively at establishing and reinforcing a shared context of affiliation between the therapist and client. With this response type, emotion-focused therapists were in a strong position to not only develop the emotional facets of the client’s emerging story, but to also secure the client’s endorsement of the therapist’s displayed understanding of the client’s lived experience.
Footnotes
Appendix:
Funding
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 410-2009-0549).