How psychotherapists make use of their experiences from being a client: Lessons from a collective autoethnography

Abstract

First-hand experience of being a client is regarded by many psychotherapists as making an essential contribution to professional development. Although research has not established any direct influence on client outcome, arising from therapist participation in personal therapy, qualitative studies have explored how therapists transfer learning from one context to the other. A group of six therapists-researchers engaged in a collective autoethnography in which we shared narrative accounts of our own experiences as clients. Together we covered a wide set of therapies, sought for varied purposes, and from different stages in the life-course. Different areas of learning were identified: negative experiences could strengthen own convictions for acting differently; positive experiences worked as inspiration and support; being in therapy early in life represented a significant formative experience; working through complex personal issues in therapy gave the courage to identify similar conflicts in phantasies and realities of clients. The link between having been a client and working as a therapist is a subjective, reflective process of reworking figure and ground in the search for professional sensitivity.

The embodied listener: a dyadic case study of how therapist and patient reflect on the significance of therapist’s personal presence for the therapeutic change process

“…One pitfall we detected during this process was the interviewer's tendency to idealize the therapist because of his apparent level of competence and reflectiveness. By participating in reflective writing tasks and discussions with the research group we sought to enhance transparency of the researcher's interpretations and the analytic process, thus strengthening the methodological integrity of the study (Levitt et al, 2017;Råbu et al, 2019).…”

People Engaging Each Other: A Dual-Perspective Study of Interpersonal Processes in Useful Therapy

“…This study is part of a larger collaborative research program examining constructive psychotherapy processes (Råbu et al 2013) from the perspective of both the therapist (Bernhardt et al 2019) and the client. Researcher reflexivity is paramount to qualitative research, implemented in depth in the current project (Råbu et al 2019). To ensure methodological integrity we used a phenomenological and hermeneutical approach that supported our research goal of getting close to the participants' lived experiences (Binder et al 2012;Van Manen 1997.…”

Antisocial personality disorder in group therapy, kindling pro-sociality and mentalizing

“…This study was performed as an autoethnographic self-reflective study (Råbu et al, 2021) BPD/SUD (Arefjord et al, 2019). As the newer developments of MBT was going in the direction of ASPD (Fonagy et al, 2020), and because many of the patients in our MBT-SUD program had ASPD, we wanted to provide more targeted treatment for this group.…”

“…As a result of this we decided to do a focus group study within an autoethnographical frame (Kitzinger, 1994;Råbu et al, 2021). When performing qualitative studies, reflexivity is an important tool for ensuring transferability and trustworthiness of the study (Finlay & Gough, 2003;Malterud, 2001).…”