Response‐ability: therapist's ‘I’ and role

Abstract

The professional therapist, like an actor, has a role. Inside, in between, and beyond the role is a person without a clearly defined script in the therapeutic interview. This paper looks at the interplay between the therapist's role and personhood. As with the professional actor, the T can be an effective consultant to the role. The ‘I’ or visceral responses of the therapist can increase the therapist's sensitivity to the family members' emotional experience in the familial and therapeutic relationships. This information can help the therapist be more ‘response‐able’– a position where the therapist is more flexible and ‘able to respond’ to the emotional experience of the family interview. Thus, by increasing therapeutic options, the interface between the ‘I’ and the role can help the therapist be more professionally ethical and ‘responsible’.

Women's tales: systemic groupwork with mothers post–separation

“…This was in part to distinguish it from other theories and practices which concentrated on the individual and his or her processes. Now that systemic thinking and family therapy have become part of the mainstream, it is timely to consider the significance of the therapist's life experience and its judicious use in therapeutic contexts (Haber, 1994;Hildebrand and Speed, 1995).…”

“…However, despite this initial mutual interest and influence, there has not been the ongoing dialogue between family therapists and groupworkers in the literature that one might have expected. In the last few years more systemic therapists have been describing their therapy in contexts other than with families, including their work with groups (Hildebrand, 1987(Hildebrand, , 1988Hills, 1994;O'Neill and Stockell, 1991;Wilson and Hutton, 1992).…”

The Counsellor's Self in Therapy: An Inevitable Presence

“…The first type of research methodology focuses exclusively on system therapists as the sample, either as individual counsellors describing the self that they bring to therapy (Carlock, 2000;Duhl, 1987;Haber, 1990Haber, , 1994Hardham, 1996;Keith, 1987;Lum, 2002;Paterson, 1996;Prosky, 1996;Real, 1990;Rober, 1999;Smith, 2000), as interview subjects (Oke, 1994;Shadley, 1986) or as participants in survey research (Tester, 1992;Turney, 1991). Whilst there are some studies from outside of a systems perspective, the majority of counsellor's self research has come from a systems framework, in the recognition that the counsellor is a part of the presenting system.…”

Rapprochement in Sight? Postmodern Family Therapy and Psychoanalysis

“…Fine and Turner (1991) have referred to a dialectical methodology -'the therapist continually operates in the realm of contradictory ideas' -which informs practice thus: 'once an idea or hypothesis comes to mind, bring forth its opposite. ' Haber (1994) has similarly referred to the therapist's use of the 'I' or self as consultant, and this has been likened to the psychoanalytic concept of countertransference, or 'the therapist's unconscious emotional reaction to the patient's transference onto him/her' (Cooklin, 1994: 286). According to Cooklin, its use requires the therapist's awareness of the reaction, and further, 'an awareness of the degree to which this reaction was a response from "unresolved" aspects of the therapist's inner life' (ibid).…”