The Embodied Attunement of Therapists and a Couple within Dialogical Psychotherapy: An Introduction to the Relational Mind Research Project

Abstract

In dialogical practice, therapists seek to respond to the utterances of clients by including in their own response what the client said. No research so far exists on how, in dialogs, therapists and clients attune themselves to each other with their entire bodies. The research program The Relational Mind is the first to look at dialog in terms of both the outer and the inner dialogs of participants (clients and therapists), observed in parallel with autonomic nervous system (ANS) measurements. In the ANS, the response occurs immediately, even before conscious thought, making it possible to follow how participants in a multiactor dialog synchronize their reactions and attune themselves to each other. The couple therapy case presented in this article demonstrates how attunement is often not a simple "all at the same time" phenomenon, but rather a complex, dyadic or triadic phenomenon which changes over time. In the case presented, there was strong synchrony between one therapist and one client in terms of their arousal level throughout the therapy session. It was also observed that high stress could occur when someone else was talking about something related to the participant, or if that person mirrored the participant's words. Overall, it seems that in evaluating the rhythmic attunement between therapists and clients it is not enough to look at single variables; instead, integrated information from several channels is needed when one is seeking to make sense of the embodiment.

Psychophysiological Synchrony During Verbal Interaction in Romantic Relationships

“…Since these early studies, different authors have revisited this research topic. A growing interest in biological synchrony of couples has been seen in recent years (e.g., Helm, Sbarra, & Ferrer, 2012, 2014Liu, Rovine, Cousino Klein, & Almeida, 2013;Papp, Pendry, Simon, & Adam, 2013;Saxbe & Repetti, 2010;Saxbe et al, 2014), also in the context of dialogical family therapy (Karvonen, Kykyri, Kaartinen, Penttonen, & Seikkula, 2016;Seikkula, Karvonen, Kykyri, Kaartinen, & Penttonen, 2015).…”

Affective Arousal During Blaming in Couple Therapy: Combining Analyses of Verbal Discourse and Physiological Responses in Two Case Studies

“…Differences in the agendas and tasks of the therapists in this particular case have been studied in another paper in the Relational Mind project (Kykyri et al manuscript in preparation). Along with Seikkula et al (2015), we suggest that variation in synchrony may be a positive phenomenon in a multiactor therapy setting in that more perspectives are taken into consideration.…”

“…Change in Multi-actor Therapeutic Dialogues, which aims at increasing understanding of attunement and synchrony in couple therapy at various levels, including both verbal and nonverbal interaction and ANS responses (Karvonen et al 2016;Seikkula et al 2015). The project is being conducted at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland in collaboration with three other European universities.…”

The Added Value of Studying Embodied Responses in Couple Therapy Research: A Case Study

“…The project was conducted by the University of Jyväskylä, Finland in collaboration with four other European universities. The project (Seikkula et al., ) aimed to examine (1) how the participants in multi‐actor dialogues synchronize their behavior with each other, (2) whether change events in the session involve emotional arousal on the part of the clients and/or therapists, (3) what is happening during important moments in the dialogue when things are not spoken aloud, and (4) how any change for the better is related to mutual attunement and synchronization of movements in all the above‐mentioned factors. The present report focuses mostly on aims (1), (2), and (3).…”