. . . it is as if the therapist is a host who meets and greets the client as a guest while simultaneously the therapist is a guest in the client’s life. I ask my students to think about how they like to be received as a guest. What does the host do that makes them feel welcomed or not, at ease or not, and special or not? What did the quality of the meeting and greeting feel like? These are not rhetorical questions. I do not expect specific answers. Instead, I want the students to think about the sense of their experience in the relationship and conversation and what it communicated to them (Anderson, 2006, p. 45)
I also use a “storyball” metaphor to discuss the learning position and mutual inquiry with my students. When I first meet a client and they begin to talk, it’s as if they gesture to hand me a gift -- a storyball of intertwined threads of their life narratives and their current circumstance. I respond (
As they put the ball toward me, and while their hands are still on it, I gently place my hands on it but I do not take it from them. I begin to participate with them in the story telling, as I slowly look at/listen to the aspect that they are showing me. I try to learn about and understand their story by responding to them: I am curious, I pose questions, I make comments, and I gesture. In my experience, I find that this therapist learning position acts to spontaneously engage the client as a colearner; it is as if the therapist’s curiosity is contagious. In other words, what begins as one-way learning becomes a two-way, back-and-forth process of mutual learning as client and therapist coexplore the familiar and codevelop the new, shifting to a mutual inquiry of examining, questioning, wondering, and reflecting with each other (p. 47).
My responses—whatever form they may take, whether questions, comments, gestures, glances, etc—are informed by and come from inside the conversation itself; that is, they relate to what the client has just said or done. They are not informed by my “truth” about the client: what I think the client should be talking about, is really thinking, or should be doing. My responses are my way of participating in the conversation from a continually learning position and to ensure that I understand as best I can: all to encourage the back-and forth process that I call mutual inquiry and to engage the client in a new curiosity about themselves. Through the process of mutual inquiry the client begins to develop meanings for themselves and the people and events in their lives that permit addressing the circumstances in their lives for which they sought consultation, as well as other possibilities with far reaching effects. In other words, the newness comes from within the dialogical process. These possibilities or the newness, as mentioned above, may take infinite forms.
Through this joint activity, the client-therapist relationship and conversation begin to determine the process or method of inquiry; the process or method does not define the relationship and the conversation. That is, client and therapist create from within the present relationship and conversation in the moment as each moment unfolds, not from outside it or ahead of time. The therapist does not control the direction of the conversation or storytelling but participates in it. Together, client and therapist shape the story-telling, the re-telling, and the new telling yielding a richness of novel freshly seen possibilities and previously unimagined futures.
WhenworkingwithafamilyIthinkofeachmemberascomingwithhisorherownstoryball.IwanttomakeroomforandshowtheimportanceIplaceoneachone.Itisnotunusualformemberstohavedifferentandsometimescompetingstoryversions.Thesearepartofthecollectivestorytelling.Iaminterestedinunderstandingeachversion;Idonotstriveforconsensu
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