When working with a family I think of each member as coming with his or her own storyball. I want to make room for and show the importance I place on each one. It is not unusual for members to have different and sometimes competing story versions. These are part of the collective storytelling. I am interested in understanding each version; I do not strive for consensus. I have found that the differences are important and that possibilities emerge from these differences as we engage with each other in the tellings and re-tellings.
Regardless of the number of people in the therapy room, an in-there-together connection and activity begins in which people talk with, not to, for, or about each other. Each member develops a sense of belonging which invites participation, which in turn invites ownership and a sense of commitment and shared responsibility.
I tend to talk with one person at a time, listening intensely to their story, and conveying with words and actions the importance for me of what they are saying. I respond with questions, comments, etc. that are informed by what they have just said not by what I think they should be saying. In my response to the client and theirs to mine, meanings and understandings begin to be clarified, expanded, and altered. As one member of a family talks and the others listen, all parties begin to experience a difference in the story tellings and re-tellings. When a speaker has the room to fully express him or herself without interruption and the others have equally full room for listening, all begin to have a different experience of each other and what is said and heard. When you are able to fully listen without preparing your response or sitting on the edge of your chair preparing a corrective response, you begin to hear and understand things in other ways.
I would like to make a few comments about questions. I do not think of questions as posed for answers, or to collect data of information. I think of questions as starting points for dialogue and for facilitating continued conversation, as expressing curiosity and interest, and as breathing life and energy into a conversation.
2. Relational Expertise
Both client and therapist bring expertise to the encounter: The client is an expert on themselves: their life, their world, their “problem” and its “solution.” The therapist is an expert on a process and space for collaborative relationships and dialogical conversations. The focus on the expertise of the client does not deny the expertise of the therapist: It calls our attention to the client’s wealth of know-how on his or her life and cautions us not to value, privilege, and worship the therapist as a better knower than the client. The therapist’s expertise is in helping the other do it themselves; the therapist’s expertise is always present but not in an hierarchical fashion. Again, I do not suggest that the therapist lacks or pretends a lack of expertise. Of course, therapists have expertise, though from a collaborative perspective it is a different kind of expertise: it is a “know-how” in inviting and maintaining a space and process for collaborative relationships and dialogical conversations. The risk of ay kind of therapist expertise, or outside knowledge, is that we bring and carry our pre-understandings forward. The collaborative therapist is always prejudiced by their experiences, but they try to listen in such a way that their pre-experience does not close them off to learning and responding to understand the full meaning of the client’s descriptions of their experiences.
3. Not-Knowing
Not-knowing refers to how a therapist thinks about the construction of knowledge and the intent and manner with which it is introduced into the therapy. It is a humble attitude about what the therapist thinks he/she might know and a belief that the therapist does not have access to privileged information, can never fully understand another person, and always needs to learn more about what has been said or not said.
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