Embodied Relationships: The Therapist’s Experience
type: CreativeWork
description: This study explores the lived experiences of the therapist in the therapeutic relationship. It focuses on therapists understandings of their own bodies showing a range of experiences that therapists have in their day-to-day practice of psychotherapy. It then explores the understandings that these therapists bring to their experiences. The study is different from much of the current writing about therapists body experiences in that it is not written to illustrate theoretical views but is the gathering of experiences to explore how the therapists body is part of the every-day therapeutic relationship. Hermeneutic phenomenology is chosen as a methodology in order to stay close to the therapist’s experiences. The philosophical underpinnings that guide the methodology are drawn from Heidegger and van Manen. The findings of this study show that embodied experience is a dimension of the therapeutic relationship that is often hidden in its always-there-ness but is a rich source of relational and symbolic information. The significance and dynamics of the hidden-ness and revealed-ness of the embodied relationship is revealed. This includes notions such as, the body is the relational surface; it is the site of our interpretive interaction with the world. Each participant described his/her body as a site or dimension of experience that was ‘lived’ and contained dynamics, both in and out of awareness, which arose in the relational context. The therapist’s body responses often appeared to be a way of accessing material that was difficult to know about. The therapist’s ability to access, understand and consciously use the body experiences was a complex mix of their own capacities and what was possible in the moment-to-moment living engagement between client and therapist; what the therapeutic dyad were capable of engendering and exploring between them. There is richness to the lived bodily experiences that the therapists shared, which captures the realness of the therapeutic relat…
abstract: This study explores the lived experiences of the therapist in the therapeutic relationship. It focuses on therapists understandings of their own bodies showing a range of experiences that therapists have in their day-to-day practice of psychotherapy. It then explores the understandings that these therapists bring to their experiences. The study is different from much of the current writing about therapists body experiences in that it is not written to illustrate theoretical views but is the gathering of experiences to explore how the therapists body is part of the every-day therapeutic relationship. Hermeneutic phenomenology is chosen as a methodology in order to stay close to the therapist’s experiences. The philosophical underpinnings that guide the methodology are drawn from Heidegger and van Manen. The findings of this study show that embodied experience is a dimension of the therapeutic relationship that is often hidden in its always-there-ness but is a rich source of relational and symbolic information. The significance and dynamics of the hidden-ness and revealed-ness of the embodied relationship is revealed. This includes notions such as, the body is the relational surface; it is the site of our interpretive interaction with the world. Each participant described his/her body as a site or dimension of experience that was ‘lived’ and contained dynamics, both in and out of awareness, which arose in the relational context. The therapist’s body responses often appeared to be a way of accessing material that was difficult to know about. The therapist’s ability to access, understand and consciously use the body experiences was a complex mix of their own capacities and what was possible in the moment-to-moment living engagement between client and therapist; what the therapeutic dyad were capable of engendering and exploring between them. There is richness to the lived bodily experiences that the therapists shared, which captures the realness of the therapeutic relat…
author: Goulding, Josie
keywords: Therapist and patient, New Zealand, Psychotherapy
date published: 2003
date modified: 2026-07-27T18:45:44Z
provider: AUT University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: AUT University