Researcher–client and participant–therapist reflecting relationally on a research conversation

Abstract

What happens when a researcher engages her former therapist as a participant in her research? How do they transition to this new relationship as they encounter themselves, and one another, in conversation about therapy that ended eighteen months earlier? Written jointly by a doctoral researcher and her former therapist, this paper is a reflective account about their experiences during one such research conversation. Individual and shared accounts show how they brought themselves to a process that carried qualities of experiencing from their earlier therapeutic relationship, in addition to their identities as person‐centred practitioners and feminists. Separately written pieces of experiential writing, followed by short, jointly written reflective commentaries are used to foreground and explore the emotional and experiential processes of arriving at the research conversation and also two significant moments during that conversation. The paper illustrates how multiple aspects of identity were encountered, boundaries became more flexible and delicate shifts in power were made and experienced. Each person needed to hold their positions lightly, reflexively and in continuous dialogue. The authors found the presence of the empathic in each other facilitated a deepened understanding, enabling the selves of researcher, participant, client and counsellor to come into relationship in this new context. The paper challenges the conventional binary positioning of therapist and client in research about therapy. It also draws attention to the scarcity of accounts of therapy written by client and therapist together.