Therapeutic Letters

Abstract

This article explores the impact of letter writing on therapeutic boundaries. Letters challenged and extended the spatial and temporal boundaries of the therapeutic relationship, and especially the boundary between the personal and the professional, resulting in greater relational connectedness and therapeutic intimacy between the author as therapist and his client participants. By crossing boundaries traditionally posited to keep clients safe, letter writing evoked a carefully considered use of boundary that, perhaps paradoxically, brought the author and the participants into a fuller relationship with self and with each other. A revisioning of therapeutic boundary that challenges "professionalism" and patriarchal constructions of boundary is followed by an exploration of how letters contributed to therapeutic intimacy by giving expression to therapist availability, mutuality, and vulnerability. The experiences of five of the author's clients who agreed to be interviewed are used to illustrate and enrich this narrative.

Humanising care in a forensic mental health ward through creative writing workshops for staff and residents: a case study

“…Professional boundaries and power structures within mental health care are inherently connected, and when conceived as a means to maintain emotional distance, boundaries can be perceived to be actively opposed to mutuality (Harris, 2014). However, boundaries are best understood “like the skin of two hands joined, [to] mark both the places of separation and of meeting” (Rodgers, 2009, p. 51). As such, their negotiation is intrinsic to the process of mutuality rather than in opposition to it.…”

“…Instead, in the separate space of the workshop, mutuality is permitted by staff and residents meeting on the same ground of everyday personal experience. As well as the equalizing effect of writing on common themes of the everyday, the exchange of narratives between clinician and patient may play a crucial part in allowing participants to enter into a “collaborative, co-constructed relational endeavour in which each influences the other” (Rodgers, 2009, p. 59). Staff may have been perceived to invest in the patients’ personal and non-pathologized identity, creating resonance through being directed by the patient in inhabiting their narrative from the “inside”.…”

El programa paloma mensajera: intento de comunicación interpersonal entre ancianos institucionalizados

“…La conexión relacional (Rogers, 2009) se basa en la disponibilidad, la reciprocidad y la vulnerabilidad. Términos que favorecen el intercambio y sobre los que se cimenta el esperado feedback.…”