Storytelling, depression & psychotherapy

This chapter examines storytelling practices of depressed clients within the context of Emotion-focused psychotherapeutic treatments. Using the methods of conversation analysis, a fine-grained qualitative approach to studying social interaction, Muntigl shows how stories convey helplessness and low personal agency and how therapists are able to negotiate the import and significance of the client's story through different types of response. The relevance for clinical practice is highlighted in this chapter. First, it is shown how different therapist responses convey different degrees of affiliation with the client's distress. Second, therapist response types tend to mobilize affiliation and empathy from clients in different ways. Third, the more empathy or affiliation therapists invest in their response, the more empathy/affiliation they get back.

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