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Therapeutic alliance ruptures/tensions: description, frequency, causes & effects

I wrote a blog post yesterday entitled "Therapeutic alliance ruptures: common, very challenging & a key area for increasing therapist (and personal) helpfulness"I think this area is so important that I'd like to spend additional time exploring it more thoroughly. 

"Therapeutic alliance ruptures": common, very challenging & a key area for increasing therapist (and personal) helpfulness

We had another of our small peer Emotion-Focused Therapy supervision/practice groups yesterday evening.  Half a dozen of us were able to make it.  We'd agreed we would look particularly at "therapeutic alliance ruptures" at this meeting.  As a doctor, I can't help finding the term "alliance rupture" rather giggle-inducing.  I have all kinds of pictures of unwanted extrusions, metaphorical trusses and possibly extreme interpersonal surgical cures. 

Emotion-focused and narrative therapies

"Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives - the power to retell it, reexperience it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change - truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts."   Salman Rushdie 

The jazz trio metaphor: reworking the core conditions, relational depth, compassion & two kinds of empathy (1st post)

Working as a psychotherapist or counsellor, practising as a doctor, participating in interpersonal groupwork, and at the heart of relating deeply with another human being - I have internal reminders, charts, ways of helping myself be present in as constructive a way as I can.  One inner chart or internal reminder is the jazz trio metaphor.  A bit like a musician revisiting and making fresh again their playing of a well known classical work, the jazz trio metaphor takes another look at the key, so often explored territory of the therapeutic relationship - which overlaps to a huge extent with the more universal territory of how to be profoundly present in any deep relationship with another human being. 

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