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Abstract
We use the methods of conversation analysis to examine how therapists draw attention to a client’s verbal or nonverbal affectual stance display and thus place the focus of talk on the client’s here-and-now experience. These therapist practices are referred to as noticings. By investigating four different experiential-oriented therapeutic approaches (Emotion-Focused, Gestalt, Symbolic Experiential, and Narrative), we explore three ways in which therapist noticings manage the progressivity of talk: by facilitating, shifting, or manipulating/disrupting the activity in progress. We also found that therapists would put noticings to use with varying degrees of empathy and cooperativeness. Whereas empathically designed noticings would facilitate progressivity and cede epistemic authority to clients, nonempathic noticings would disrupt sequential progression and challenge the clients’ greater epistemic status pertaining to their domain of experience. Differences and similarities between therapy approaches with respect to how therapists deploy noticings are discussed. Data are in American English.
Notes
1. 1In an empty-chair intervention, the therapist pulls up an empty chair or has an empty chair already placed in close proximity to the client. The client is then asked to engage in a form of role-play in which the client speaks to some “other” in the empty chair. A main purpose of the empty-chair technique is for clients to gain increased access to their unresolved feelings and needs with respect to relationship problems (Greenberg, Citation2010).
2. 2During the silence, Dawn makes a “facial display” that has the following characteristics: raised lower eyelids and slightly drawn down corners of the lips. According to Ekman and Friesen (Citation2003), these are typical features for conveying sadness.
3. 3But, as Antaki (Citation1994, p. 76) points out, noticings need not refer to an action. Instead, they may simply draw attention to someone’s physical appearance as in “I see you’ve got a new hairdo.”
4. 4Another interpretation is that Carol’s account may have been generated by Sherri’s complaint rather than the noticing itself. Thus, it may be that not all noticings seek accounts, and our therapy data seems to support this.
5. 5For an elaborate account justifying the use of demonstration sessions for CA studies of psychotherapy, see Kondratyuk and Peräkylä (Citation2011).
6. 6Our terminology of softening and sharpening is taken from Martin and Rose (Citation2003, p. 38).
7. 7It could also be argued that Greenberg was pursuing another EFT goal during this sequence, termed emotion assessment (Greenberg, Citation2010). In this form of practice, therapists make distinctions between primary and secondary realizations of emotions. According to Greenberg (Citation2010),
Primary emotions are the person’s most fundamental, direct initial reactions to a situation, such as being sad at a loss. Secondary emotions are responses to one’s thoughts or feelings rather than to the situation, such as feeling angry in response to feeling hurt or feeling afraid or guilty about feeling angry. (pp. 34–35)
In the sequence analyzed, Dawn’s feelings of anger may be spurned on by her sadness, and Greenberg’s aim, therefore, may also have been to direct Dawn’s attention to which emotion in her experience was primary.
8. 8Locating an emotion within someone’s voice may generate at least a couple of differing inferences: It could be interpreted as “your voice betrays your emotional state = anger”; another possible interpretation is that the anger is separate from Lisa in that because the anger is localized in her voice, Lisa herself may be experiencing different or a wider range of emotions. Note that the EFT therapist’s noticing from Extract 4, in which sadness is localized in Dawn’s eyes, would seem to generate the same kinds of inferences.
9. 9It may, however, still be possible to detect indirect expressions of anger, blame, and appeal in Lisa’s talk about her vulnerability and, therefore, the position of the client may only have partly moved from blaming the partner to reflecting on her own experience. We thank an anonymous reviewer for having pointed this out.
10. 10Perls’s noticing may also be seen as “locating” the somatic aspect of Gloria’s experience; for example, it directs attention to what her chest (and the action of placing her hand onto her chest) symbolizes.