“I Can See Some Sadness in Your Eyes”: When Experiential Therapists Notice a Client’s Affectual Display

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.

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