The balance of power in therapeutic interactions with individuals who have intellectual disabilities

Establishing a collaborative relationship is a cornerstone of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Increasingly CBT is being offered to people with intellectual disabilities who may have problems with receptive and expressive communication, and a history of disadvantage or discrimination in their relationships with those in positions of power. Consequently, they may have difficulty establishing a collaborative interaction with their therapist. This paper uses a novel method of interactional analysis to examine if collaboration increases as therapy progresses.

Fifteen participants with borderline to mild intellectual disabilities and significant problems of depression, anxiety and anger were recruited from specialist clinical services to participate in this study. Verbatim transcripts of therapy sessions 4 and 9 were coded using an initiative-response method of analysing power distribution in dialogue, to investigate collaboration at the level of therapeutic interaction.

The initiative-response scores indicated that power was relatively equally distributed between clients and therapists. On this measure there was no significant increase in collaboration as therapy progressed, as the dialogues were relatively equal from session 4. Analyses of the pattern of interaction showed that whilst the therapists asked most questions, the clients contributed to the flow of the analysis and played an active part in dialogues.

The implications of these findings are discussed, along with the possible uses of such interactional analyses in identifying barriers to communication and ways of establishing effective therapeutic dialogue.