The therapeutic relationship in action: how therapists and clients co-manage relational disaffiliation

Over the past three decades a great deal of energy has been invested in examining the consequences of relational stresses and their repair. Less work has been done to examine how therapists and clients actually achieve re-affiliation through verbal and non-verbal resources, how such affiliation becomes vulnerable and at risk, and how therapists attempt to re-establish affiliative ties with the client-or fail to do so. We utilize the method of Conversation Analysis (CA) to examine clinical cases that involve extended episodes of disaffiliation. Clients with different styles of disaffiliation-confrontation and withdrawal-are compared. We show how disaffiliation is interactionally realized in different ways and how this is followed by more or less successful attempts at repair.