Explaining Symptoms in Systemic Therapy. Does Triadic Thinking Come Into Play?

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Psychotherapy Research

Background:

• Systemic therapy emphasizes relational and contextual factors in psychopathology.
• Understanding the explanatory models used by clients and therapists is crucial for therapeutic alliance and change.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the inference fields (monadic, dyadic, triadic) and etiopathogenetic content (traumatic, intrapersonal, interpersonal) of symptom explanations in early systemic therapy sessions.
• To determine if therapists utilize triadic explanations as per systemic theory, while clients predominantly use monadic and dyadic explanations.

Main Methods:

• A qualitative analysis of transcripts from 25 individual systemic therapy sessions.
• Application of the "1 to 3: from the monad to the triad" coding system to categorize explanations.
• Analysis of etiopathogenetic content including traumatic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal factors.

Main Results:

• Clients predominantly used monadic and dyadic explanations.
• Therapists incorporated triadic explanations, aligning with systemic principles.
• Therapists offered more interpersonal explanations compared to clients.

Conclusions:

• A significant dissonance exists between client and therapist explanation fields in systemic therapy.
• This dissonance is a key mechanism for therapeutic change, enabling the co-creation of new client narratives.
• The findings support the premise that differing explanatory frameworks contribute to client emotional processing and narrative restructuring.