Active retreating: Person-centered practices to repair disaffiliation in therapy

• Sequences in which clients disagree with therapist formulations are examined.
• Therapists were found to respond by retreating from own position.
• The practice of retreating was realized verbally and non-verbally.
• Retreating tended to establish re-affiliation between therapist and client.
• Therapist nods played an essential role in the re-affiliation process.

This article examines how Emotion-focused therapists use person-centred relational practices to re-affiliate with clients after clients have disagreed with therapists’ formulations of clients’ personal experience. Using the methods of conversation analysis, 70 client disagreements were identified from 15 video-taped sessions of Emotion-focused psychotherapy. Our main finding is that, in contexts of disagreement, talk is organized in Emotion-focused therapy to (1) maintain affiliation by neutralizing the potential conflict; and (2) preserve the client's epistemic primacy of experience by privileging the client's viewpoint. Person-centred relational practices were realized in two different ways: Most commonly, therapists would retreat from own position by affiliating with the client's contrasting position through a range of non-verbal (nods) and verbal resources (mirroring repeats, joint completions, second formulations); less common was for therapists to confront the disagreement, primarily as a problem in understanding that requires repair. Whereas the practice of retreating would lead to mutual affiliation and consensus between the participants, confronting the disagreement did not always lead to successful re-affiliation. This is because the therapist's repair initiation would sometimes contest the client's viewpoint, thus fostering further disaffiliation and placing the client's epistemic primacy at risk.