Creating Relational Ripples

This is a professional development book for people working in the health and social care professions as psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, doctors, counsellors, community and support workers. The book will help strengthen your intuitive knowledge about therapeutic relationships. It invites you to enter the inner world of psychotherapy and explore how the relational space between client and therapist interconnects with the relational space within the therapist, thus creating relational ripples. Most professional training help you to work with others and don't focus on how to help yourself when you're working with others. This is more of an invitation than a textbook. It's a space, an expansive unfolding space for you to explore who you are, how you have become who you are, why you are this kind of professional and what kind of professional you want to be. Clinicians need to allow themselves to talk about the things that we don't normally talk about in our profession. I show how I am making parts of the unsaid or the difficult-to-say part of therapy, and I encourage other professionals to allow difficult conversations to emerge in the therapy room. My aim is to think, teach, and write about our professional practice reflexively and ethically, in a way that offers colleagues another perspective. In my work and my doctoral inquiry I use the concept of relational space in therapy to include words, actions, movement, bodies, affect and the more-than-human world. I am showing how these elements interconnect and how different relational utterances are created in the therapy process. This book is written to encourage systemic practitioners to create a professionally employable space for the personal. Through my stories, I invite you to enter the inner world of psychotherapy and explore how the relational space between client and therapist interconnects with the relational space within the therapist, thus creating relational ripples.