Creating "maneuvering room": a grounded theory of language and therapist influence in marriage and family therapy

Influence in psychotherapy has been conceptualized in several different ways. It has been compared to rhetoric or persuasion, focusing on the power of language to heal or harm others. It has also been conceptualized as a characteristic of the therapist. Therapists differ in the degree to which they control a therapy session, and this is related to how they defíne their role as an expert. Influence has also been researched as a negotiated process. This is especially applicable to couple or family therapy contexts where multiple clients are involved. This current study is a qualitative study of language and change in marriage and family therapy, drawing on techniques from task analysis and grounded theory. Videotapes and transcripts from portions of thirty-one different couple or family therapy sessions were analyzed. The emergent concept, the creation of maneuvering room, suggests that there are some similarities across family therapy models in how language is used. Therapists create space to introduce a different perspective about clients' problems by first creating uncertainty in clients' current beliefs. Therapists may then offer a new way of viewing problems by speaking from three different dimensions: therapist as expert or non-expert, therapist as participant or observer, or highlighting similarities or differences in clients' experiences. The fíndings of this study have implications for the ongoing debate between modem and postmodem assumptions of therapy, especially the hierarchy betsveen therapists and clients.