The Embodied Attunement of Therapists and a Couple within Dialogical Psychotherapy: An Introduction to the Relational Mind Research Project

• Date: 01 December 2015
• Author: Markku Penttonen,Jaakko Seikkula,Anu Karvonen,Jukka Kaartinen,Virpi‐Liisa Kykyri
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12152
• Published date: 01 December 2015

The Embodied Attunement of Therapists

and a Couple within Dialogical Psychotherapy: An

Introduction to the Relational Mind Research Project

JAAKKO SEIKKULA*

ANU KARVONEN*

VIRPI-LIISA KYKYRI*

JUKKA KAARTINEN*

MARKKU PENTTONEN*

To read this article in Chinese, please see the article’s Supporting Information on Wiley Online

Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/famp).

In dialogical practice, therapists seek to respond to the utterances of clients by includ ing

in their own response what the client said. No research so far exists on how, in dialogs,

therapists and clients attune themselves to each other with their entire bodies. The researc h

program The Relational Mind is the first to look at dialog in terms of both the outer and

the inner dialogs of participants (clients and therapists), observed in parallel with auto-

nomic nervous system (ANS) measurements. In the ANS, the response occurs immediately,

even before conscious thought, making it possible to follow how participants in a multiactor

dialog synchronize their reactions and attune themselves to each other. The couple therapy

case presented in this article demonstrates how attunement is often not a simple “all at the

same time” phenomenon, but rather a complex, dyadic or triadic phenomenon which

changes over time. In the case presented, there was strong synchrony between one therapist

and one client in terms of their arousal level throughout the therapy session. It was also

observed that high stress could occur when someone else was talking about something

related to the participant, or if that person mirrored the participant’s words. Ov erall, it

seems that in evaluating the rhythmic attunement between therapists and clients it is not

enough to look at single variables; instead, integrated information from several channels is

needed when one is seeking to make sense of the embodiment.

Keywords: Couple therapy; Dialogical investigations; Autonomic nervous system;

Rhythmic attunement

Fam Proc 54:703–715, 2015

INTRODUCTION

Dialog has been seen as one of the basic orientations in family therapy (Anderson &

Goolishian, 1988; Andersen, 1991; Bertrando, 2007; Rober, 2005; Seikkula & Arnkil,

2014). In dialogical practice, therapists focus on responding to the utterances of their

*Department of Psychology, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finland.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jaakko Seikkula, Department of Psychol-

ogy, University of Jyvaskyla, P.O.Box 35, 40014 Jyvaskyla, Finland. E-mail: 3jaakko.seikkula@jyu.fi.

Authors JS and AK should be regarded as equal first authors of the paper. JS has the main responsibil-

ity of writing the paper and AK has the main responsibility for collecting the data and conducting the

analysis of autonomic nervous system information. The rest of the authors have contributed to the design

of the project and analyzing of the results and formulation of the text.

The research has been supported by the Finnish Academy.

703

Family Process, Vol. 54, No. 4, 2015 ©2015 Family Process Institute

doi: 10.1111/famp.12152