ABSTRACT
The way communications and relationships are experienced in health and social care can, like the weather or the ebb and flow of tides, be unpredictable. The practitioner has to respond to turmoil, changes and crises, encounters that are stormy and those that are calm. The practitioner must understand the particular way the service user responds to events in their life in order to work in a real partnership. Skilled work with events, often referred to as ‘process’, can create change and make a moment in time positive, and manageable or, if poorly handled, damaging. The way someone communicates and relates influences how each moment is experienced for the other person. This is just as true of relationships which involve little choice for the people involved as it is for those meetings that are chosen.
