ABSTRACT
This chapter begins Part II of the book ‘listening beyond words’ and focuses the reader towards treatment of maternal mental illness. It explores relational psychotherapy, what it is and how focusing treatment for women with maternal mental illness on their intimate relational patterns can unlock their illness and bring about fundamental change. Listening beyond words is an important part of the relational process – attuning to our clients, using implicit relational knowing, paralinguistics, behavioural cues and creativity to help us gain a rounded picture of the woman's distress. Relational psychotherapists work in the transferential domain, touching the primal images, the pre-symbolic, the implicit memory system, the sensorimotor patterns or schemas. This is about going to a place of feelings, emotions and bodily sensations. Words and narrative may follow, or are co-created together, but words are not the beginning, they are more the end. It is the intense patterns of relating which can be touched or triggered in our most intimate relationships often at a point of hope and dread. This chapter offers the theory underpinning why this type of psychotherapy is so powerful. The chapter includes a critique on relational psychotherapy and ends with a clinical vignette.
