Introduction

This chapter explores how to maintain an aliveness to the possibilities in therapy and practice and how to challenge ideas of orthodoxy in theory and methodologies that can become stale or followed like religions. Therapy is an enactment, a performance, that is created between all the participants. The significance of the therapeutic relationship, the influence of extra-therapeutic factors, and the importance of specific techniques and theoretical models is addressed in detail in the work of Hubble, Duncan, and Miller. They argue convincingly in support of the prominence of the quality of the therapeutic relationship — the capacity for accurate empathy, non-possessive warmth, positive regard, and congruence. These are the features of the therapy process that help us respond sensitively to the interaction in order that we can create a relationship to the person, not a manual or protocol for practice as if divorced from the person before our eyes.