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“I can’t wait to read this book. I feel as though we have all been waiting for
this book. It seems all set not only to flatten relations between clients and
therapists but squash flat the pseudo-professional boundaries that psycho-
therapy professionals have ducked behind all their (our) working lives. This
book moves therapists out from hiding behind their couches and their false
veils of ‘expertise’ to stand alongside their clients as fellow, flawed humans.
Therapy and therapists need to come out of the closet. Therapy needs queer-
ing up a bit and Trish and Dan are exactly the people to perform this feat. I
hope this book becomes a core text for all psychotherapy and counselling
education programmes.”
– Jane Speedy, Emeritus Professor of Education,
University of Bristol, UK; Member of CANI-net

“In the spirit of Irvin Yalom’s, ‘Every Day Gets a Little Closer,’ Trish Thompson
and Daniel X. Harris share the ever-deepening richness of their therapeutic
journey through poignant, vulnerable, and transparent collaborative writing.”
– Lawrence Rubin, PhD, ABPP, Editor, Psychotherapy.net

“Collaboration, accessibility, emotional connection: autoethnography allows

all three in the client-therapist relationship. Hierarchies are transcended, heal-
ing is transformative. This book shows us how.”
– Dr Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli AM, Honorary Fellow,
School of Communication and Creative Arts (SCCA),
Deakin University, Australia

“This is a provocative intervention in the field of psychotherapy, counsel-

ling and qualitative and creative research. Trish Thompson and Daniel X.
Harris intimately reflect on the relational processes and intersubjective nature
of client-therapist relations as they move from therapist/client to collabora-
tors and co-authors. They demonstrate the transformative power of dialogical
practice and creative methods, particularly writing, in their own therapeu-
tic relationship, illustrating how it evolved into a collaboration where their
vulnerabilities could be explored in relation to each other, in ways that had
therapeutic and transformative benefits for them both. Collaborative Writing
and Psychotherapy is a must read for anyone engaged in therapeutic practic-
ing or thinking about the potential power dynamics between therapist and
client, and/or ethical possibilities for unsettling tradition notions of client/
therapist relationships.”
– Professor Katherine Johnson, Professor of Psychology and Dean of
Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, Australia
“This book is a realisation of a beautiful idea. Dan and Trish seek to challenge
and dislodge the often unacknowledged power imbalance between client and
therapist. Their dialogical process places ‘equivalence of voice’ at the centre of
this radical and humanising idea. This book moves me to seriously consider big
questions; who am I as I sit in my therapeutic role, who is my client, and what
might be possible for two people together in a shared space?”
– Dr Stephen Andrew – Psychotherapist and author of Searching for
an Autoethnographic Ethic

“This is a rare gem in the plethora of books written for therapists, giving the
reader first-hand experience of using dialogical writing for therapeutic reflec-
tion. The book is both rigorously academic and sensitively personal, demon-
strating the thought processes and reflexivity of master therapists, reflexivity
that all therapists strive for but can rarely achieve.”
– Dr Judith Ayre, Head of School of Counselling, Psychotherapy and
Arts Therapy, Ikon Institute of Australia
COLLABORATIVE
WRITING AND
PSYCHOTHERAPY
Flattening the Hierarchy Between
Therapist and Client

Trish Thompson and Daniel X. Harris

Designed cover image: ThomasVogel / Getty Images
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Trish Thompson and Daniel X. Harris
The right of Trish Thompson and Daniel X. Harris to be identified as authors
of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-032-21387-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-21388-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-26816-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268161

Typeset in Optima
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix
Preface: May we all continue to be brave x

Introduction 1

1 Irv who? (Trish) 11

2 Unstable sense of self (Dan) 22

DIALOGUE 1
How do we define collaborative writing? 33

3 A fine balance (Trish) 45

4 Letting go (Dan) 55

DIALOGUE 2
The book of laughter and remembering 65

5 Writing into healing (Trish) 76

6 Butterfly moves (Dan) 88

viii Contents

DIALOGUE 3
Breaking up is hard to do 98

Conclusion110
References115
Index119
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Trish and Dan would like to thank Hannah Shakespeare and Matt Bickerton
at Routledge for their care, support and expert stewardship of this text and
of us as authors throughout this process. We thank Jonathan Wyatt for his
thoughtful feedback and beautiful preface which frames this book and for his
2018 book Therapy, stand-up, and the gesture of writing: Towards creative-
relational inquiry (Routledge), which informed our thinking during the writing
of this book. We thank our respective human and fur family members, both
present and absent, for their companionship and comfort while we plowed
difficult ground. We thank Keiran O’Loughlin, Sara Timms, Stephen Andrew,
Lawrence Rubin for their draft readings, encouragement and publishing sup-
port. Finally, we dedicate this book to all therapists and clients working hard
to change the world, one person at a time, from within.
PREFACE: MAY WE ALL CONTINUE
TO BE BRAVE

It is Tuesday 16 May 2023. Preface day.

I have begun this preface, begun writing with Trish Thompson and Dan
Harris, once already today.
The first time, back then, early this morning before the busyness of an ordinary
academic working Tuesday, I was sitting at my university office desk. I started writ-
ing: a few lines about where I was, my office, the feel of it, the light and sounds
of that moment, then into when and how last week I had first encountered this
book. I wrote about reading – meeting – Trish Thompson and Dan Harris on a
train journey to London as I travelled south for my mother’s 94th birthday. I wrote
about how the tracks hug the east coast between Edinburgh and Newcastle, fol-
lowing the edge of the ocean as they pass through and between the coastal towns
of Dunbar, Berwick-upon-Tweed, and Alnmouth. I wrote how I had purposefully
booked a seat on the left – the east – of the carriage to take in the view. Whatever
the ocean’s mood, I would previously have claimed, you can’t but gaze and
imagine. Except last week, I had the perfect east-facing view and found I paid
no attention at all. My attention and my imagination were elsewhere: I was with
Thompson and Harris and with what they conjure in this book.
The story of that journey was as far as I got in my early morning half-
hour writing. I can’t know where the writing would have gone nor how it
might then have led me further into Collaborative Writing and Psychotherapy.
I saved the document, or thought I had, and closed the file ahead of moving
into the rest my morning.
The rest of my morning was this: a colleague and I met online, in turn,
three applicants to our psychotherapy training programme. We spent an hour
with each, asking them to tell us about themselves. We asked each applicant
why they wanted to become therapists and why now; about the (difficult) ex-
periences they’ve had that have shaped this moment; about their experience
 Preface: May we all continue to be brave xi

of being and working with others; about what qualities in themselves they’re
bringing that they imagine they will draw from as therapists; and about their
hopes and fears. We were online with them even though some live or work
nearby. The colleague and I wondered why the institution continues, almost by
default, to do these interviews online. We questioned how the pandemic often
continues to govern how we all relate to each other. It was a long morning star-
ing at a screen, with difficult decisions at the end of it that will affect applicants’
futures. The responsibility was heavy even as we hastened to complete the task.
Returning to writing now in the afternoon on my laptop, after the inter-
views are done and I have moved across the street to a different setting – a
university café – I needed to get away from the office – the preface I was writ-
ing then, early this morning, is nowhere to be found.
So, I have begun writing this preface again. I have begun writing with Trish
Thompson and Dan Harris again. I am with them in a different place at a dif-
ferent time of day. Now is not the freshness of a new morning. Now is writing
with this morning’s interviewing, with my sense of those becoming-therapists
and the politics of those encounters.
Perhaps this is how writing always is: we are always beginning writing again.
Perhaps we always are rehearsing writing. We can only write because the writing
comes from somewhere, something, something else, some other time, some other
encounters, some others. We’re always starting writing in the middle (Deleuze &
Parnet, 2002). In the middle of what’s happening. Early morning. Mist over the
ocean. The east of a train carriage. Lost words. A long life’s birthday. Conversa-
tions about new life directions, longings and fears. Lunchtime in a sterile univer-
sity café. Because writing is never only writing; it is formed in stuttering efforts to
get by. Writing arises as someone tells you their stories of what brought them to
becoming a therapist and you take a moment’s look out of the window as those
stories land. We’re always starting writing in the middle and always writing with
(a sense of) human, non-human and more-than-human others.
This sense of being beckoned into writing’s middle – its heart – is what com-
pelled me on that speeding train journey down the coast last week. It’s what
compels me now in this empty café. This is what Collaborative Writing and
Psychotherapy did, what it does. Trish and Dan – last names have suddenly,
here, now, become distant, formal, patriarchal, an outdated academic trope
and an echo of my schooldays when it was only last names even between best
friends – invite their reader into the middle of their continuing relating. As it’s
happening, as it’s always been happening, as it’s been shifting and changing.
Into its movements, its politics and its vulnerabilities. Into its hopes and fears.
Narrative therapist and pioneer collaborative writing scholar, Jane Speedy
(2012, p. 355) claims:

All writing is collaborative, insofar as all writing is an embodied and im-

agined accumulation of selves and stories. All writing … is about love.
All explicitly collaborative writing is about bringing what Weems (2003)
xii Preface: May we all continue to be brave

describes as the imagination-intellect into play and extending the social

imaginary of the academy; collaborative writing is about engaging with the
highly subversive activity, much neglected amongst scholars, of building
loving communities within and across groups of writers, across disciplines
and themes, and across continents. To write collaboratively is to engage
with reconsiderations of scholarship and of what it means to be a human
being living amongst other human beings and other species and elements
on this planet.

Reading Trish and Dan throughout their text, Jane’s claims for collaborative
writing are alive and activated. I sense Trish and Dan would also add “and
psychotherapy” to Jane’s claims for writing. For Trish and Dan (and for Jane,
surely), psychotherapy also is collaborative. Psychotherapy also is an em-
bodied accumulation of selves and stories. Psychotherapy also is about love.
Psychotherapy also is about the imagination-intellect, is also subversive. Psy-
chotherapy – and writing collaboratively about psychotherapy – is to engage
with what it means to be human on this multi-species, fragile planet.
Today, Tuesday 16 May, has been preface day. A day (not) like any other
academic Tuesday.
I end in the middle of this day, in the middle of writing. This file is saved,
but this preface is not finished. Nor, moreover, is Collaborative Writing
and Psychotherapy: it continues to write itself, continues to be written,
continues to do its work, as we, its readers, its witnesses, follow what it
prompts, what it calls for. What it calls for is both pressing and enrich-
ing. Collaborative writing, psychotherapy, and collaborative writing about
psychotherapy, are, for Trish and Dan, necessary, urgent, beautiful, and
not without jeopardy. So, as they write in the book’s final lines, “Let us all
continue to be brave”.
Jonathan Wyatt
Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry, The University of Edinburgh
May 2023

References
Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2002). Dialogues II (H. Tomlinson, Trans.). Continuum.
Speedy, J. (2012). Collaborative writing and ethical know-how: Movements within the
space around scholarship, the academy and the social research imaginary. Interna-
tional Review of Qualitative Research, 5(4), 349–356.
Weems, M. E. (2003). Public education and the imagination-intellect: I speak from the
wound in my mouth. Peter Lang.
INTRODUCTION

Writing prompt #1:

Ok let’s begin by centring ourselves.

A way to enter the moment.
Feel your breath.
Invite yourself right there.
And let come to mind a time in your life when it felt like things were
falling apart.
Where the ground really got shaken for you.
Ideally one in the past, so you have a bit of distance.
A death of a loved one, a divorce, job loss, serious illness, trauma?
And just be curious about it, as one of the inevitable expressions of
impermanence,
of loss, of change.
And just reflect: did it change you?
How might it have changed you?
Did it, in some way, bring you to a deeper resourcefulness, or wisdom, or
understanding?
Stress, the pain of loss, it’s a messenger in our system.
What message was this pain bringing to you?
Now see if you can write some words out of this important message.

Centring before co-writing can be a way to let go of the self-censor, an outward-

focus on your collaborator and bring it back to “home.” Not unlike therapy,
settling in a bit before beginning can help let go of the “day,” whatever busy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268161-1
2 INTRODUCTION

business has preceded this session, and bring each of us into the moment,
and the “here.” So we have taken this same approach to the structuring of
this book.
Each chapter begins with a writing prompt, some of which we have used
as provocations in our own collaborative writing sessions, others borrowed
or invented specifically for this book. Some of them are simply meditations
which aim to centre the writer before embarking on reflexive writing, many
of which have been pivotal to Dan’s daily meditation practice since their
diagnosis. Some are more practical, instructional prompts. We offer them as
gestures of sharing between us, the co-authors, and you, our readers. We
encourage you to make your own. We encourage you to adapt them to your
own uses, styles, or preferences. And in the conclusion, we offer a more sche-
matic array of prompts that we hope will be useful to readers as a jumping-off
point for enacting/maintaining your own autoethnographic and, perhaps, col-
laborative writing adventure. They are not meant to reflect the content of each
chapter, but rather invite readers into a meditative space for receiving this
work, and in anticipation of writing your own.

Context
The overwhelming majority of psychotherapeutic writing is centred around
concepts, theories and techniques. In this text, we are proposing a shift away
from this monological way of conceptualising this work to a creative, collabo-
rative and dialogic frame where the therapist and client have an equivalence
of voice. This echoes the reality of the successful, post-modern therapeutic
space where both parties co-create the healing environment. There are a
number of terms that refer to the roles of those who provide and receive ther-
apy, such as ‘counsellor’ and ‘patient’. Throughout this book, we have chosen
to use ‘therapist’ and ‘client’, as we believe they are the most recognisable
across disciplines.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way therapists practice. Much
of their work now takes place away from traditional face-to-face, in situ coun-
selling environments. This looks set to continue for some time yet. Therapy
now takes across two different places – in the therapist’s space and in the
client’s space. These are also places where writing and reflection occur. This
new therapeutic topology suggests an increased need for books about new,
collaborative ways of working.​​The collaborative, therapist-client dialogical
writing approach is a rare methodology. Indirectly, it builds on what some
consider to be the most important psychotherapy research of the last 20 years,
which posited the therapist-client alliance as the central component of suc-
cessful therapy (Duncan et al., 2010).
This book aims to delve deeper into the relationship that develops between
client and therapist with an emphasis on a dialogic/epistolary approach,
 INTRODUCTION 3

allowing both voices to be heard together in the exploration of the therapeutic

relationship. The majority of literature about psychotherapy focuses on theory
and technique and its application to client presentations. This book seeks to
redress that, allowing the client voice to be both present and equal to that
of the therapist. By drawing on autoethnographic modalities (collaborative
autoethnography and dialogic autoethnography) and creative-relational
approaches, this proposed book will encourage therapists to be more en-
gaged/in touch with their own life experiences and how these shape and
influence therapeutic encounters with clients. How might therapist narratives
and different parts of them enter the space and connect with the narratives/
parts of the client? In this book, we argue (through demonstration) that the
meeting point/s of these narratives can be a catalyst for creativity and change
in both the client and therapist. After all, as Ocean Vuong reminds us, “survival
is a creative act” (Vuong, 2022, n.p.).
The book’s primary contributions are in this exploration of the notion that
both client and therapist change as a result of engaging in a psychotherapeu-
tic process, as well as collaborative writing. Additional contributions include
the expansion of psychotherapeutic literature to explore co-creative (creative
relational) methods, and to expand autoethnographic scholarship to include
psychotherapy narratives. Our collaborative and psychotherapeutic narrative
approach is not new: we lean heavily on prolific author and renowned psy-
chotherapist Irvin Yalom, and develop Yalom’s idea of fellow travellers. Like
Yalom, we challenge the more rigid boundaries and traditionally-held power
dynamics of the client/therapist contract.
Lastly, we hope the book will offer ideas to therapists who might want to
develop the “fellow traveller” aspect of their professional identity, either in
working directly with clients, or as part of their reflective practice. We believe
the book will have wide-ranging value not only to health professionals, but as
a core text for counselling and therapist training programs, as well as qualita-
tive methods courses.
We have worked together in one way or another for over 8 years now. First
as therapist/client, now as collaborators, friends, co-presenters. We have
used those and other modalities and relational approaches to ask questions
about the scholarship of therapy, the art of therapy and the radical potential
for joining these two practices. Therapists can sometimes be precious and
over-protective of their profession, as can researchers. What is it like to
be an autoethnographer engaged in therapy? What does the researcher see
(in the therapist and the psychotherapeutic edifice) that the therapist does
not? What does the therapist see in the researcher than the sometimes over-
intellectualised, analytic researcher does not? In this book, we bring together
the two practices of psychotherapy and academic research in order to ex-
tend them both, to extend ourselves, and to ask readers to consider the ways
in which both practices might benefit from cross-pollination.