Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy

Living Edition
| Editors: Jay Lebow, Anthony Chambers, Douglas C. Breunlin

Deconstructive Listening in Couple and Family Therapy

Living reference work entry
First Online:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_227-1
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Therapeutic conversations provide a context for change in couple and family therapy and are interconnected with the contexts in which they take place, i.e., social, cultural, and historical contexts. Conversations serve as context and are embedded in context. Therapists’ listening orientation contributes as an important factor in setting up a context of response to the concerns that bring clients to therapy. How therapists are oriented to what they listen to and for impact how they, aesthetically, filter information out of unlimited potential possibilities (Hibel and Polanco 2010). It is in the very same aesthetic act of their selection of information that information becomes such, making whatever difference (Bateson 1972) in the therapeutic process. Consequently, that which is not listened to or selected easily gets lost in the conversation. Solution-oriented therapists, for example, would listen to select information that they judge, from their theoretical framework, as exceptions...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Our Lady of the Lake UniversitySan AntonioUSA

Section editors and affiliations

  • Margarita Tarragona
    • 1
  1. 1.PositivaMente & Grupo Campos ElíseosMexico CityMexico