Relationship Analysis
In which way someone experiences themselves as the victim of their environment (personal responsibility decision!) can always be studied well in the offer of contact and developing relationship patterns with the consultant. To absorb this information and then to use it is an essential (hermeneutic dialogue) consulting technique.
The guiding question is: Which internal or external reactions does the client reveal to the consultant? How should the consultant feel: well or unwell, cautious or unconsidered, critical or gentle, bored or curious, distant or close, attracted or withdrawn, and much more)? The consultant’s internal ‘non-selective perception’ for the often rather subtle changes in his perceptiveness, his acceptance, his understanding and his response are required in order to recognise a pattern which will help the client to understand and which will then create possibilities for making this understanding available to the client: “I notice that I always hesitate to question something you say. On my side there is always a little game of ‘be careful’ going on. Could it be important to you, for a reason we have not yet examined, that others are a little bit fearful of you?” or “I often feel tempted to help you or to say what should be done. It is just as if you wished to animate the helper in me, and see yourself as in need. Could there be something in that?”. It is only when individuals receive information about something which they have induced in others, that they can experience their personal responsibility in a new and different way. The utilisation of relationship-dynamics, which, incidentally, is well spread in many consultancy methods (in psychoanalysis ‘transference relationship and counter transference analysis’), is, however, strongly dependent upon how well the consultant knows himself and his own patterns. Otherwise he will unconsciously pressure the client and thus damage him instead.