Innovative Studies in Organized Helping...

Communication is central to solving (inter-)personal problems in the helping professions (psychotherapy, counseling, coaching, helplines, mediation etc.). Peräkylä's (2019) paper on “transformative sequences” in psychotherapy has argued that important change events occur in three dimensions that are grounded in conversational practice: relations, referents and emotions. For example, a “good” relationship between the help provider and the client bears a significant, positive relation to the outcome of the process (Norcross and Lambert, 2018). However, the majority of the existing research mainly relies on quantitative methods, rather than a detailed examination of the specifics of communicative events and how this can develop an in-depth understanding of how transformative sequences are achieved through the talk and conduct of help-providers and clients. The 13 contributions to this Research Topic rely on qualitative, interaction-focused methods to describe and understand transformative sequences as an organized societal practice. These works examine transformative sequences in relation to four partly overlapping themes, namely emotion, relationships, referents and communicative practices.