This book is about 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. The central metaphor is the performance of practice emphasized in the spoken word and expressed in all its non-verbal complexity. How practitioners use every aspect of their being to communicate with the other in practice, how they shape and mold their words through gesture and other non-verbal actions in response to the gestures and words of others is a continually recursive process....

Several good books exist about systemic understanding in therapy and a few about dialogic understanding. However, none exist that try to bridge the gap between these two world views, which have some similarities, but also a whole array of differences.

The most striking difference between these two world views is the very vantage point for observation each of them holds. According to systemic theory, we exist only in and because of the network of relationships we are embedded in. In dialogic theory, we inhabit different worlds, and we need dialogue in order to make them communicate...

Emotions are connected to meaning-making in human interactions. In recent years, systemic theory and practice adopted a dialogical orientation, more centered on the persons of the therapist and her clients. This has led to a growing attention toward emotions, which, in this book, is developed in terms of emotional systems.

An emotional system in therapy may be viewed as the sum of the emotions existing and interacting in people's lives. Relevant changes in life happen when emotional stances and sequences change within the system, leading, for example, to a greater sense of agency...