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Running Head: HIJACKED CONVERSATIONS?
Hijacked conversations in counseling?
Tom Strong PhD
Division of Applied Psychology
University of Calgary
Presentation to the Social Construction and Caring Relationships conference,
Lugano, Switzerland, May 18, 2007
All correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Tom Strong, Division of Applied Psychology,
University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta Canada T2N 1N4 or
strongt@ucalgary.ca
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Abstract
From a view that collaborative dialogue requires negotiating meanings and ways of
talking agreeable to both client and counselor, this paper takes sideways glances at a stark
alternative: conversational hijacking. Conversational hijacking is an invented term to
denote how counseling dialogues can be overtaken by some monologic tendencies,
tendencies often reinforced in counselors’ training and institutional expectations.
Examples of conversational hijacking can include shoehorning counseling into the
conversational scripts and protocols of particular theoretical models or institutional
expectations, overtaking clients with counselor passions and certainties, and permitting
oneself to be conversationally hijacked by clients. The general thrust in this paper is on
how to keep and optimize counseling a dialogic encounter that engages the
resourcefulness of both client and counselor.
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Genuine dialogue requires at least two differently situated persons who recognize their
mutual embeddedness in one another’s lives, who meet and work together. Conditions
that thwart this possibility, whether based on a refusal to recognize the embedded nature
of persons or on power arrangements that transform dialogues into monologues held by
the powerful in order to rule the rest, undermine any serious hope that justice can prevail.
E. Sampson, 1993, p. 174
I’d like to talk today about collaboration in counseling, but to do this I will refer to
hijacking conversations. I recognize that talking about “hijacking conversations” in this post 911 world is a dramatic, if not desperate, way to try to draw attention to my preferred topic –
resourceful and collaborative dialogue between clients and counselors. Counselors are clearly not
similar to terrorists and hijackers. They mean well and generally help clients pursue the goals
and concerns that brought them to counseling. They can be immensely influential as well. Their
influences on clients and counseling – intended or unintended - are not to be under-estimated.
I will use the word conversation a number of ways as we proceed. Sometimes I will
borrow from Gadamer (1988), Foucault (1972), or Wittgenstein (1953) in suggesting that there
are large cultural conversations in which we participate and that significantly shape our lives.
Other times I take up a view closer to Erving Goffman (1967) or Derek Edwards and Jonathan
Potter (1992) for whom important stuff happens in face to face dialogue. I will shift between
macro and micro views of conversation and how counselors participate in both. Each kind of
conversation can be a dialogue when it offers participants ways to influence or negotiate how it
occurs. Conversational hijacking occurs when such negotiations or influence are not possible.
Counselors generally seek open, responsive and generative dialogues with clients and I believe
would be appropriately dismayed with any effort to hijack conversation, how ever well intended.
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Hijacking?
Conversational hijacking, in my view, occurs when dialogues and their related
negotiations are overtaken by monologues or monologic tendencies (more on those later). To me,
the dialogues of counseling offer clients opportunities - rare elsewhere - to reflect upon their use
of language, and to find or negotiate alternative language to move forward. Clients can become
‘linguistically impoverished’ (Vico, 1984), so counseling can be where they join counselors in
putting personally apt words to understandings worth enacting. But, such dialogue is an elusive
thing and seldom occurs as well as it might. Conversational hijacking often occurs without
counselors and clients being aware of it. People normally do not try to take conversational
‘hostages’ but they aren’t fans of conversations that don’t go their way, or as they professionally
‘should’, either. Avoiding this entails collaborative conversational work that doesn’t fit for
counselors who see themselves as experts on clients’ concerns or the counseling process. It is
further compounded when clients show up acculturated to defer to counselor expertise, but do
what they want to beyond counseling regardless of what happens there. Needed, in my view, are
dialogues that clients and counselors can mutually claim as their own for how each participates
in them. Conversational hijacking as I am describing it stands in stark contrast with my
dreamer’s view of resourceful dialogue (I am not alone, see also Anderson, 1997; Bakhtin, 1981;
Buber, 1958; McNamee & Gergen, 1999; Sampson, 1993), as a relational process that makes
possible more than what each speaker could come up with on their own.
I want to be clear that I am also not suggesting that counselors are only listeners or that
they should be conversational eunuchs either. Clients generally seek more than dialogue within
their monologues. Complicating things further, conversational hijacking isn’t something one
could point out by stopping dialogue at any given time. People take turns in talking; some getting
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more into talking at times than others. Nor am I suggesting deadening the counselor to enliven
the client either. My preference is with how counselors can host conversations that engage the
resourcefulness, passions, curiosities, discouragements, and hard-to-discuss features of clients’
and their lives – and how this all gets done with negotiable mutuality. Conversational hijacking
comes with being held to any conversation that is non-negotiable, intended or otherwise.
Hijacked by the Already Spoken
Berger and Luckmann (1967) wrote years ago that conversation is our primary way of
conserving understanding, problematic or otherwise. This extends as much to counselors as it
does to clients. Either can get ensnared in closed or fixed circles of meaning that don’t serve
them well as new developments arise. Counseling provides an opportunity to talk beyond the
bounds of the already spoken, beyond meanings which have become fossilized or fetishized
(Newman & Holzman, 1996). Life calls for people to consistently adapt but somehow this axiom
seems to have not been extended to the language and ways of talking they use for such adapting.
The already spoken might seem like an unusual hijacker. No overt hijacking is involved,
and I contend that how this occurs owes more to dominant understandings of language than to
one’s conversational partners. As Tom Andersen (1996) pointed out language is not innocent; it
comes ‘peopled’ with others’ intentions (Bakhtin, 1981). Wittgenstein (1953; 1961/1921) said a
lot relevant to conversational hijacking. For modern realists, he wrote one of the classic books on
(Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 1961/1921) how rational science could benefit from a metalanguage. Most sciences, psychology included, try to develop such a metalanguage. It helps
scientists talk to each other, conduct research, and convey scientifically derived and approved
findings to the lay public, and so on. But, this linguistic uniformity (and it is anything but
uniform across scientific disciplines) comes with fairly significant costs.
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Wittgenstein came to think quite differently (1953) about language. For him,
metalanguage was an unattainable ideal so he shifted focus to how people use their existing
languages to go on in life (my emphasis on languages plural is intended). Everyday languages,
while perhaps lacking in scientific precision, bring out aspects of life typically passed over in
scientific discourse. Science seemed to promise certainties; but taken-for-granted certainties put
to words have a habit of binding people, including counselors, to particular descriptions
(Amundson, Valentine, & Stewart, 1993). One person’s ‘depression’ might, as different aspects
of their everyday experience are discussed, more closely resemble oppression. That language
was somehow connected to how one understands and relates to experience was not something
people in Western societies reflected on much until recently. As John Heron once wrote, “The
perceiving process becomes routinized by language. Its active participation sleep-walks inside
the clothing of linguistic categories” (1996, p.16). Wittgenstein wanted us to wake up to how
language shapes our experience in taken for granted ways, right down to how we understand and
talk about our most subjective experiences. His shift on language will feel familiar to many
counselors who have taken up a social constructionist approach to counseling.
Wittgenstein’s wake-up call, so to speak, relates to his view that people could optimize
their use of language in perspicuous representations and apt language games. He felt we too
often are bewitched by language – in our descriptions and ways of conversing, something akin to
the already spoken as a conversational hijacker. Perspicuous language suggests a linguistic ideal,
but Wittgenstein’s point was that needed was language that helped people “go on” where they
hadn’t been able to before. Some language serves us better than others, while less than adequate
language often overtakes people who don’t get to reflect on alternatives. It is important to note
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an absence of the word “correct” here. Effective, apt, fitting, adequate, satisfactory language can
help us “go on”. Correct language – however this gets determined – can be a recipe for paralysis.
Perspicuity?
Finding perspicuous language – to aptly describe experience, to articulate personally
meaningful and do-able solutions, to repair connections with others, and so on – can be an
exacting process. Needed is a critical stance to reflect on the shortcomings of existing language,
and a poetic and improvised knack at articulating alternatives. On the critical side, the already
spoken can be like ‘hand-me-down’ clothing - ways of representing and communicating
experience that don’t fit the user. On the poetic side, it can help to remember that different
language can bring out relevant, unvoiced aspects of experience while pointing to connections
that promote a sense of being able to “go on”. Perspicuous language need not be a solo project
either; it has to be usable back in the relationships and contexts where it is required.
Counseling affords resourceful possibilities for perspicuous conversations. There
counselors and clients can get curious about the already spoken, particularly as this relates to
clients’ concerns or aspirations. As Bakhtin (1981) might say, in such conversations speakers
make words come alive in the back and forth of their talk. More important, perspicuous
conversations can help clients reflect upon and confront being hijacked by the already spoken
while joining counselors in finding apt language for describing their concerns and solutions.
The already spoken hijacking how dialogue occurs
There is another aspect to Wittgenstein’s wake-up call that relates to how conversations
occur; perspicuous representations or descriptions focus more on what gets said. How people talk
shapes what can be said. Counselors know this from differences associated with how certain
approaches to counseling sanction certain kinds of questions, curiosities and manners of
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engaging with clients. In everyday life, religious conversations produce different understandings
than conversations about sports. These can be seen as examples of Wittgenstein’s notion of
“language games”, conversations involving different kinds of participation with their associated
meanings. These “language games” bear a distant family resemblance to Foucault’s (1972)
discourses. Within either certain ways of being, understanding and interacting are required.
Where Wittgenstein (1953) saw “language games” as “forms of life”, Foucault’s concern was
with the often taken-for-granted dominance any discourse had on both meanings and ways of
interacting. Conversation, for Foucault, often occurs in dominated ways I have been referring to
as hijacking. Gregory Bateson’s (1980) concerns about patterning also speak to this ‘how
dimension’ of conversation. Systemically trained therapists are attuned to problems in stuck
patterns of conversation between family members and partners (e.g., Imber-Black, 1989; Tomm,
1991). These patterns have a hypnotic conversational inertia about them that sustain particular
(often unhelpful) understandings and ways of relating (Ritterman, 1983). Such conversational
patterns can also be seen as hijackers. Stale or restrictive language games, dominant discourses,
and maladaptive patterns are forms of the already spoken that, through taken-for-granted
perpetuation, work against adaptive, or perspicuous, ways of understanding and relating.
Scientifically correct conversations in counseling?
Behind these views is a sense of how the already spoken keeps hijacking conversations;
those of clients as well as counselors. The barn door isn’t closed on a lot of things in counseling,
especially on what happens or is possible in dialogue. But, a growing movement aims to hold
counseling to correct conversations – evidence-based ones. An extreme version sees the first
phase of counseling as a correctly conducted diagnostic interview of pre-scripted questions tied
to decision trees with answers culminating in a diagnosis. Efforts to standardize this part of the
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counseling interview (e.g., Fisher & O’Donohue, 2006; Jensen Doss, 2005) dovetail neatly with
the protocols of correctly used evidence based interventions. Thus, it would seem, counseling’s
conversations can be scientifically mapped then legislated as ethically correct practice
(Bryceland & Stam, 2005). To administrators and a technologically oriented public this brings
order and legitimacy to the unruly house of counseling where over 350 approaches now compete
for clients. But, it is a trend that has concerned critical psychologists for some time (e.g.,
Henriques, Holloway, Urwin, Venn & Walkerdine, 1984; Newman & Holzman, 1996; Parker,
1999; Prilleltensky, 1994; Rose, 1990). Where some see dependable algorithms for practice (e.g.,
Rush, 2001), I see a form of conversational hijacking. The word warranting all this is “science”.
Science itself can be seen as rigorous and contested conversations where understandings
and ways of practice are continuously worked out (e.g., Hacking, 1983; Latour, 1988; Toulmin,
1990). Newton’s sense of life as a knowable, tinkerable machine still holds sway as a root
metaphor in psychology while the hardest of sciences, like physics, have shifted to other ways of
conceptualizing and conducting their business. My point is not to denigrate science – its
accomplishments arise out of very carefully scrutinized conversations. But, to paraphrase Victor
Turner (1975), modern science has a habit of translating metaphors into calculus. And so it goes
with mapping out the statistically-supported diagnostic and intervention protocols of counseling.
Further entrenching this very persistent metaphor for counseling’s conversations are health care
administrators, the legal profession ever-wary about ‘malpractice’, and mental health professions
who seek scientific and thus public accountability and legitimacy. Journalist, Gary Greenberg
(2007), recently described his being a client as a “journey into the economy of melancholy” (p.
47) where clients and therapists took up parts in such pre-scripted conversations.
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Things need not be that bleak for counseling, of course. While the evidence-based
conversation seems on the rise, debates at the highest levels of the profession (e.g., Norcross,
Beutler & Levant, 2006) continue to shape where this discussion may go. A flipside discussion
that also finds a lot of resonance for counselors relates to Milton Erickson’s (see Zeig, 1980)
notion that every client needs their own customized therapy. Counselors have long had to sort
out the extent to which their conversations with clients might be hijacked by a form of
methodolatry, something particularly relevant to when they are in face-to-face dialogue.
Hijacking face-to-face dialogue
While social constructionist counselors recognize meaning-making occurring at a cultural
level, many feel uneasy about their meaning-making contributions when conversing with clients
(Strong, 2003). Wary of Foucault’s cautions (2006) about the professional gaze and about
counseling as another “truth regime”, some retreat into the seemingly benign professional stance
of Carl Rogers (Bavelas, McGee, Phillips, & Routledge, 2000). Counseling, from this stance, is
portrayed as a manifest activity where a counselor’s good listening skills are sufficient in helping
clients arrive at meanings and actions they need. And, there are ways to ‘postmodernize’ Rogers’
(Anderson, 2001) client-centeredness which has deservedly become a core value of counselors.
What I most borrow from Rogers is something that can get lost sight of at times: who the
conversation is for, the client. When there isn’t a pre-scripted conversation to have with clients
ethical and moral concerns arise as to how counseling should take place, and whose criteria
should be used in evaluating its progress. Most commonly, clients’ goals are focal to the
counseling, but in some counseling models (e.g., Egan, 1998) the counselor seems like a taxi
driver. Once he or she has the client’s goal (or desired destination), it is their job to get the client
there. “Good intentions” and strongly held concepts of what clients need come up here. Such
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intentions have contributed to the tragedy playing out for many indigenous people, globally. As
Samoan Just Therapist, Kiwi Tamasese said at a conference years ago, ‘psychology is the last
colonizer of my people’. My colleague David Pare would add that counselors can ‘colonize’ with
what they feel passionately about, most coercively so when there is something they feel their
clients MUST understand or do. Clients always have the last say on counseling (they’ll think and
do what they want to after, regardless), so holding them to the good intentions of our counseling
models and passions doesn’t make sense and can be another way of hijacking the conversation.
Negotiated Dialogues?
When it became clear to me that collaborative dialogue translated to negotiations then my
clinical and research interest turned toward how these negotiations take place (Strong, 2003).
One of Bakhtin’s (1981) core ideas has become a personal mantra: the word in any dialogue is
only half mine. My take on this is that any word I use in counseling needs to accommodate how
clients will respond to its use – if I ‘let’ them. Maturana and Varela (1988) helped rid me of the
notion that I could install or transmit my thoughts to clients’ (or your) heads and hearts. How we
talk from our interpretive histories and preferences won’t permit this but missing seems a step in
how speakers negotiate then share words and ways of talking. A close look at conversation
shows people doing things with each other’s utterances, working out how they will understand
and relate as they talk. Presumably, collaboration owes something to how counselor and client
talk so clients can take useful things from their talking. How this occurs without conversational
hijacking is my concern, so, let’s now turn, micro-dynamically, to these negotiations with clients.
Conversation, where personal stakes and moral inferences matter to speakers - as they
talk (Potter, 1996) - can be hard work. Speakers face a challenge of pursuing personal outcomes
while sustaining their relationships. The libertarians and Hobbesians would have us view each
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conversation as dog-eat-dog competition of the fittest. Besting our conversational partners over
points of logic or talking down to them from some moral or informational high ground is a recipe
for conflict or isolation. Some counselors are ambivalent on this point, particularly if they see
their role as correcting or directing clients from their expertise.
Professionally rigged dialogues?
Hijacked conversations in counseling hold clients to particular meanings and actions - the
counselor’s. Counselors might be offended when some critical psychologists and sociologists see
counseling as a power play determined by how well clients learn to speak the counselor’s
discourse or meet their criteria for ‘appropriate dialogue’ (e.g., Davis, 1984; Rose, 1990).
Negotiating what constitutes therapeutic success and then being guided by this “success” is one
way constructionist counselors level conversational hierarchies, customizing and revising
counseling’s understandings and direction with clients as they talk. Many taken-for-granted
junctures in counseling arise where decisions and evaluations regarding the counseling process
can be collaboratively made. How important aspects of experience are named, how client
understandings are selected for reflection, how conversational directions are decided, how
particular subjects get discussed, how success is defined (and so on) can be sites of
conversational hijacking or places for collaborative decisions on how to go forward together.
For John Shotter (1993), conversations can develop seemingly inconstestable realities.
They can develop a speakers’ logic, as to what gets deemed “appropriate” participation over time
(e.g., Arminen, 1999). Add to this cultural power differentials in professional helping favoring
the counselor (Miller & Silverman, 1995) – and a counselor’s potential to label clients “resistant”
– and unsurprisingly, clients can become cooperative where we would prefer them collaborative.
Cooperating is not collaborating; it is like going along with a hijacker. As with the Stockholm or
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Patti Hearst syndrome, in time clients can learn to cooperate and start sounding like their
hijacker. Long ago, family therapy pioneer, Jay Haley (1963), said that crazy-making situations
were ones people couldn’t comment on or influence. There is an ample supply of such nonnegotiable conversations in everyone’s lives, including counselors’ professional lives.
Hijacking or negotiating counseling’s aporectic moments
I want to speak to a few nuances on this theme. One such nuance relates to when speakers
feel held to being clear or certain about experience (Byrne & McCarthy, 1988). Ambiguity and
ambivalence is generally unwelcome in Western cultural discourse (Levine, 1985). Moral and
conceptual clarity are much trumpeted virtues these days, in ways that can hijack or prematurely
foreclose on important reasoning and preference-making processes. Such careful reasoning and
preference making is often needed on matters of great delicacy and importance for clients. Why
can’t there be room for ambiguity and ambivalence about things for which language remains
inadequate!? For Paolo Freire (1985) it is critical that the disempowered acquire their language
for such matters and not some professional or otherwise ‘correct’ language. But, funders of
counseling need goals, diagnoses, or empirically supported interventions to fill such unprofitable
conversational “voids”. Counseling models offer counselors rich vocabularies for clients’
experiences while counselors can feel uncomfortable in joining clients in such voids of meaning.
I am interested in how clients and counselors relate to emotionally charged and ambiguous
moments (e.g., Fuller & Strong, 2001; Strong, 2007). Many of these slip by in counseling.
Derrida (1976) questioned how humans give experiences meaning, when words can never
be the same as what they represent, and experiences can not name themselves. Aporias are
experiences for which there is no finally determinable meaning and counseling has lots of them.
Suppose clients review tapes of their counseling, pick emotionally charged moments that, upon
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further reflection still matter to them, and then come back to discuss such moments (see Elliott,
1987; Gass & Mackey, 2000)? What new might get talked into being when, for Bakhtin (1981),
any meaningful moment promises multiple conversational pathways or possibilities for meaning?
Margaret Fuller, a graduate student I supervised, asked clients five sessions into their counseling
to pick a passage they considered most “alive” from reviewing videotapes of their counseling.
From their selected “alive” moment, Margaret interviewed the clients in the presence of their
counselor. Clients had varied reasons for choosing their “alive” moments and Margaret had some
curiosities as well. If ever there was a place where she could hijack the research conversation it
came in asking: did clients associate anything spiritual with these moments? Each client
suspiciously responded by asking Margaret “what do you mean by spiritual” to which she
offered a broad, pantheistic definition. A shared period of ambiguity and ambivalence followed
until the clients tentatively came to talk about their moment in ways consistent with this broad
definition. As these tentative efforts were put to words, Margaret joined in their elaboration, and
the utterances grew to sound less tentative, more confident. Three months later the clients
reported still thinking and acting on this elaborative discussion.
This research evoked an understandable wariness from some readers about how Margaret
‘held’ clients to her idea of the conversation. After all, it was her question that invited a spiritual
discussion about the “alive” moments. The “co” prefix in co-constructing understandings or
actions, a prefix dear to many constructionist counselors, doesn’t wash for those concerned here.
When conversation is viewed as a contest, or its course can’t be negotiated or co-developed, one
speaker has to dominate. Margaret had to be hijacking the conversation or clients were simply
indulging her. Note how such lines of thought can sanction conversational hijacking. Margaret’s
research points to important considerations about negotiating counseling conversations without
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hijacking them. How can one talk of co-constructing understandings and actions, if both clients
and counselors are not negotiating, and customizing their content and process?
Many pause here and ask: but don’t clients come to counselors for their expertise, for the
conversational process they host? I agree. They come for a conversation to help overcome
distress or achieve a goal they could not attain on their own. But this can sound like a blood
transfusion - clients coming for a transfer of counselor expertise knowledge. It also implies a
client who, like a blood recipient, is passive until the knowledge transfer is complete. Foucault
(2006) harshly saw professionals, like counselors, needing docility from their clients in order to
do their work. This contrasts dramatically with responsive conversations that mobilize the
resourcefulness of both clients and counselors. Consistent with this view, some counselors see
their expertise as “conversation or process managers”. Personally, I prefer notions like discursive
flexibility (Strong, 2002) and balk at conversation “management”, or dialogues ‘administered’
by counselors. To turn to a narrative metaphor, with the counseling dialogue a developing client
story, I am mindful of who is editor in chief. And, in many editorial boardrooms, the discussions
that lead to editorial decisions can be quite imaginative and sometime even heated, on the way to
what finally makes it into print. Clients take forward what they find useful from counseling.
Missing from most accounts of the counseling process is a sense of clients and counselors
simultaneously engaged in meaning-making, as they talk with each other. Close examinations of
talk show listeners’ subtly and often not so subtly indicating to each other – as they talk – that
something in what they are being told is or is not on for them. For example, speakers often start
saying something and, depending on how they are being received, make mid-course corrections
to what they say so they can be understood more as they wish. There is a “co” thing going on
here. Such speakers point out an axiom of dialogue: that being in dialogue means opening
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oneself to the reciprocal influence of one’s conversational partners. It isn’t a matter of either/or;
even the most overbearing conversational partner usually cedes some ground to their
conversational other to sustain a conversation. What matters most is how the stakes of the
conversation are worked out as people talk to each other. In counseling these stakes are varied.
In part, I am talking about the yin and yang of dialogue; it’s instrumental and goaloriented dimension and its relationally responsive dimension. Counseling needs both dimensions
though the instrumental dimension has been particularly emphasized in North American
counseling this last while. Some social constructionist counselors have also become particularly
enamored with conversational techniques. John Shotter speaks of a Rambo-esque (i.e., a la
Sylvester Stallone) kind of agency shown by some counselors – for themselves and for their
clients. What counselor doesn’t like to see Michael White ask a brilliant question, or read
spectacular accounts of Milton Erickson’s therapeutic wizardry? Carl Rogers’ empathic ahhmms and reflective paraphrases seem pretty mundane and useless by comparison. Counselors
are sometimes likened to carpenters who have intervention toolkits. But, clients have their own
evolving ideas on what needs to get constructed in their work with counselors. In this regard,
counseling can seem like the challenge of choosing then hanging wallpaper in a friend’s home.
Talk in this sense helps speakers coordinate their preferences, understandings and actions around
projects aimed to better things for one of them. Like hanging wallpaper, it is easy for counseling
to become competing monologues (note how clients can simply go silently underground here) on
how things should develop in ways that serve no one.
In considering the yin (“feminine”, Carl Rogers) side of dialogue, lately my interest in
nuance has grown around conversations about topics difficult to initiate and elaborate. Some of
the difficulty seems to come with the moral aspects of such topics, in what James and Melissa
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Griffiths (1994) once described as “unspeakable dilemmas”. Professional or institutionally
driven dialogue sanctions some kinds of conversation over others. For example, emergent “alive”
moments in dialogue are passed over if counseling is too goal-directed or if the counselor fails to
engage with evocative client utterances (Katz & Shotter, 1999). Difficult conversations are
pregnant with aporias of meaning-making potential, beckoning counselors to respond as
“conversational midwives” (Weingarten, 1995). David Silverman (2001) described such
conversations as constructing “delicate” objects. These are conversations that often start in
incoherence, ambiguity, confusion or even moral or politically sensitive circumstances. They
typically became difficult because they failed to find a response in others. Sensitive to still not
being heard, a raised eyebrow, an unresponded to tentative utterance, a change of topic via a
counselor’s question at a mounting emotional juncture in the conversation – all point to junctures
where counselors may unintentionally hijack or bypass delicate conversations with clients.
Blunted responsivity?
I want to re-emphasize that behind most hijacked conversations in counseling are good
intentions or blunted awareness. Counselors channel their good intentions through training and
supervision, counseling models, professional codes of practice, theories of development and
communication, personal theories, and so on. Often what comes out the end of this professional
sausage-maker are finely-honed intentions, improvements on those prior to training but
sometimes blunting what Shotter (2006) refers to as relational responsivity. Relational
responsivity is something we most humans are born into this world with, being well-attuned to
their primary caregivers. This gets blunted as one learns ‘how things are or should be’. I don’t
want to romanticize the untrained helper but research shows that paraprofessionals can be as
helpful to clients as professionals (Durlak, 1979). My hunch is that, despite greater self-
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awareness, refined sensitivities to the helping encounter, and diverse knowledge about human
development and change, the counselors had more of a professional agenda with which to hijack
the conversation from clients. But, I would not idealize everyday conversation either.
In everyday conversation, the norm is that one encounters many agendas in asking for
help, so counseling can be a definite improvement over those conversations. Similarly, in the
hurly-burly of every day discourse, people are faced with multiple claims on their meanings and
actions. We don’t think, talk or act without reference to how others might receive us (Billig,
1996). As relational beings we can’t just say and do whatever pleases us individually, without
some responses or other ripple effects in our relationships. Ask someone who has come out as
gay or lesbian about this. Observe what happens when a politician “flip-flops” on an important
policy issue. Such circumstances point out an important feature, not of changing one’s mind or
one’s identity, but of changing one’s conversations and ways of interacting with others
(Edwards, 1997). And such changes might seem tantamount to conversational hijacking to these
others, though that need not be the case. We are talking about the politics of everyday
conversation (Laing, 1967; Ochs & Taylor, 1992) where conversations sustain some relational
orders and shared versions of experience over others (Garfinkel, 1967). Counseling can offer a
place to reflect on such conversational politics and how to negotiate one’s involvement in them
anew. Where that is not possible, broader social action and support may be required.
As I indicated earlier, some see counseling involving negotiations with clients, with these
tending to favor counselors and the institutions in which they work (Parker, 1999; Rose, 1990).
In my research I look for how such negotiations transpire using conversation analysis (CA). I am
interested in how clients and counselors put words to difficult conversations, negotiate critical
junctures in counseling, contest overdetermined meanings from prior conversations, construct
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generative relationships, and so on. For Harold Garfinkel (1967), conversations engage speakers
in practically interpreting, or making sense of, each other as they talk. In this sense-making they
each propose where the conversation, and thus their relationship, might next to go. This
generally occurs in taken for granted (seen but unnoticed is how they say things in CA) ways –
much slips under our conversational radar as we learn to attend to some things more than others.
CA regards speakers as talking across a gap in which they propose things to each other – to
which the conversational partner responds based on her or his interpretation of what is proposed.
Interpretations, judgments and conversational actions are all worked out on the fly, between
speakers, though prior conversations cover ground, that unless seen as controversial, generally
escapes notice. While speakers can become good or familiarized at packaging their talk for each
other, as they talk, there will always be some element of dialogic mystery as others respond to
them in taking their turns in talking. What matters in CA is what speakers do with their parts in
these interactions, how they use their turn for proposing initiatives, declining proposals, taking
up others’ talk, extending or departing from what has been said, and so on. In counseling, these
negotiations are interesting to see worked out (or not).
In the absence of “telementation” (literally, knowing what goes on in another’s thinking)
speakers have only what they show each other to go on for understanding how they are being
received and understood (Wittgenstein, 1953). So, understanding itself is seen as an observable
accomplishment, though speakers having histories with each other, typically have worked out
many prior understandings that don’t require further effort. In conversations with new people,
however, such as in counseling, this may not be the case. Understanding may require
considerable conversational effort before client and counselor adequately acknowledge to each
other that they have worked out an understanding. The same goes for influence. In trying to
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propose an action, or invite a particular kind of response, one has what is shown back to go on.
So, not surprisingly considerable effort can be spent in ‘packaging’ what is sent. Here, however,
I must turn to a point raised by Vygotsky (1987), that expressed thought is completed in words as
they are spoken – not before they exit one’s head. Much packaging of talk occurs based on how
speakers see themselves being received. What I am about to say may seem like an odd
observation but I’ll back it up in a moment. I have actually come to appreciate the many umms
and ahs, and pauses, - the stuff many associate with unclear communications – with what people
are doing as they package what they say to each other. To me, they can be artful ways of
showing responsivity to each other as they talk and not always some kind of conversational
clumsiness. Delicate negotiations and those with unfamiliar others require more work and
elements of tentativeness and responsiveness to one’s negotiating partner. These efforts are all
observable, and guide speakers on what next to say how to say it to their conversational others.
Counseling as Negotiation: Finding “Common Ground” on Words and Ways of Talking
Good therapeutic dialogue involves an interweave of client and counselor words and
ways of talking (Ferrara, 1993). By this I am referring to what Herbert Clark (1996) has called
“common ground” in communications. Developing “common ground” comes as speakers work
out and take up ways of understanding and relating that they then use in common. The common
ground or interweave in these ways of understanding and relating becomes evident in an
increasingly shared (and uncontrived) vocabulary and manner of speaking. For counselors, this
discursive perspective suggests being mindful of how their use of language fares in terms of
what clients do with it. Common ground, if achieved, is a discursive accomplishment of both
client and counselor, but the back and forth negotiations to get there are quite observable.
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Getting specific, it can help to see dialogue occurring across a gap, like neuroscience’s
synaptic gap. This dialogic gap is where speakers show how they interpret and put forward their
preferences for how they want the conversation to go next. Common ground occurs when the gap
isn’t quite so large or doesn’t require so much conversational work. But, when it is about, say,
answering a new style of question in counseling, activity across the gap is something to behold
as I hope this next passage of counseling dialogue shows.
John asks and Sid answers a solution-focused scaling question
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
John:
Sid:
John:
Sid:
John:
Sid:
John:
Sid:
John:
Sid:
John:
Sid:
John:
Sid:
John:
Sid:
John:
Sid:
John:
Sid:
John:
Okay, on like (.) on a scale of one to ten↓
Okay ((nods))=
=Okay, like TEN would be (1.5) ah >you’ve got a handle on this<↓
[Uhm huh] ((nodding))
[Right] and, and its, its (.) you know, maybe ten would be like the balance
(.) if there’s a balance between (.3) you know, sometimes its (.) its (.)
helpful to plan=
=Okay ((nodding))
and o, you know maybe over plan (.6) and (1.2) uhm (1) sometimes its,
you know, it it >stresses you out<
[Uhm uhm] ((nodding))
[*Right?*] Ten would be:: (.4) like (.3) the balance is >this is nothing but
helpful<
Okay ((nodding))
Like it’s totally on
[Yea ((nods)) (1.5) Yep]
[on the continuum of] this is helpful. And one would be (.) like
you’re (.6) you know fretting and worry about everything and you’re you
know, it’s (2.5) making you’re stomach
[Yea ((nods)) (1) Yea ((nods)) (1.5) Yea]
[go in a knot or whatever happens for you when you’re stressed out]
Uhmm (1.1) >Where’re you at right now<?=
=Somewhere probably a 6 or a 7.
Okay.
Yep.
So, that’s, that’s (.) that’s pretty good?
Yea, yea it’s not hind (.7) its >hindering me in the sense that I have those
stressful moments throughout the day< or throughout the week or whatever
where I am like ge::ez, you know, but its not killing me↓ and I think it is
beneficial in that (.) it’s gotten me to where I am and its helping me cope
with my time and it’s, you know (.8) keeping me on track↑
Okay, okay.
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Normally, one thinks of questions as simply posed and answered. Here, however, there is
a lot of conversational work going on as John (the counselor) has to work out with Sid a question
that can be answered. The pauses, the underlines (for emphases), the umms and ahs, and so forth
show intricate conversational work as Sid and John propose things and respond to them. Most
counseling textbooks leave out this level of detail in clients’ and counselors’ dialogues. My point
is to bring out relevant details (i.e., to the speakers involved) involved in negotiating this
question and answer sequence. What seemingly could have been asked in line 1 and answered in
line 2 took 23 lines before an answer was started. The conversational journey there had lots of
backs and forths until Sid finished elaborating an answer and John acknowledged receiving one.
Evidence that a conversational outcome is accomplished – by Sid’s answering a challenging
question in ways that satisfy both Sid and John - occurs between lines 23 and 32.
Why should this level of conversational detail matter to our topic of hijacking? My
answer is that it points to a responsive dimension of conversation important to how counselors
customize their communications when working with clients. Like a dancer trying to introduce a
new dance step into a dance that is already under way, great sensitivity is required not only in
advancing something unfamiliar to the dance partner, but in responding to how the partner
responds. Counselors proposing something different from what has been already worked out
have comparable important challenges: suppose the client doesn’t want to do the dance step,
suppose the initial response back isn’t going as hoped for, suppose the client proposes a different
dance step? Developments inside counseling are not much different, although counselors can
take ‘conversational hostages’ when they shut down the kind of responsiveness shown by John
above. Looking closely at good counseling has shown me how much counselors try to customize
a language and a conversational process together with clients (e.g., Strong, in press). Creating
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common ground in shared understandings and actions takes a lot of negotiating, to accomplish
understandings and actions that clients can carry forward beyond counseling.
Negotiations as forward moving collaborations?
Psychology has a poor vocabulary to account for how individuals collaborate or negotiate
common understandings and actions. More common are notions like groupthink, enmeshment,
surrendering to logic – to me, forms of conversational hijacking. How is it that people talking
and listening come to influence each other? Are they tripping cognitive or affective switches
with their words? Elsewhere they strike up business partnerships and work out other joint
projects, even between relative strangers, in ways not unlike John and Sid. The best partnerships
show partners highly attentive to new developments either proposes and with conversational
work great things can emerge. No hostages are taken, no coercive power is required, two
people’s intentions get ‘wordsmithed’ (Strong, 2006) into a new language at least one could
usefully take forward. What’s that about, if not a transfer of expert knowledge?
My answer is that it is about the responsive, resourceful and flexible ways counselors
engage clients (and themselves) in developing a shared language, one that is continually up for
negotiation, so as to remain perspicuous for the client. But, counselors are typically trained to
have particular kinds of conversations with clients, those consistent with their theoretical
orientations and training. Stephen Tyler (as cited in Hoffman, 1995), once described an
anthropologist entering a hitherto unknown culture with textbooks taped to his eyes. This is an
extreme caricature of what can happen to counselors as they learn to selectively engage with and
respond to clients. Our clients don't usually come to counseling conceptually packaging their
understandings in the discourses of Freud, Aaron Back or Michael White. But, our conversations
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can sure take them there. Bill O'Hanlon (workshop comments, 2002) pokes a lot of fun at
counselors "marrying" their clinical hypotheses and models.
A few years ago I became interested in a conversational metaphor I first learned from
Lois Shawver on her Postmodern Therapies listserv (PMTH@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU).
The metaphor was that of a dialogic borderzone and I began looking at how good dialogue
requires a sense that it is the 'dwelling' (in Heidegger's sense) of both speakers (Strong, 2002).
Counseling typically starts with a conversation between two relative strangers. They may share a
common mother tongue, but this can blind them to each other's unique uses and understandings
of language. The discursively aware counselor, recognizing this, faces a choice as to how to
welcome the client’s understandings and ways of talking without accepting them as the sole
language of counseling, or hijacking the client’s language as an alternative. A borderzone
implies that client and counselor have some common ground to work out in their
communications. This metaphor bears some family resemblances to the work of Imelda
McCarthy and her colleagues (e.g., Byrne & McCarthy, 1988) in creating conversational spaces
where new forms of talking and listening are possible. Clients and counselors are, in a sense, on
linguistic foreign ground each time they talk, or negotiate, their way through unfamiliar
developments between them. I say “in a sense” here because neither creates or comes to such a
borderzone without prior understandings or ways of talking. Indeed, part of what a borderzone
can offer is a purposefully co-constructed context in which to unpack significant differences in
how client and counselor use language, as part of talking their way to common ground.
Milking this metaphor further, there are lots of junctures where clients and counselors
depart from common ground, taking relational risks by reflecting on the already spoken, by
proposing and working out new language for how they will conversationally move forward
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together (Strong & Tomm, 2007). Needed is a language that clients find fitting in understanding
and acting on concerns they brought to counseling, something I suggest happens through this
unpacking and negotiating we have been discussing. But, I’m not confident that this can happen
when clients are conversationally hijacked by the already spoken, or by simply mimicking the
counselor’s language without customizing it as their own. A borderzone can be a place of
conversational hybridity where words and ways of talking can be unpacked, tried on, and
customized to clients’ purposes for beyond counseling. Without such a conversational place, well
intended counseling can become conversational hijacking occurs for reasons that owe much to
outdated views on conversation and language use in counseling, something that concerns me.
Hijacking the Final Word: No way!
I want to conclude with a little experiment. Throughout this paper I have repeatedly
suggested that counseling is a negotiated process which can be hijacked without great sensitivity
and responsivity to both clients’ and counselors’ words and ways of talking. My stance has been
that collaborative dialogue in counseling involves more than client cooperation and that this is
accomplished through developing contexts and ways of talking that promote perspicuous
understandings and common ground. But, I have been doing this all along as a monologue,
proposing ways of talking and understanding to you in the hopes that we might get to common
ground (translators and all). Borrowing from Bakhtin (1981), a collaborative dialogue should
ideally take people to a sense of “we” in their communications, a “we” in which understandings
and actions are customized so that they are personally fitting. My invitation is for you to see my
paper as one turn in a dialogue about where important conversations about counseling could
better accomplish that for you. Our conversational negotiations don’t stop because I said so. That
would be my way of hijacking your conversation.
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