Fittedness and Implicit Relational Knowing: What is Mutative

In co-creating fittedness, the therapist and the patient implicitly move toward a shared intention. In a beautiful explicit, concrete example, a colleague shared how she and a pre-teen, female patient were drawing a story together on a large whiteboard [an example of the therapist joining or following the patient]. After awhile, the young patient became embarrassed and moved away from the shared task, but then, looking over her shoulder and seeing the therapist still drawing, the patient returned to the whiteboard for some finishing touches [an example of the patient joining the therapist]. That is, the two moved closer and closer toward a shared intention. Moving toward a greater ‘fittedness’ leads to an increased coherence within the dyad, which, in turn, expands implicit relational knowing.

Expanding implicit relational knowing widens the possibilities of how to behave with one another and enriches the repertoire of relational patterns. Likewise, flexibility increases, as does the hope for spontaneity. This is mutative. This is change. Change opens the way to insight, when, after comfortability with a new way of being with an other, one notices that and how things are different.

This is to say that change precedes insight, not follows it.

The Boston Change Process Study Group [BCPSG] has turned psychoanalytic thinking on its head in another way with their explication of how relational patterning is primary and the foundation of psychological life, while conflict and defense are secondary. They cite attachment patterns at age twelve months (seen in the Strange Situation) as evidence for the presence of conflicts and defenses based on relational experiences (because the infant has already apprehended what to expect from the caregiver). For example: an infant with avoidant attachment has learned it cannot count on the caregiver to soothe it when distressed and so appears to have little affect [defensive] while seeking objects to soothe itself; or, conflict is evident in disorganized attachment where the infant reaches for its mother while simultaneously backing away from her.

Change in Psychotherapy: A Unifying Paradigm. (2010). The Boston Change Process Study Group. New York: Norton.