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Doing relational work with individuals can help fill gaps in understanding relationship dynamics.

Role-play in therapy enhances clients' relational skills through embodied practice.

Chairwork may uncover relational dynamics clients might overlook.

What does it mean to do relational work with individual clients? It might sound contradictory, but it’s actually one of my very favorite ways to work—and it has the potential to resolve some serious issues that therapists often face.

Many of our clients come to us for help with issues they’re experiencing in their relationships, whether with their spouses, their family members, their friends, or their colleagues. As therapists, we can ask questions about dynamics, offer support, and reflect back what we see, but we’re only getting part of the picture. Our understanding is limited by our client’s willingness to share and their level of insight. That, in turn, limits how much we can help.

This knowledge gap can lead to all kinds of issues. For instance, based on our client’s reporting, we may end up seeing the client’s partner as a villain, while if we were to actually see how things play out, we might discover that our client contributes to unhelpful relationship dynamics. (This is a common refrain among relationship therapists—our clients’ individual therapists don’t know what they don’t know!)

The opposite can also be true: Our client’s partner may be much more dysregulated than our client lets on. It’s possible to miss seriously damaging behaviors if your client experiences them as normalized and unremarkable. Either way, it’s important to find a way to get a better, more accurate picture.

So, how do you get around the gap so that you can actually help your clients shift troublesome dynamics in their relationships? This is where doing relational work with individual clients comes in.

The first step is getting a more accurate picture of the relational dynamics in question. For this, I use chairwork. Here’s how to set it up:

Look for an opportunity. This is the moment when your client describes some interaction they had that didn’t go as they’d hoped. When that happens, you can ask, “Hey, are you willing to try and experiment? Let’s play out this interaction right here, and we’ll see if we can find a way to make it go a little better.”

Set up two chairs in your therapy room (or, if you’re on telehealth, have your client set them up). Each of these chairs will represent one person in the conversation: your client and the person they were interacting with. They will play both parts, moving between the chairs to take each role in turn.

Have them play out the interaction again, and see what you learn. You might find that the other partner is more denigrating or unkind than you had thought; you might find that a different side of your client comes through. No matter what, you’ll learn something.

Look for the moment of opportunity, when your client could have said something differently that would be likely to bring forth a different reaction from their partner. When you see it, pause the roleplay and suggest an alternative. Let them try it again and see if it brings out a different reaction in their role-played partner. This is a great way to build muscle for difficult conversations through embodied practice; it will pay off for them in future interactions.

If they can’t figure out how to do something differently, you can tap in and enter the roleplay as the client. This offers them a way of interacting that’s both authentic and warm in the moment. Do not tap in and take on the part of the other person in the interaction. You might be tempted to do so, but this risks causing your client to project the conflict onto you. You want to stay in the role that’s aligned and attuned with your client, and let them voice the other person.

You might be able to see from this why chairwork is one of my favorite tools. It simultaneously allows you to get a better picture of the dynamic and opens up an opportunity to help your client build relational skills in real time. When your client actually practices taking a different approach in a conversation, it makes it much more likely that they’ll be able to bring that home and experience something new as a result.

This is just one little peek into what it means to do relational work with individual clients. And, in fact, this same approach can be applied to individual sessions between sessions of relational work and to individual interventions during relational sessions. It’s a seriously powerful, flexible way of working (I love it so much that I’m devoting an entire in-person retreat to the topic).

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