Rehearsals for Growth: Conducting Action MFT Teletherapy

Abstract

Rehearsals for Growth (RfG) is a systemically-informed action method of psychotherapy in which improvisational enactments (derived from theater Games) are offered to clients, both as assessment tools and as interventions that gently challenge habitual patterns of interaction. RfG combines verbal therapy for couples and families with distinctive action episodes offered in a playful, exploratory context.

Because embodied enactment techniques has been an integral part of RfG practice from its inception in the mid-1980s, it had been supposed that their use in virtual therapy sessions would be ineffectual. When, however, the Covid-19 pandemic necessitated teletherapy, it was found that enactments need only be suggested as physical for them to be effective in virtual sessions.

Following some general discussion of the pragmatics of conducting teletherapy sessions, two basic RfG enactment techniques are described: first, in their original, embodied form; then, in a modified, virtual form. These descriptions illustrate how RfG techniques have been adapted successfully to teletherapy.