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Article

From a Fumbled Beginning: If You Don't Make a Mistake, You Don't Make Anything

Pages 28-33
Published online: 28 Dec 2017
 
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As a generality in life, and especially any learning process, we take for granted the necessity and inevitability of fumbling through and learning from mistakes. Sometimes our best learning comes from a mistake, a failure that becomes the grit in the oyster from which a pearl can emerge. In the interpersonal/intrapsychic processes that are at the heart of psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic change, failures, ruptures, enactments, and mistakes and their repairs are inevitable and often transformative. At the same time, this is not a charter for thoughtless sloppiness. Rather, it is a rigorous and compassionate openness to the paradox of needing to fail to get it right, a realization that we sometimes succeed in psychotherapy when it most seems like we are failing. As a practitioner who works within the developing relational narrative in transactional analysis psychotherapy, the author offers a clinical vignette as a way to ponder the nuanced differences between a mistake, an enactment, a failure, and a rupture with the possibility of repair.

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Author information

Katherine Murphy

Katherine Murphy, B.A., M.Sc. (psychotherapy), Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst, UKCP-registered integrative psychotherapist, works as a psychotherapist, teacher/educator, and supervisor in private practice in London. She has been actively involved in the education of practitioners since 1986 and has contributed to the development of education and training standards in both the ITAA and the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). She is one of the series editors of the British Journal for Psychotherapy Integration. In 2010 she was made honorary fellow of the UKCP. Katherine can be contacted at c/- 48 Overdale Road, London W5 4TT, United Kingdom; e-mail: .
 

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