The Therapist’s Feelings.

The present article discusses possible uses of the therapist’s feelings to enhance treatment following Kohlenberg and Tsai’s conceptualization of the therapist-client relationship. Four vignettes from a case study involving a couple are used as illustrative material. It is argued that the therapist’s feelings can serve as clues for identifying functional similarities between the therapist-client relationship and the clients ’ daily life situation. They can highlight how the client affects other people and which behaviors are involved in causing these effects. Furthermore, they can prompt the detection by the therapist of in-session experiences that can be turned into in-vivo learning opportunities for clients. Practical suggestions for the use of the therapist’s feelings are extracted from the discussion of the vignettes. Emotions are complex whole-person responses that involve behavioral dimensions as diverse as muscular activity, subjective experience, attention and thinking, and not infrequently (but not necessarily) have a rapid onset outside awarenes