The Thinking room

Where it began

The Thinking Room began with a practical need: to support new colleagues who had never sat in a session as they take their first professional steps. The most natural way to learn this work would be to watch, in real time, a whole series of sessions. To see how a therapeutic relationship is built from zero, what dynamics develop between the two people, and every detail of the journey, from the first phone call to the therapist’s supervision. But that is impossible. Confidentiality is the cornerstone of the therapeutic relationship, and no real session can be opened to third parties so that someone may learn from it.

That is where the idea was born: if we cannot show real therapy, we can construct one that resembles it in everything, except that it exposes no one.

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The Thinking room

The Thinking Room is an individual educational seminar in the development of clinical thinking, working through fictional but clinically realistic therapeutic pairs. Each pair consists of a therapist seeing her very first client and a person coming to therapy for the first time. Their relationship unfolds session by session, with full narrative continuity: what was said in the first hour still holds in the second, what was left open is not closed for convenience, and every character has a history, a family and a body that do not change from one document to the next.

The therapist of each pair is always at her beginning. Her clumsiness, her hesitations and her good moments show through the scene, not through labels. The participant who reads her recognizes themselves in her, and that is intentional.

Each pair begins with the first phone call and continues with the sessions. For every session, a fixed set of material is produced.

First, the Dialogue: a complete session in theatrical form, written to last roughly 20 to 25 minutes in real time, in language as human as possible.

Then the Theoretical Framework of that specific session, given to participants together with its bibliography. Every concept is named by its scientific term and explained immediately afterwards in plain, experiential language. Theory does not come before the scene. It arrives to illuminate what has already happened, and participants hold the sources in their hands, free to go as deep as they wish.

Then come three levels of reading of the same hour. Each participant first answers a fixed set of questions, before seeing anything else. Next they read the therapist’s Closing, that is, how she herself saw her session, with all the naivety one has in one’s very first hour. And finally they read the Experienced Eye: the same session, as read by a therapist with years of work behind her. Three readings of the same hour, and each participant sees with their own eyes where their gaze stands between the other two.

For the coordinator of the journey there are separate sheets, not given to participants: the points of the session that deserve attention and what each of them may mean, along with a grading sheet holding a few targeted questions and an answer scale, so that the sharpening of the clinical eye can be measured from session to session.

The therapist’s journey does not stop at the session room. At regular intervals she goes to her own supervision, and that supervision is also written. The supervisor of the pairs is a constant character who knows only what the therapist tells her, just as it would happen in reality. Every supervision meeting is accompanied by a sheet of comparative approaches: how five different schools would handle the same pivotal moment, with one real phrase the therapist could say to her client and the cost of each choice. Participants are not asked which phrase suits the client. They are asked which one they themselves would say, and why.

All this material serves the individual Meetings, the live hour of guidance between participant and coordinator. The Meetings take place online. There, the material is played, not merely read. Participants step into the therapist’s place in free role play before seeing the written text, write their own dated hypothesis about the client, and compare it with the next one. The seminar is individual, one to one, at a pace set by each participant.

At a later stage, participants have the opportunity to observe a colleague’s real supervision, with the explicit consent of everyone involved and with full protection of confidentiality.

At the end of the journey, a certificate of seminar attendance is issued. Participation requires signing a participation and confidentiality agreement.

Alongside the pairs, a library of autonomous volumes is taking shape: the Clinical Maps. It is not a manual and is not read like a book from beginning to end. Each volume works as a map of orientation over one area of clinical thinking, always starting from what one sees inside the room and arriving at the concept afterwards.

The Thinking Room is not clinical supervision of real cases and does not place participants with real clients. All persons, stories and sessions are constructed. That is its reason for existing: a space where one can see the whole journey of a therapeutic relationship, from the first phone call to supervision, without exposing a single human being.

The Thinking Room does not lead to certification and does not confer a professional title. The certificate attests solely to attendance of the seminar.

Each Meeting costs 40€. How many Meetings take place within a month is agreed between the coordinator and each participant, according to the pace and the needs of each journey.

The role of the therapist is not worn. It is built.

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