Guiding connections: The role of therapist interventions in facilitating couples’ vulnerability and responsiveness in enactments.

The primary proposed change process in emotion-focused therapy models for couples involves partners accessing and revealing vulnerable emotions and responding to such disclosures with empathy and compassion. Therapists often use enactments (guiding partners to communicate with each other directly) to facilitate this process. However, many therapists report lacking confidence and clarity in how best to facilitate enactments, and it remains understudied which therapist interventions within enactment episodes contribute to vulnerability sharing and responsiveness expression. This preregistered study examined the role of three interventions used during enactments—systemic meaning-making (narrating), emotional engagement (experiencing), and interaction guiding (choreographing) in promoting these processes. One hundred forty enactment events from 21 treatment couples were coded and analyzed. Trained raters coded therapists’ interventions and partners’ behaviors. In contrast to our hypothesis, systemic meaning-making and interaction guiding were not associated, and emotional engagement was only marginally associated with greater vulnerability expression. Interaction guiding was positively associated with responsiveness. However, systemic meaning-making was negatively associated with responsiveness, and emotional engagement was not associated with responsiveness. Vulnerability expression did not predict partner responsiveness. These findings highlight the importance of tailoring therapist interventions in enactments according to their distinct contributions to facilitating vulnerability and responsiveness.