“We’re all just walking each other home” – Ram Dass
Written by Toby Clark, Psychotherapist
Working within the Conversational Model of psychotherapy, I often imagine each encounter as stepping onto an unknown road with another person. Neither of us knows the exact direction or destination. This shared journey unfolds through dialogue—hesitant at times, searching, often surprising. The path emerges from the rhythm between us, and it is in this unfolding that healing becomes possible.
Russell Meares (2000, 2005), building on the work of Robert Hobson, describes the essence of this approach as “aloneness-togetherness.” This phrase captures the paradox at the heart of therapy: two individuals remain distinct, yet intimately connected. The client is not subsumed into the therapist’s perspective, nor is the therapist a distant observer. Rather, both are present in a relational field where experience can be voiced, witnessed, and reshaped.
Within this space, hidden aspects of the self often find expression. Feelings that were once wordless or fragmented surface in tentative forms—sometimes as fleeting images, sometimes as embodied sensations, sometimes as silences that speak more than words. Crucially, the therapeutic work does not reduce these experiences to clinical categories. Instead, therapist and client collaborate to give them shape, often by finding the right words together. As Stern (2004) reminds us, transformation happens in the immediacy of the present moment, where lived experience can be safely explored and symbolised.
At times, the difficulty does not sit solely within one person but lives between us—in a pause, a missed attunement, or a sudden emotional intensity. These moments are not failures but invitations. By attending to what emerges in the relationship itself, we often discover the very patterns that have long constrained the client’s ability to connect. Naming, exploring, and gently holding these dynamics allows new meanings to crystallise.
The process can feel like co-composing a melody. Client and therapist contribute different notes, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in dissonance. Over time, a rhythm takes form, carrying both voices toward a more stable and expansive relational equilibrium. This act of joint creation is not simply interpretive; it is restorative. It allows the client to experience themselves as alive in relation, not isolated or overwhelmed.
What gives this work its lasting power is that meaning is not imposed from outside but co-created. The client leaves not with the therapist’s truth, but with a new sense of their own voice—heard, recognised, and integrated into a larger narrative of self. In this way, the conversational model offers more than symptom relief: it provides a pathway to a more coherent, enlivened sense of being.
For me, each therapeutic encounter is also unique. No two sessions are ever the same, because there are always two intersubjective voices present—two minds, two hearts—meeting in a living, embodied process. It is impossible to predict what will emerge, and that very aliveness is what makes the work so powerful. To see and be alongside another person’s growth, to witness the unfolding of meaning that was once hidden, is nothing short of a privilege. Again and again, I am reminded that therapy is not only a professional practice, but also a profoundly human one. It is, quite simply, beautiful.
References
Fosha, D. (2000). The transforming power of affect: A model for accelerated change. Basic Books.
Meares, R. (2000). Intimacy and alienation: Memory, trauma and personal being. Routledge.
Meares, R. (2005). The metaphor of play: Origin and breakdown of personal being. Routledge.
Stern, D. N. (2004). The present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life. W. W. Norton & Company.