8 - The Conduct of Everyday Life and the Life Trajectory

Summary

So far I have considered the social practice of therapy from the standpoint of clients living their lives across diverse places and participating with varying others in diverse practices. I stressed that for clients to begin therapy means that they are entering a structural arrangement in which they attend sessions at intervals with expert strangers in a way that sets off their participation in these sessions from their ordinary lives elsewhere. I focused on how therapy comes to work because clients somehow turn session phenomena into particular parts of their lives across places. And I decentered the understanding of therapy and the problems it is to treat by considering them as particular parts of the clients' ordinary lives. Now I take this decentering further by going into the conduct of everyday life and the life trajectory that all persons unfold regardless of whether they attend a therapy or not. This illuminates the workings of therapy as a part of the way the clients conduct their everyday lives and life trajectories. I already touched on phenomena belonging to their personal conduct of everyday life and life trajectory. But I did not analyze them as such. I shall now do so. It is easier to define this layer of analysis and link it to my framework after having dealt with therapy as a part of the clients' everyday lives and with their pursuit of changes and problems across contexts.