Questions about whether therapists genuinely feel love for their clients sit at the heart of ongoing debates about relational depth, emotional authenticity, and ethical connection in therapeutic practice. While therapeutic love has long been discussed in professional literature, conversations typically focus on client idealisation, transference, or the management of boundaries. Less attention has been given to therapists’ own emotional landscapes, and how they understand, experience, and name the feelings that arise in their work, including those they might describe as love. Using Therapeutic Positive Autoethnography (ThePosAE), the study employs interlocution as a dialogical autoethnographic method in which one author poses reflective questions to the therapist‑autoethnographer. These questions act as prompts that elicit emotional insight, surface tacit knowledge, and support an exploration of how therapists make sense of love in their everyday clinical work. Through this collaborative inquiry using combined guided questioning, the therapist’s voice emerges as central data, revealing how love functions as a sustaining, motivating, and ethically nuanced dimension of therapeutic care. This study highlights the therapeutic practitioner as a meaning-maker. It demonstrates how ThePosAE provides a structured and generative method for exploring clinically grounded positive emotional experiences, deepening understanding of how therapists hold love, and re‑positioning therapeutic affection as a legitimate and valuable component of healing work and yielding valuable insights for therapeutic engagement. Rooted in therapeutic practice, the article contributes to emerging scholarship that recognises love not as a boundary violation, but as an ethical, optimistic and relationally potent dynamic in therapeutic care.
Multi-author autoethnography has become a popular methodological approach in academic development research. While it offers unique strengths in diversifying voices, preserving lived experiences, and promoting innovative practices, limited attention has been paid to the co-author relationships that shape and constitute the research process. This article argues that stronger methodological engagement is needed to review, define, and reflect on co-author relationships. Attention should be paid to intimacy, hierarchy, positionality, and power relations between authors, and how these dynamics may influence collaboration, reflexivity, and knowledge production. Drawing on academic development research, this article identifies personal, collegial, and educational relationships as the three most common forms of co-author relationships and explores their characteristics, opportunities, and potential tensions. It proposes the Co-Author Relational Reflection Framework as a practical guide to help researchers define, disclose, analyse, and revisit co-author relationships throughout the research process. Furthermore, the article highlights therapeutic positive autoethnography as a potential approach for building, sustaining, and developing supportive co-author relationships within collaborative qualitative inquiry.
Journal writing has long been recommended as a therapeutic practice for growth and healing. Receiving less attention, however, are techniques for revisiting past journal entries to learn from and/or expand them. What might autoethnographers and journalers alike discover about themselves and their potential for growth by looking back on and interacting with these entries through a positive inquiry lens? In the key of therapeutic positive autoethnography (ThePosAE), the author experiments with artistic, inquiry-evoking techniques to demonstrate how reflexively rereading and rewriting excerpts from one’s personal journal serves both generative and transformative purposes. Reflecting on and working with her personal journal chronicled throughout her eating disorder recovery, the author shows various creative practices for rereading, reimagining, and rewriting past journal entries in present time to illustrate her transformation through them. Through reconstructing her emotional experiences, including acknowledging them in places where they were once neglected, she shows how ThePosAE can be used to reconfigure past meanings in ways that reveal new pathways for future action and change.
Chronic physical health conditions may challenge mental health conditions. This collaborative therapeutic positive autoethnography (ThePosAE) presents a discourse between two authors regarding one author’s ability to transform his extremely challenging physical health conditions into positive learning and development from a salutogenetic perspective. The authors, through dialogue and reflective thoughts, explore the one author’s life story and his successful attempt to transform physical challenges into an embodied “up” schematic structure and finally into an “inside-out” schema. The author’s strengths and his ability to create comprehensibility, manageability and meaning while facing extreme health challenges is part of his latest discovery of the “inside out” schema which makes the personal universal. The methodology used is a collaborative ThePosAE perspective to describe one author’s experience of kidney failure at the age of 36 and his lifelong experience to transform this extremely challenging physical condition into positive, transformational and post-traumatic growth through narration and arts. The authors present conclusions and recommendations for future theory and practice of ThePosAE.
Like all truthful autoethnographies, this is not just a simple story I tell here. Originally, I wrote this narrative describing what I thought was a good example of a relatively new but expanding genre of research and writing entitled evocative autoethnography. However, although I did not know it at the time, some information was missing from my story – even worse- many of my initial perceptions were incorrect. Through additional reading, self-reflection, and interviews of family, colleagues, and friends I discovered “autoethnographic writing does not merely tell stories about yourself garnished with details but actively interprets your stories to make sense of how they are connected to others’ stories. Through this method you gain new knowledge and insights about yourself and others and become transformed. In this sense autoethnographic writing is a constructive interpreted process” (Chang, 2008, p. 49). Thus, I learned that further information relative to my representations of my hospital “internment” helped me better comprehend what was closer to the “real truth.”
