This presentation was delivered live over zoom on December 8th 2021 at our annual academic symposium. Rebecca was a third-year student at Ikon at the time of recording. This talk is the result of her personal research.
"Psychotherapy is an interactive process summated by the dynamic communication of verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal information between therapist and client. While psychotherapy – touted as the ‘talking cure’ – originally focused on the verbal realm, the nonverbal properties of communication were only of fringe interest until more recently. In particular, the paraverbal – or prosody – is under-examined in the literature. Prosody – the qualities of voice including intonation, rhythm, volume, speech rate, pauses, and voice quality – communicates much more than most of us are aware of. It is a major stream of relational, affective (emotional) information exchange, and an important component of the Gestalt of human- human reciprocity; the intersubjective matrix that fills and enriches the therapeutic container. When prosodic dimensions of dialogue are attended to in therapy, therapist and client may begin to know and articulate previously unavailable, dissociated self-experiences."
- Rebecca Hirst, Bachelor of Counselling and Psychotherapy