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Abstract
This inquiry explores the experience of client trauma disclosure among pre-licensed marriage and family therapists (MFTs), guided by agential realist theory. In particular, this dissertation investigates how novice MFTs experience trauma disclosure in the moment of its happening, and how disclosure shifts the process and relationship of therapy as it unfolds. This inquiry draws on agential realism as a relational ethico-onto-epistemology, utilizing diffractive methodologies across two manuscripts to consider how trauma comes to matter, materially and significantly, both within the embodiment of MFTs and the entanglement of therapist and client in the therapy space. The first manuscript outlines a poetical analysis of 11 semi-structured interviews with pre-licensed MFTs, with poetics serving as the analytic process and product of this study. Poetic findings from this study highlight the complexity of experiencing client trauma disclosure, underscoring physiological, somatic, affective, cognitive, and relational shifts in the embodied performativity of novice clinicians when intra-acting with client trauma. The second manuscript presents the findings of a diffractive analysis across two focus groups of pre-licensed MFTs, exploring the impact of client trauma disclosure on the therapeutic process and relationship. Insights from the diffractive analysis underscore how trauma disclosure produces shifts in the therapeutic topology, highlighting the materiality and relationality at work in the entangled, therapeutic assemblage. Clinician engagement following trauma disclosure is described through an ethics of entanglement, explicating how MFTs enact practices of becoming-with the client, including through intra-ventions of slowing the therapeutic process and holding space. Collectively, these studies contribute to a relational understanding of therapy, specifically during moments of trauma disclosure, offering conceptual shifts of embodiment, ethics, and the role of materiality in therapy. Implications for clinical practice among novice clinicians and for the supervision of MFTs in training are provided at the end of this work, suggesting opportunities for practitioners to consider how their relational entanglements of becoming-with clients in their materiality produce different therapeutic possibilities that matter.