In the first two sections of this chapter, I go into the meaning of participating in sessions for clients on the basis of their participation in other contexts. In the last three sections I turn to how clients may link their participation and experiences in sessions into their social practice across places. The structural arrangement of sessions makes it necessary to understand how clients may accomplish this linking across places before going into the course of therapy-related changes in the next chapters. The fact that clients' participation and experiences in sessions and other places differ adds to its importance.

Diverse Modes of Participation in Diverse Contexts

As argued in chapter 1, research on therapy generally assumes that clients act in identical ways inside and outside sessions. That understanding is crucial to the prevailing idea about how sessions and clients' everyday lives are linked, how insights gained in sessions matter, and how therapy works. It also plays a key role in therapists' ideas about how a “good client” should behave. A good client hides nothing from her therapist and can be trusted to act in identical ways inside and outside sessions. In doing so, she allows her therapist comprehensive access and penetrating insight into her life from within sessions so that the therapist may reach a good understanding of his client on the basis of information obtained here. Therapists may, thus, assume to know from within sessions what their clients do outside sessions.