Understanding (co-experiencing) psychotherapy

1. Introduction

Version followed: F. E. Vasilyuk's understanding psychotherapy (понимающая психотерапия), which he called co-experiencing psychotherapy in English. This guide follows his own texts: the 1996 paper on the semiotics of the therapeutic situation and the psychotechnics of understanding; his programme text "Understanding psychotherapy: an attempt at building a psychotechnical system"; and his 2016 paper on co-experiencing as the central category. Gaps are filled from training papers by his colleague T. D. Karyagina (2010, 2016). Vasilyuk's 2007 doctoral monograph Понимающая психотерапия как психотехническая система is not drawn on. [source: Vasilyuk 1996; Vasilyuk n.d./2005; Vasilyuk 2016; Karyagina 2010, 2016]

Understanding psychotherapy is a Russian humanistic and dialogical method. Vasilyuk developed it in Moscow from his theory of experiencing (переживание). In that theory, experiencing is an inner activity a person carries out to get through a critical life situation, meaning a situation in which life becomes impossible as it was. The therapist's work is co-experiencing (сопереживание): inner work aimed at understanding, as a whole, the client's experiencing as it happens, so that it moves forward productively. The method's value is meaningfulness (осмысленность), not health. Its subject is the client's life-world, not an illness. [source: Vasilyuk n.d./2005; Vasilyuk 2016]

How change happens. The therapist does not produce change directly. The client's own experiencing is the method's "hope". The therapist's replies give each act of the client's consciousness a matching response, so that it becomes a real event in the dialogue. A feeling needs an empathic answer before it can be fully lived. A barely noticed meaning needs understanding before it can be held in awareness. Experiencing then unfolds on three planes:

• living through the reality of the feeling;
• expressing it in a true word or image;
• solving the task of meaning (задача на смысл).

Understanding is itself the therapeutic act, not a diagnostic step before "real" intervention. Vasilyuk calls it an invitation to freedom ("приглашение к свободе"). [source: Vasilyuk 1996; Vasilyuk 2016]

Vasilyuk taught and supervised the method at the Moscow State University of Psychology and Education (MGPPU), and colleagues there continue it. Methodology conferences in his name continued into 2025. [source: Karyagina, Sheryagina et al. 2025] The method is a system of reply types and therapist stances. It is not a manualised protocol.

2. Framework

No phase model in the primary sources. Vasilyuk does not divide therapy into numbered stages. He gives no session count and no criteria for ending. The framework below is the structure he does describe: one unit of work at the micro level, a model of the client's consciousness that guides which reply to give, and the planes of experiencing at the macro level. [source: Vasilyuk 1996; Vasilyuk n.d./2005; Vasilyuk 2016] Session count and format are not given in the sources [uncertain].

Micro-unit: the reply triad. The basic unit is the client's utterance, the therapist's reply and the client's response. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]

• Client side. The client faces a whole existential state, the "original" (оригинал). From it the client selects an area to speak about, the "picture" (картина). The spoken words are the "phrase" (фраза).
• Therapist side. The therapist hears the phrase (perception). From that part, the therapist rebuilds the client's whole picture (reconstruction). The therapist then forms a picture of their own and speaks a reply.
• Check. The client's response is tested twice. Does the client's picture recognise itself in the reply? Does the reply fit the original? A mismatch shows up as the client's sense that it is "not it" ("не то").
• Moving on. Recognition plus fit lets you move forward. "Не то" sends you back to reconstruct.

Model of consciousness: four levels and four paired units. Vasilyuk tells the levels apart by whether the Observer and the Observed are active or passive. Each level has a matching therapist activity. [source: Vasilyuk n.d./2005; Vasilyuk 1996]

At any moment, one level leads and others form the background ("ведущий и фоновый уровни"). [source: Vasilyuk n.d./2005] Vasilyuk contrasts schools that work mainly at one level with understanding psychotherapy, which uses all four units. [source: secondary summary of Vasilyuk et al. 2012, in Tomsk paper]

Macro frame: three planes of experiencing. These are directions of work, not stages. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]

1. Immediate experiencing. The client faces the full reality of the feeling (pain, loneliness, also joy).
2. Expression. The client voices the truth of the inner experience in a fitting word or image.
3. Meaning-making. A new meaning emerges. It is not computed or supplied.

Empathic micro-cycle. A study of sessions by experienced therapists and trainees in this method found empathy running in repeated cycles of four steps. [source: Karyagina 2016]

1. The client's attention turns to their own experience, away from external events or other people.
2. The client searches for an accurate symbol for it.
3. Its meaning is reflected.
4. A deeper, more refined expression follows, often a metaphor carrying new aspects.

Criteria for shifting (how the sources imply it). Choose the reply unit by the client's leading level. Shift when the leading level changes or when "не то" appears. [source: Vasilyuk 1996; Vasilyuk n.d./2005] Practical rules of thumb [synthesis]:

• Stay mostly with empathy and understanding early, in line with the "strategy of non-understanding" below.
• Use maieutic or interpretive replies only once the client recognises themselves reliably in your understanding replies.
• Treat therapy as approaching completion when the critical situation has gained a livable meaning, the life-world feels inhabitable again, and the client carries the dialogue themselves.

Crisis example: grief. In "Пережить горе" (1991), Vasilyuk described grief as phases that the helper tracks: shock, search, acute grief, residual shocks with reorganisation, and completion at around a year. In this account grief's task is to "create memory" ("творить память"), not to forget. [source: Vasilyuk 1991, via Ruslina 2012] These phases describe the client's process. They are not stages of therapy [synthesis].

Format. Individual verbal dialogue is the core format. Training runs through workshops (мастерские), supervision and didactic (personal) therapy. [source: Vasilyuk n.d./2005; Karyagina 2016]

3. Guiding principles

• Understanding is the intervention. Understand in order to understand, not to fix, teach or influence. Practically: drop the urge to steer toward a solution. A precise, checked understanding is the work. [source: Vasilyuk 1996; 2016]
• Anti-activism, freedom. Understanding is an "invitation to freedom". Practically: never treat a reply as a lever to move the client somewhere you have chosen. [source: Vasilyuk 1996; 2016]
• Strategy of non-understanding (стратегия непонимания). Early understanding is very unlikely to be accurate. Quick interpretations come from your existence, not the client's. Practically: hold back global formulations in early sessions and keep reconstructing. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Purifying perception, self-emptying (кенозис). Set aside your own needs, vanity, interests and projections to perceive "cleanly". Vasilyuk frames this as an ethical stance as well as a technical one. Practically: before replying, ask whose need the reply would serve. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Clearing dialogical space. Do not fill the client's "emptiness" or silence with advice, recommendations or consolation. Practically: leave pauses open so the client can fill them in their own words. [source: Vasilyuk 1996; 2016]
• Co-experiencing, with your own experience as an organ of understanding. Co-experiencing is inner creative work, not emotional mirroring. Practically: find a resonant experience of your own so that you understand from inside, without telling it to the client. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Tenderness and courage. Be compassionately present, and accept painful realities without premature optimism. Practically: do not rush to soften a loss or to promise it will pass. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Trust, attunement, poetics (доверие, сопричастность, поэтичность). On the expression plane, search together with the client for the right word or image. Practically: offer candidate words tentatively and let the client refine them. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Co-creativity, participation and outsideness (сопричастность / вненаходимость). Be inside the experience and also outside it, keeping a view of the whole. Practically: feel with the client while keeping the larger life context in view. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Patience with meaning (смысловое долготерпение). Meaning emerges; it cannot be calculated. Practically: tolerate long stretches without resolution and do not supply the meaning. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Integral responding. Each reply answers the whole preceding dialogue, not only the last sentence. Practically: keep the arc of the session in mind when you choose words. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Dialogical duet. Your replies may harmonise or deliberately not, and dissonance is allowed. Practically: you need not always agree. You can name the tension while staying with the client. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Each act of the client's consciousness needs its matching act from the therapist. Practically: answer feeling with empathy, awareness with understanding, reflection with maieutics, the unconscious with interpretation. [source: Vasilyuk n.d./2005]
• Replies are hypotheses. Empathic and understanding replies are offered for the client to check. Practically: phrase replies tentatively and take the client's correction seriously. [source: Karyagina 2010; 2016]
• Work at the edge of awareness. Reflect what the client barely notices. Do not uncover what is entirely out of awareness through empathic work. Practically: follow what is currently felt, accurately. [source: Karyagina 2010]
• The client is the author. Even when you voice something for a client who is silent, the client remains the author of the "first voice". Practically: phrase what you voice as theirs, open to correction. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Treat the real situation as meaningful. Practical facts such as coming, waiting and paying are part of what you understand, not only the content of complaints. Practically: notice how the client is in the room as well as what they say. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Critical life situations, not illness. Practically: frame the work around what has become impossible in the client's life and what experiencing must achieve. Do not frame it around symptoms. [source: Vasilyuk n.d./2005; 2016]

4. Intervention inventory

The method's interventions are types of reply. Each reply is built by choosing a small set of features, which Vasilyuk calls multipliers (мультипликаторы): the level addressed, the register, the focus within the therapeutic situation, the client's life-world, the node of the image, and the fragment of the utterance. Items 4.1–4.4 are the four basic units. Items 4.5–4.10 are the features you choose when building any reply. Items 4.11–4.17 are further procedures described in the sources. Items 4.18–4.21 are training and self-supervision exercises. [source: Vasilyuk 1996; Vasilyuk n.d./2005] Vasilyuk described the understanding unit in detail. He described the empathic unit briefly. He named maieutics and interpretation but did not develop them in the sources, so those entries are thin and marked [uncertain].

4.1 Understanding reply (понимание → сознавание)

• Purpose / when: for moments when the client is actively looking at something: thinking it over, describing, appraising. The aim is for the client to see that object more clearly with you standing beside them. This is the method's signature reply. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Steps:
  1. Hear the phrase and rebuild the whole picture behind it.
  2. Choose the register (4.5) and the focus (4.6).
  3. Choose which node of the image to address (4.8). Understanding favours the object, its meaning and its personal sense over the sensory layer.
  4. Speak as someone standing beside the client and looking at the same object. Name what the client sees, believes or imagines. Do not name what they feel.
  5. Add an operator of understanding that makes the reply a checkable hypothesis.
  6. Read the response for recognition or "не то" (4.11).
  [source: Vasilyuk 1996; Karyagina 2016]
• Example language:
  • Vasilyuk's typical form: "Правильно ли я понял, что вы видите…" ("Do I understand correctly that you see…"). [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
  • Other operators: "Можно ли сказать, что…?" ("Could one say that…?"). [source: Karyagina 2016]
  • (illustrative) "Am I right that, looking back now, you see that your father never really had room for you?"
  • (illustrative) "So, as you see it, every route you try with your mother ends in the same fight?"
• Watch for: The client takes the reply up, adds to it or corrects it. That is working. Correction counts as success, because the reconstruction is improving. If the client simply agrees and stops, the reply may have closed the topic: you may have said more than they see.
• Note: a reply that names feelings belongs under 4.2. One that slips in your own causal account is drifting into interpretation (4.4).

4.2 Empathic reply (эмпатия → непосредственное переживание)

• Purpose / when: for when the client is in a feeling and is being moved by it rather than observing it. A feeling becomes a lived reality in the dialogue only when it gets an empathic answer. Empathy also fits the infantile life-world best (4.7). [source: Vasilyuk 1996; Vasilyuk n.d./2005]
• Steps:
  1. Track the feeling that is present now. Stay with what the client barely notices, not with what is wholly out of awareness.
  2. Name it, shifting attention from external events to the inner state. Naming also gives the feeling social recognition.
  3. Make the reply tentative, as a hypothesis.
  4. Include the "persona" element, so the reply marks the client as the author of the experience ("you").
  5. Follow the empathic cycle in 2. Framework: attention to own experience, search for a symbol, reflection of meaning, deeper expression. Each reply invites the next step.
  [source: Karyagina 2010; 2016]
• Example language:
  • Vasilyuk's sample: "Вам было так одиноко, так больно…" ("You were so lonely, it hurt so much…"). [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
  • (illustrative) "Something like being left completely on your own with it, and even now you don't know where to put yourself?"
• Watch for: Working looks like the client's speech slowing and turning inward, and new words or images appearing. Vasilyuk warns that a sympathetic, consoling empathic reply can soften the client and hold out false hope of compensating care, for example parental care. Keep it accurate rather than soothing. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]

4.3 Maieutic reply (майевтика → рефлексия)

• Purpose / when: for when the client is reflecting, taking a stance toward their own mental activity. The aim is to help a new understanding be "born" from the client, in the Socratic sense of midwifery. [source: Vasilyuk n.d./2005]
• Steps: Vasilyuk says maieutic replies use two extra multipliers, modality and scale. The sources only name these and do not define them. [uncertain] Working steps [synthesis]:
  1. Wait until the client has taken a reflective position: "Why do I always…?" or "What does it mean that I…?"
  2. Ask an open question that widens or narrows the scale of the client's own reflection (for example, this episode versus the whole life). Do not insert your answer into the question.
  3. Let the client produce the formulation.
• Example language: (illustrative) "When you put it like that, 'I can't be second', what does that say about what you need from her?"
• Watch for: The client generates the insight. A question that has your answer built in turns maieutics into steering.

4.4 Interpretation (интерпретация → бессознательное)

• Purpose / when: for processes the client cannot trace by inner observation. Vasilyuk holds that an unconscious act cannot "recognise" itself without a matching interpretation from the therapist. [source: Vasilyuk n.d./2005]
• Steps: The procedure is not described in the sources [uncertain]. The constraints the sources do give:
  • Do not interpret early (strategy of non-understanding).
  • Make sure the interpretation comes from the client's existence and not yours.
  • Check it with the same recognise-and-fit test as any reply (4.11).
  [source: Vasilyuk 1996] Working form [synthesis]: offer a link the client has not made, between fragments they themselves supplied, as a question, and drop it if "не то".
• Example language: (illustrative) "I wonder whether each time things go well for you, she might feel you have climbed above her, and that is when it flares up?" (The client in Vasilyuk's sample session arrives at a link like this herself.)
• Watch for: Compliance without recognition. A smooth "yes, probably" with no new material means the interpretation has not landed.

4.5 Choosing the register: here-and-now vs there-and-then

• Purpose / when: a "here-and-now" reply sets the client in the consultation, looking at the past from today. It distances and sobers. A "there-and-then" reply takes the client back into the remembered scene and revives it for a while. Use here-and-now to steady the client. Use there-and-then when a scene needs re-experiencing. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Steps:
  1. Decide whether you need distance or re-entry.
  2. Mark time and place in the grammar: "now you remember" or "back then, as a child".
• Example language: (illustrative) "Now, remembering your childhood, you realise…" (here-and-now). "Back then, as a child, you…" (there-and-then).
• Watch for: Rising flooding during a there-and-then reply. Switch to here-and-now.

4.6 Choosing the focus within the therapeutic situation

• Purpose / when: the situation has three poles: client, problem and therapist. A reply can centre on one of four things: the person, the person's activity toward the problem, the problem itself, or the joint work. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Steps: Pick deliberately. Agency-building replies centre on the client's activity toward the problem. Collaborative repair centres on the joint work.
• Example language: (illustrative) Person: "You're exhausted." Activity: "You keep trying new routes with her." Problem: "The fight starts as soon as you're independent." Joint work: "We keep circling one point here."
• Watch for: Replies that always centre on the problem tend to turn the client into a reporter about it.

4.7 Tuning the reply to the client's life-world

• Purpose / when: Vasilyuk describes four life-worlds, each needing different wording. In the infantile world the client is largely passive. In the realistic world the client is engaged in practical effort. In the value world a value and a choice are at stake. The creative world is about building a new life. [source: Vasilyuk 1996] The life-world typology comes from his 1984 Психология переживания [uncertain on details].
• Steps:
  1. Identify the world the client is speaking from.
  2. Infantile: lean on empathy. An understanding reply can echo the client's helpless intonation. Expect either deeper regression or a mature protest.
  3. Realistic: acknowledge effort and difficulty.
  4. Value: name the value and the choice it poses.
  5. Creative: a value reply can be made slightly creative by hinting at an insight that may come.
  [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Example language:
  • Vasilyuk's realistic-world sample: "Не так уж просто избавиться от такого недетского груза…" ("It's not so easy to get rid of such an un-childlike burden…"). [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
  • (illustrative, value) "Is being able to love something that really matters to you, something you would choose?"
• Watch for: A mismatch, for example a value reply to a client in an infantile state, typically produces "не то" or withdrawal.

4.8 Targeting a node of the image

• Purpose / when: Vasilyuk models an image as a tetrahedron with four nodes: object, meaning, personal sense and word. It sits on a sensory fabric. Choosing the node decides what the client looks at next. Understanding favours the outer nodes. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Steps: Decide whether to address:
  • the object (what it is);
  • its socially shared meaning;
  • its personal sense (what it means for this client's life);
  • the word itself (how the client named it).
• Example language: (illustrative) Personal sense: "For you, 'ungrateful daughter' isn't just a label. It touches who you are." Word: "You said 'on top'. Is that the word?"
• Watch for: The client's attention moving to the node you chose. If it keeps returning elsewhere, follow it.

4.9 Targeting a fragment of the utterance

• Purpose / when: a reply can take up a single word, one phrase, a link between fragments, or the whole utterance. This steers the client's attention. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Steps: Choose the fragment that carries the live charge, and quote or paraphrase only that.
• Example language: Vasilyuk's sample takes one fragment: "Вы вынуждены признаться себе…" ("You are forced to admit to yourself…"). [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Watch for: Overuse of single-word echoes can feel mechanical.

4.10 Choosing the level (meta-step)

• Purpose / when: before every reply, identify the client's leading level: experiencing, awareness, reflection or unconscious. Pick the matching unit (4.1–4.4). Note the background levels. [source: Vasilyuk n.d./2005]
• Steps:
  • Is the client moved by a feeling? That is experiencing: use 4.2.
  • Is the client actively looking at something? That is awareness: use 4.1.
  • Is the client questioning their own way of seeing? That is reflection: use 4.3.
  • Is something enacted that the client cannot see? That is the unconscious: use 4.4, sparingly.
• Watch for: Your habitual level, the one your training school favours, overriding the client's actual level.

4.11 The "не то" check and reconstruction loop

• Purpose / when: after every reply. Check that the client's picture recognises itself in your reply and that the reply fits the client's whole state. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Steps:
  1. Listen to the response for recognition: the client takes up your words or extends them.
  2. Listen for "не то", for example "no, no, that's not what I meant". Vasilyuk treats this as a normal, productive marker, not a failure. It also appears after an accurate reply, when the client confirms you understood but says it is still "not it": the words fit, but the original is not yet expressed.
  3. On "не то", do one of three things. Wait for more material. Go back over the fragments you already have and rebuild the picture. Or confirm that you heard the first gesture of the utterance correctly.
  4. Do not defend the reply.
  [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Example language: (illustrative) "Not quite that. Let me go back. You said it isn't about your mother so much as about your whole way of living?" Or simply "Something else, then…" followed by a pause.
• Watch for: A client who never says "not it" may be complying. Invite correction explicitly.

4.12 Detecting the rehearsed monologue

• Purpose / when: when the client speaks smoothly, as if from a prepared monologue, the words have come loose from the live original. Vasilyuk says the therapist should feel professional unease here. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• Steps:
  1. Notice fluency without fresh feeling or hesitation.
  2. Do not reward the narrative with summaries.
  3. Address a single live fragment (4.9), or the present state (4.5, here-and-now), to reconnect the words with the original [synthesis on the specific moves].
• Example language: (illustrative) "You've clearly told this many times. Right now, telling me, what is it like?"
• Watch for: Pace changes, pauses, and new words in place of stock phrases.

4.13 Reformulating a contradiction as a question

• Purpose / when: for a client caught between two values. Turn the apparent conflict into an open question that respects both sides. This builds trust without the therapist giving up their own coherence. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Steps:
  1. Name A as precious.
  2. Name B as important too.
  3. Leave the tension open, without resolving it or ranking the two.
• Example language: the form Vasilyuk gives: "Похоже, «А» для вас драгоценно, но и «Б» очень важно" ("It seems A is precious to you, but B is very important too"). [source: Vasilyuk 2016] (illustrative) "It sounds as if being a good daughter really matters to you, and so does living naturally, as yourself."
• Watch for: The client starts weighing the two for themselves rather than asking you to choose.

4.14 Integral responding

• Purpose / when: every reply should answer the whole dialogue so far, not only the last statement. This is especially important near the end of a session and after long narratives. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Steps:
  1. Before replying, recall the arc of the session.
  2. Phrase the reply so it links the present utterance to that arc.
• Example language: (illustrative) "From 'we don't understand each other' at the start, to now: it's less about her and more about whether you can be yourself at all."
• Watch for: The client says "yes, that's the whole thing", or a broader theme opens up.

4.15 Voicing for the silent client (client as author of the first voice)

• Purpose / when: for clients who cannot or will not speak. Vasilyuk cites a Gendlin example in which the therapist speaks about what the silent client might be feeling, while positioning the client as the author of the "first voice". [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
• Steps:
  1. Speak slowly and tentatively about what might be present, attributing it to the client.
  2. Leave long pauses.
  3. Accept a nod, a look or a shift as a response.
  4. Withdraw anything that does not fit.
• Example language: (illustrative) "Maybe it's hard to say anything at all right now… maybe it all feels pointless… I could be wrong."
• Watch for: Any non-verbal sign of recognition or rejection. Over-talking takes the client's voice away.

4.16 Co-searching for the word or image (expression plane)

• Purpose / when: for when the client is searching for how to say what they live through. The therapist joins the search with a poetic stance, based on trust and attunement. [source: Vasilyuk 2016; Karyagina 2016]
• Steps:
  1. Notice the search: hesitations, approximations, "it's like…".
  2. Offer a candidate word or image tentatively.
  3. Accept the client's correction and refine together.
  4. Welcome metaphors. In the empathic cycle, deeper expression is often figurative.
• Example language: (illustrative) "Like a wall? … or more like a fog?"
• Watch for: The client's "yes, exactly that", followed by new material. That is a sign the expression plane has moved.

4.17 Holding the task of meaning (meaning plane)

• Purpose / when: in critical situations, when the old life-meaning no longer holds. The therapist accompanies meaning-making co-creatively. The therapist reads the experience within the whole life context, keeps patience with meaning, and never computes or supplies the meaning. [source: Vasilyuk 2016] In grief, the target is the one Vasilyuk names: grief creates memory, and the image of the lost person comes to take a stable, valued place. [source: Vasilyuk 1991, via Ruslina 2012]
• Steps [synthesis built on the sources' principles]:
  1. Name the impossibility the client faces, without minimising it.
  2. Reflect emerging glimpses of meaning as the client's own.
  3. Tolerate stretches with no resolution.
  4. In grief, track which phase the client is in (shock, search, acute grief, residual shocks, completion) and match the register:
     • during shock: here-and-now, steadying;
     • later, in acute grief: careful there-and-then re-entry into memories.
• Example language: (illustrative) "Nothing about this makes sense yet, and I'm not going to pretend it does." Later: "When you remember her like that, at the window, something in your voice changes."
• Watch for: Premature meaning, both yours and the client's ready-made consolations. Signs of genuine movement: the client speaks of the loss as part of a life that continues.

4.18 Training exercise: building replies to single client phrases

• Purpose / when: a core training method in Vasilyuk's school, usable for self-training. [source: Karyagina 2010; 2016]
• Steps:
  1. Take one client phrase from your practice.
  2. Write several alternative replies that vary the multipliers: level, register, focus, life-world, node and fragment.
  3. Compare what each reply would make the client look at next.
  4. Check each reply against the rules for its type: operator of understanding, persona element, tentativeness.
• Watch for: Replies that default to one type. That shows your habitual level.

4.19 Training exercise: mini-consultations

• Purpose / when: short practice consultations of 5–10 exchanges, analysed afterwards. [source: Karyagina 2010]
• Steps:
  1. Run or record a short exchange.
  2. For each reply, assess its timing, how well it fitted, its effect, and why you chose that form. These are the supervision criteria named by Karyagina.
• Watch for: A pattern of replies that the client corrects at the same node. That is your blind spot.

4.20 Stop-frame in supervision

• Purpose / when: pause a training consultation to examine the therapist's inner response. [source: Karyagina 2010]
• Steps:
  1. Stop at a chosen moment.
  2. The therapist names their feelings, images and impulses to help, and "whose voices" are present in them.
  3. Consider how these fit the session's aim. Purify them where needed, or turn them into an organ of understanding.
• Example language (supervisor): (illustrative) "Stop here. What's happening in you right now, and whose voice is urging you to fix this?"
• Watch for: Activist urges, such as rescuing, advising or consoling, disguised as empathy.

4.21 Finding your own resonant experience; "Personae non gratae" game

• Purpose / when: for when you understand the client only at the level of words.
  • Resonant experience. In Vasilyuk's supervision example, a supervisor's question helped a trainee find a personal experience that resonated with the client's situation. That experience then became her organ of understanding. [source: Vasilyuk 2016]
  • "Personae non gratae". A training game used in the school, built on the idea that experiencing is addressed to someone (адресованность переживания). It helps therapists notice their inner "characters" and fold their unprofessional reactions into professional replies. [source: Karyagina, Sheryagina et al. 2025] The game's rules were not found [uncertain].
• Steps (for the resonant experience) [synthesis on the specific questions]:
  1. Ask yourself, or have a supervisor ask: "When have I lived something like this?"
  2. Let that memory inform your sense of the client's state.
  3. Do not disclose it, and do not substitute your experience for the client's.
• Watch for: Projection, meaning your experience overwriting the client's. Use the "не то" check.

5. Handling problems

The sources address mainly therapist-side errors (5.1–5.7). Client-side difficulties such as resistance, non-adherence, ruptures and risk are not covered in them, so that guidance is marked [synthesis].

• 5.1 Urge to advise, fix or console. Vasilyuk calls filling the client's "emptiness" with advice, recommendations or offers of help an everyday reflex to resist. Response: notice the urge (stop-frame, 4.20). Return to an understanding reply (4.1). Let the pause stand. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• 5.2 Premature understanding or interpretation. Rushing to a global reading and voicing it. Response: apply the strategy of non-understanding. Go back to reconstructing from fragments, and keep interpretation for later, when the client reliably recognises themselves in your replies. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• 5.3 Therapist's own motives shaping the reply. Response: use purifying perception (self-emptying) and supervision. Before replying, ask whose need the reply serves. [source: Vasilyuk 1996; Karyagina 2010]
• 5.4 Consoling empathy. A sympathetic reply can soften the client and hold out false hope of compensating care. Response: aim for accuracy over comfort. Use here-and-now understanding to keep the client's adult observer active. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• 5.5 Rehearsed, smooth narrative (stuck in telling). Response: see 4.12. Treat it as a sign that words have come loose from the original. Address a live fragment or the present moment. [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• 5.6 Wrong register. Using there-and-then when the client needs steadying, or here-and-now when a scene needs reviving. Response: switch register (4.5). [source: Vasilyuk 1996]
• 5.7 Overreacting to dramatic content. Vasilyuk's example is a client voicing a wish to kill their father. Do not treat it as danger by default: the client is in therapy and acting responsibly by bringing it. [source: Vasilyuk 1996] Caveat [synthesis]: this does not replace risk assessment. If statements suggest real intent, a plan, access to means or harm to others, step out of the pure understanding stance. Run a standard structured risk assessment and safety planning, including lethal-means counselling on storage and removal, and follow your duty-to-protect and local reporting rules. Then return to the understanding stance.
• 5.8 Overwhelm or flooding in re-experiencing [synthesis based on 4.5]. Response: move to here-and-now replies that name what the client sees from the present. Shift the focus to the joint work ("we can go slowly here"). Slow down, use shorter replies and target smaller fragments. Do not use there-and-then replies until the client is steady.
• 5.9 Client in the infantile world, demanding that you take over [Vasilyuk 1996 on the infantile world; responses are synthesis]. Response: give an empathic reply to the helplessness itself (4.2, 4.7). Do not take over the problem, and do not lecture about responsibility. Expect either deeper regression, which you hold empathically, or a mature protest, which you meet with a realistic-world reply that acknowledges effort.
• 5.10 Client asks directly for advice or a verdict [synthesis]. Response: acknowledge the wish and the difficulty behind it. Reflect the choice the client faces (a value-world reply), or the two values in tension (4.13). If practical information is genuinely needed, for example where to get legal or medical help, give it briefly and plainly. Then return to understanding.
• 5.11 Persistent "не то", and the client feels never understood [synthesis]. Response: make replies smaller, taking single words and the client's own phrasing (4.9). Ask the client to correct you. Shift the focus to the joint work: "I keep missing it. Help me get closer." Bring the session to supervision to check for projection.
• 5.12 Compliant agreement ("yes, exactly", then nothing) [synthesis]. Response: suspect over-reaching or deference. Offer a less complete reply and leave the gap for the client to fill. Invite disagreement explicitly.
• 5.13 Rupture: the client is hurt or angry at a reply [synthesis, consistent with the "dialogical duet" principle in Vasilyuk 2016]. Response: treat the reaction as a "не то" about the relationship. Give an understanding reply about what the client sees in you right now, without defending yourself. Take responsibility for the miss and re-check.
• 5.14 Long silence or a mute client. Response: voice tentatively for the client as author of the first voice (4.15). Keep long pauses and avoid filling the space with advice. [source: Vasilyuk 2016; 1996]
• 5.15 Non-adherence [synthesis]. The method sets no homework, so there is little to adhere to. Missed sessions and lateness belong to the client's real situation, which Vasilyuk treats as meaningful, so understand them with the client rather than enforcing rules. Keep the frame (time, fee) clear and consistent.
• 5.16 Meaning does not come; the client is stuck in an impossible situation [synthesis]. Response: keep patience with meaning. Do not supply a meaning. Make sure all three planes have had room: is the feeling fully lived, and has it found words? Meaning-making usually stalls when the earlier planes were skipped.
• 5.17 Grief that seems frozen [synthesis using Vasilyuk 1991 via Ruslina 2012]. Response: identify the phase. A client stuck in shock or search may need gentle there-and-then re-entry into memories of the person. A client in acute grief needs full empathic accompaniment of the pain. Phases overlap, so observe closely rather than forcing a sequence. Refer for assessment if grief comes with severe functional collapse, psychotic features or suicidality.
• 5.18 Fit and limits [synthesis; not stated in the sources]. This is an insight- and dialogue-based method for critical life situations. For acute psychosis, active substance dependence or severe imminent risk, use it only within a wider treatment plan that includes medical and psychiatric care.

Sources

Sources:

• Василюк Ф.Е. Семиотика психотерапевтической ситуации и психотехника понимания (1996). Cited above as Vasilyuk 1996.
• Василюк Ф.Е. Понимающая психотерапия: опыт построения психотехнической системы. Cited above as Vasilyuk n.d./2005. The archive is dated 2005; the year of first publication was not shown [uncertain].
• Василюк Ф.Е. Сопереживание как центральная категория понимающей психотерапии (2016). Cited above as Vasilyuk 2016.
• Карягина Т.Д. Проблема формирования эмпатии (2010). Cited above as Karyagina 2010.
• Карягина Т.Д. Эмпатия как метод (2016). Cited above as Karyagina 2016.
• Карягина, Шерягина и др. Научное наследие Ф.Е. Василюка: продолжение диалога (2025). Cited above as Karyagina, Sheryagina et al. 2025.
• Tomsk paper summarising Vasilyuk et al. 2012 on the four psychotechnical units. Cited above as "Tomsk paper".
• Руслина А.О. Периодизация процесса переживания горя (2012). Cited above as Ruslina 2012.
• Karyagina T.D. Системный анализ клиент-центрированной терапии (2014). Background only; not cited above. The author attribution is [uncertain].

Further reading (not drawn on):

• Vasilyuk, F. E. (1984). Психология переживания [The psychology of experiencing]. Moscow: MSU Press.
• Vasilyuk, F. E. (1991). Пережить горе [Living through grief]. In О человеческом в человеке. Moscow. Used via Ruslina 2012.
• Vasilyuk, F. E. (2007). Понимающая психотерапия как психотехническая система (doctoral dissertation; later a book). Not drawn on; it likely holds the fuller procedures for maieutics and interpretation [uncertain].
• Vasilyuk, F. E., et al. (2012). Методология психологии: проблемы и перспективы. Used via the Tomsk paper.