From a Fumbled Beginning: If You Don't Make a Mistake,You Don't Make Anything

Abstract

As a generality in life, and especially any learning process, we take for granted the necessity and inevitability of fumbling through and learning from mistakes. Sometimes our best learning comes from a mistake, a failure that becomes the grit in the oyster from which a pearl can emerge. In the interpersonal/intrapsychic processes that are at the heart of psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic change, failures, ruptures, enactments, and mistakes and their repairs are inevitable and often transformative. At the same time, this is not a charter for thoughtless sloppiness. Rather, it is a rigorous and compassionate openness to the paradox of needing to fail to get it right, a realization that we sometimes succeed in psychotherapy when it most seems like we are failing. As a practitioner who works within the developing relational narrative in transactional analysis psychotherapy, the author offers a clinical vignette as a way to ponder the nuanced differences between a mistake, an enactment, a failure, and a rupture with the possibility of repair.