Experiences of interpersonal process recall as a therapeutic task in emotion-focused therapy-group for clients with autistic process

Clients with autistic process can experience difficulties in emotion processing and often report unsuccessful experiences of psychotherapy. Differences in processing affective empathy for self (emotion-regulation) and other (empathy) and cognitive empathy for self (self-reflection) and other (mental representation) often result in emotional injuries and trauma-related experiences. In this brief paper, the findings from four emotion-focused therapy-group for autism spectrum are presented. Specifically, we demonstrate how psychotherapy can be made more accessible for clients with autistic process through the application of Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) as a therapeutic task used to deepen self-experience and self-other empathy within group psychotherapy. We draw from the experiences of twelve clients who undertook a 9-week Emotion-Focused Therapy-group treatment. Qualitative data is presented through a thematic analysis of client experiences of IPR. We triangulate this with illustrations drawn from HAT and change interview data. The small number of participants in the study mean that the findings have limited generalisability. However, we propose Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) as a helpful therapeutic task which goes some way to addressing accessibility of psychotherapy for clients with autistic process.