Chairwork Psychotherapy: Recent Papers/2020 to 2025
We are pleased to present this collection of recent articles and pieces that capture some of the depth, power, and beauty of the Four Dialogues Model of Chairwork Psychotherapy.
Working With the Four Dialogues: Using Chairwork in Clinical Practice
Published in 2020, this paper introduces the reader to the Four Dialogues – Giving Voice, Internal Dialogues, Telling the Story, and Relationships and Encounters. It also explores how these Chairwork structures can be used when working unresolved grief.
Chairwork Psychotherapy: Using the Four Dialogues in the Treatment of Trauma
Published in 2023, this article focuses on Chairwork as a treatment for trauma. This includes engaging with traumatic memories, experientially confronting those who hurt the patient, and challenging problematic trauma-based schemas and cognitions.
On Trauma, Courage, and the Telling of Stories: Working With Narrative in Chairwork Psychotherapy
This 2024 paper explores, in greater detail, our model of Storytelling as a vehicle for working through painful memories and difficult narratives.
Bringing It to Life: Using Chairwork and the Four Dialogues in Schema Therapy
This 2023 article is an in-depth exploration of ways of integrating Chairwork and parts work in Schema Therapy. Eight different dialogue structures are presented.
Published in 2025, this chapter includes sections on using Chairwork to help patients sort out their ambivalent feelings about substances, experientially confront people who hurt them, nurture their child self, and understand and have compassion for the decisions they made and the actions they took at a younger age.
Using Chairwork To Overcome The Psychological Impact Of Oppression
In this 2021 Schema Therapy Bulletin article, Amanda Garcia Torres explores how the Four Dialogues can be used to help patients who are wrestling with: (1) Socially Induced Trauma; (2) Internalized Oppression; (3) Identity Conflict; (4) Connection To Voice: and (5) Oppression-Rooted Coping.
Mistaken Identity: Working with Change, Betrayal, and Grief in Chairwork Psychotherapy
People change…and sometimes they change in ways that are so profound and so dramatic that they do not seem like the same person anymore. This 2024 paper introduces the Vector Dialogue as a method for working through the profound grief that this kind of loss can incur.
“I Want To Sort This Out Myself”: Using Chairwork as a Self-Practice
This article, from the Autumn 2022 Schema Therapy Bulletin, explores how therapists can use Chairwork as a personal practice. It provides specific dialogue structures for working with Countertransferential feelings towards a patient, the therapists own Inner Critic issues, and challenging problematic schemas and modes.
Toward a Chairwork Psychotherapy: Using the Four Dialogues for Healing and Transformation
This article, which was published in the APA journal Practice Innovations, sets the foundation for a free-standing Chairwork Psychotherapy based on the Four Dialogues Model. It also introduces the idea of there being two different kinds of Inner Critics - each needing a different therapeutic approach.
We hope that you will find these articles and writings to be helpful in your healing work – both with others and with yourself.
Scott Kellogg, PhD, and Amanda Garcia Torres, LMHC
Scott Kellogg, PhD, is the Director of the Transformational Chairwork Psychotherapy Project. Email: kelloggchairwork@gmail.com
Amanda Garcia Torres, LMHC, is the Director of Chairwork Therapy NYC.
Email: amandagarcialmhc@gmail.com
They both run the Chairwork Psychotherapy Initiative.
Email: info@chairworkpsychotherapy.com
Image: Jane Uitti/Two Chairs