"I've lived that thing that we do with families": Understanding the experiences of practitioners' undertaking a three-year open dialogue UK training programme

Open dialogue is a systemically-based approach to mental healthcare, originating from Finland. Growing numbers of practitioners are being trained internationally, but little is known about the impact of such trainings within a UK setting. This study used interpretative phenomenological analysis of focus group data to explore the experiences of thirteen individuals undertaking a three-year UK open dialogue training. Four themes emerged: (1) a powerful experiential process; (2) personal therapeutic change; (3) deeper and more open relationships and (4) altered relationships to power in working practice. The findings suggest that open dialogue trainees experience greater depth in relationships with both clients and colleagues as a result of training, even participants who already had therapeutic training backgrounds. The findings also contribute to Transformational Learning literature regarding how experiential, non-hierarchical, dialogical teaching methods may enhance learning on therapeutic programmes and, therefore, lead to positive changes within clinical practice. [Abstract copyright: © 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.]