The Development of 'Self' Through the Conversational Model
Most of us were trained to think of the self as something a person has: a structure, an internal object that can be strengthened, repaired or, in the language of much of our field, "rebuilt." The Conversational Model asks us to hold that assumption more loosely. It proposes that the self is not a thing at all but a process, one that emerges moment by moment in the space between people and can only be understood within a relationship.
For clinicians working with complex trauma, this is not a philosophical nicety. It changes what we listen for, what we say, and what we understand ourselves to be doing in the room.
The Self as a Process, Not a Structure
The lineage begins with John Hughlings Jackson, the nineteenth-century father of British neurology, who described a doubling of consciousness: a subject consciousness oriented to inner life alongside an object consciousness oriented to the outer world. It is this reflective, inward-facing awareness that Meares takes as the marker of self (Meares et al., 2012, p. 18).
William James took this further. He described the "stream of consciousness," the continuous, shifting flow of thoughts, sensations, images and feelings that constitutes inner life, and located at its core a feeling of warmth and intimacy (James, 1890). He also described the self as duplex: both the one who experiences and the one who observes the experiencing (James, 1892). Crucially, James did not locate the self in any fixed structure. The self is something that happens. It is the stream, not the container.
Russell Meares built directly on this. He proposes that the self is not an isolated system but part of a larger organism that includes the social environment (Meares et al., 2012, p. 13): an ever-evolving, interactive flow of feelings, sensations, thoughts and memories, arising in response to both internal and external events. Put starkly, the self is an abstraction. It cannot stand alone, any more than the brain can. Both exist only in the presence of others.
This is the first core idea. The self is not inside the person. It arises between people, and is continuously produced in that between-space.
Relatedness as the Medium
If the self arises between people, then the quality of the relating matters enormously.
Meares describes a state of self as arising through a form of relatedness characterised by a feeling of fit, or harmony, between inner and outer worlds (Meares et al., 2012, p. 13). When a person's inner experience is met, reflected and amplified by another, the stream deepens and elaborates. When it is met with dismissal, correction or contempt, it contracts, fragments, or shuts down. Guthrie and Moorey (2018), drawing on James, describe the central feature of selfhood as warmth and intimacy coupled with a continuity that feels connected and cohesive. Each of these qualities is built, and can be dismantled, in conversation.
Jessica Benjamin's work on intersubjectivity offers a complementary frame. Benjamin (1995) describes the particular joy of attunement: the moment in which the other can share my feelings, and in which I recognise the other as a separate centre of experience who nonetheless gets me. This is not merger and not compliance. It is two subjectivities in genuine contact, and the developmental achievement is the capacity to hold both: I am a subject, and so are you.
Trauma so often collapses that tension. The traumatised person tends to relate as doer or done-to, subject or object, rather than as two subjects meeting (Benjamin, 2004). Restoring the possibility of mutual recognition is, in itself, therapeutic work.
How Language Wounds the Self
If conversation is the medium in which the self forms, conversation is also the medium in which it is damaged.
Two of Meares' concepts are especially useful here. The first is attacks upon value: ridicule, mockery, disparagement and, more insidiously, the small slights inflicted day after day, which accumulate into an unconscious traumatic memory system shaping the sense of personal worth across a whole life (Meares, 2005, 2006). Meares describes such attacks as experienced like a blow, a sharp and instantaneous distress that slices into ordinary living without connecting to it. Following Janet, the resulting memory is not integrated into the stream of consciousness but persists as an isolated system at its edges, ready to move into the field of thought and obliterate the healthier consciousness of self.
The second is malignant internalisation, the process by which the voice of the abuser is taken in and becomes the person's own inner commentary (Meares, 1999). The words used against a child do not stay outside. They become the grammar of the inner world.
This reframes a great deal of what we call "negative self-talk." It is not a cognitive distortion to be corrected. It is a relationship, internalised, and it needs to be met relationally.
What This Asks Of the Clinician
The Conversational Model is deliberately non-hierarchical. The therapist is not the expert who decodes the patient's material and hands back an interpretation. The emphasis falls on the fine texture of the exchange itself.
Meares and colleagues set out working principles that can feel unfamiliar to those trained in interpretive traditions: using what is given rather than importing an agenda; choosing what is most alive in the material; scanning for the positive; using the patient's own language rather than translating it into clinical vocabulary; attending to voice, tone, pitch and inflection; tracking; and working with metaphor and imagery rather than explanation (Meares et al., 2012, pp. 161–201).
The focus is on immediate experience, what is happening now, in the body and in the room, rather than on reconstructing the past. Insight is not the primary vehicle of change. Meares (2004) is clear that the self is a relational form of consciousness, restored and potentiated in the conversation itself; it is the relationship, rather than interpretation, that transforms.
A further aim follows. Because the self forms in relatedness but is not identical with the other, therapy works toward what Hobson (1985, p. 194) called aloneness-togetherness: intimate sharing in which each person retains an inner space that is theirs alone. Hobson distinguished aloneness from isolation and togetherness from fusion. The capacity to move between the two, and to tolerate the feelings attached to each, marks a self that can bear dependence and vulnerability without being annihilated by them.
Why It Matters
For clients whose sense of self was formed under ridicule, humiliation or neglect, the work is not primarily about correcting beliefs. It is about restoring access to inner life, the stream that trauma interrupted, through a conversation safe and attuned enough to let it flow again.
Conversations construct the self. They can also dismantle it. Knowing which is happening, in real time, in the room, is much of the clinical task.
Suggested Reading
Benjamin, J. (1995). Like subjects, love objects: Essays on recognition and sexual difference. Yale University Press.
Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46.
Guthrie, E., & Moorey, J. (2018). The theoretical basis of the conversational model of therapy. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 32(3), 282–300.
Hobson, R. F. (1985). Forms of feeling: The heart of psychotherapy. Tavistock. James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). Henry Holt.
James, W. (1892). Psychology: Briefer course. Henry Holt.
Meares, R. (1999). The "adualistic" representation of trauma: On malignant internalization. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 53(3), 392–402.
Meares, R. (2004). The conversational model: An outline. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 58(1), 51–66.
Meares, R. (2005). The metaphor of play: Origin and breakdown of personal being (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Meares, R. (2006). Attacks upon value: A new approach to depression. Psychotherapy in Australia, 12(3), 62–67.
Meares, R., Bendit, N., Haliburn, J., Korner, A., Mears, D., & Butt, D. (2012). Borderline personality disorder and the conversational model: A clinician's manual. W. W. Norton.
AI Acknowledgement: Artificial intelligence tools were used to assist with drafting, structuring and editing this article. All clinical reasoning, theoretical interpretation and final content decisions are the author's own.
About The Author
Rebecca Higgins is the Clinical Director of The Radiant Group, a Registered Clinical Counsellor, Psychotherapist, EMDR Consultant and Clinical Supervisor with more than 16 years of experience working with complex trauma, attachment injuries, betrayal trauma and addictive disorders. Through her clinical practice, research, supervision, teaching and Clinical Insights series, Rebecca translates contemporary research into practical, evidence-informed approaches to trauma recovery, with a focus on restoring emotional regulation, identity, relationships and a coherent sense of self.
Clinical Insights Series | Rebecca Higgins