'Let's check in with our tummies' Orienting to feelings talk in group supervision for psychotherapy counsellors
This article examines a particular kind of business opening activity found in a specific, and little analysed, type of institutional group meeting: group supervision for psychotherapeutic counsellors. The data consist of a particular set of activities that occur in the initial stages of these meetings, which are neither the kind of pre meeting talk identified by previous research on interaction in meetings, nor specifically the business of group supervision itself. This phase, referred to as the 'check in' functions as an interim stage between small talk and getting down to business. The analysis shows how the check in comprises a highly structured set of linguistic sequences whose production is bound up with one of the key interactional features of group supervision: the collaborative orientation to the production and relevance of 'feelings talk'