2026 Invited Speaker: Brett Wilkinson, PhD

Presenting: Interruption Changes the Shape of Self: Grit and Blanchotian Désœuvrement in the CHANGES Model

This presentation addresses our contemporary crisis of interpersonal grit, defined as the client’s capacity and willingness to sustain relational engagement despite anxiety and difficulty. In the CHANGES model, grit is a precondition of change and a skill that can be refined with practice. However, the pervasive habit of retreating behind screens supports the undisturbed, narcissistic flow of our internality, actively diminishing relational opportunities to face anxiety and thereby impeding grit development. As such, clients are increasingly conditioned to seek the immediate foreclosure of distress, making therapeutic progress difficult in many cases.

Drawing upon Maurice Blanchot’s désœuvrement (unworking), we maintain that “interruption” is a therapeutic precondition for healthy relational development. Blanchotian interruption is the moment when continuity with self is broken by the Other, indicating how genuine relationality is built on pauses or gaps in communication that allow for responsiveness and contact. In clinical use, it is a deliberate refusal by therapists to reconcile client uncertainty or facilitate narrative resolution prematurely. As such, confrontative therapeutic pauses can disrupt internalized self-referentiality and force an oft uncomfortable encounter with the present moment.

Interruption changes the shape of self. It discloses the possibility that radical human separation begets relational grit by rupturing narcissistic internality. Being with clients in the clinical space of non-resolution creates a therapeutic opportunity for constructive anxiety that, in turn, can become the foundation for a greater willingness to experience anxiety and difficulty. Ultimately, grit is a hard-won emotional capacity and necessary precondition for existential belonging with sustained relational presence. Analyses at the intersection of interruption and grit in therapeutic encounters may also be a social imperative in the digital age, providing the phenomenological groundwork for articulating the deleterious ramifications of AITC’s (AI-based therapy chatbots).

Brett Wilkinson, PhD, is an associate professor of counselor education at Purdue University Fort Wayne (PFW) and a licensed mental health counselor in private practice working with individuals, couples, and families. He is Editor-in-Chief of ACA’s The Journal of Humanistic Counseling and founding director of the PFW Institute for Counseling Research, which designs clinical practice and training studies in counseling and psychotherapy. He is the co-author of Therapeutic Change with Difficult Clients: Precursors and Techniques in the CHANGES Model (2025; APA Books). He provides consultations and trainings on the CHANGES Model, existential-phenomenological practices, reflective supervision, cognitive complexity, and embodied mindfulness to community agencies, school systems, and university programs.