What about you? Responding to a face-threatening question in psychotherapy

In psychotherapy, the envisioned change in patient's feelings, thoughts and behaviour often targets their self-experience. This threatens simultaneously the patient's face and the therapeutic relation. We focus on face-threats in transformative question-answer sequences where therapists question the patient's face by shifting the focus of talk on patient's self and in response patients confront the dilemma of having to choose between saving their face or the relation with the therapist. Data come from 47 video recorded psychotherapy sessions conducted in Albanian language. Analysis shows that patients resist the transformation but only after making considerable efforts to save both their face and the therapeutic relation. We conclude that challenging the patient's self-experience is a delicate task in terms of the therapeutic relation.