The narrative of depressed patients is characterized by the type of content verbalized and the cognitive processes involved. The work of contents associated with the patient’s emotional experience during the conversation involves 3 communicative patterns (CPs) used to work on emotional contents during change episodes (CEs): affective exploration, attunement and resignification (Valdés, Krause, Tomicic, & Espinosa, 2012). The objective of the study was to analyze patients’ and therapists’ CPs and verbalized words to determine the underlying cognitive mechanisms (cause, insight, tentative and certainty) involved in the work of emotional contents during CEs which were identified in 2 psychodynamic therapies in Santiago, Chile. The verbal expressions were analyzed using the Therapeutic Activity Coding System (Valdés, Tomicic, Pérez, & Krause, 2010) and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001). The results demonstrate that cognitive mechanisms play an important role in the process of change, depending on the CP used by the speaker. Therapy promotes a constructive reasoning in which patients eventually adopt some linguistic structures verbalized by their therapists when using the affective resignification pattern.  The narrative of depressed patients is characterized by the type of content verbalized and the cognitive processes involved. The work of contents associated with the patient’s emotional experience during the conversation involves 3 communicative patterns (CPs) used to work on emotional contents during change episodes (CEs): affective exploration, attunement and resignification (Valdés, Krause, Tomicic, & Espinosa, 2012). The objective of the study was to analyze patients’ and therapists’ CPs and verbalized words to determine the underlying cognitive mechanisms (cause, insight, tentative and certainty) involved in the work of emotional contents during CEs which were identified in 2 psychodynamic therapies in Santiago, Chile. The verbal expressions were analyzed using the Therapeutic Activity Coding System (Valdés, Tomicic, Pérez, & Krause, 2010) and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001). The results demonstrate that cognitive mechanisms play an important role in the process of change, depending on the CP used by the speaker. Therapy promotes a constructive reasoning in which patients eventually adopt some linguistic structures verbalized by their therapists when using the affective resignification pattern.