Movie Myths for Therapy; The Limits of Language for Coaching
New techniques in change work are avoiding content to better access a client's inner experience.
Since at least the 60s, the film industry took an interest in depicting therapy, whether in comedies or dramas. Nowadays, you can probably ask anyone in the West—adults or teenagers or otherwise—what therapy looks like, and they'll have the therapist with a pen at their chin, asking "And how does that make you feel?" and the client laying down on a couch ranting about their personal life.
While funny that we've made this generalization up about therapy, it's also an important factor for how we approach therapy in real life. Clients, new and old, have expectations about how a therapist works:
The therapist introduces themselves and their credentials, and asks "So, what do you have going on?"
The client is then allowed to dump on the therapist about what they think they have, what might be the cause, and what it's caused for them.
If the client is guarded, then the therapist continues to ask questions and build rapport with the client, until the client will finally be comfortable to do step 2.
This expectation about the client-therapist relationship can create a profound obstacle for actual change:
The therapist, wanting the client to like them and to be more open, will take in more information than needed for their methodology of treatment. They also recognize that the client's dump will make the client feel better by the end of the session, even though they haven't even found a concrete intervention to make any change.
The client, sharing all of these details in the hope that it allows the therapist to do their best work—and to blow off some steam that they can't with friends and family—further cements their problems by finding more eloquent ways to describe their suffering.
But the client's issue that's been ongoing for 15 years would likely need almost 15 years of unpacking to be truly feel understood.
With our modern expectations of therapy, we have made clients smarter at describing suffering rather than making therapists smarter at making quality change. We then arrive at feeling better after a session, without changing behaviors to change how a person feels about themselves in the first place.
So a possible goal in non-traditional therapy is to avoid the content of the client's suffering, and access the quality and feeling of the suffering itself.
Imagine: I spend a whole session telling you about my fear of water, yet by the end of the session, you can only describe to me in your own words about what you think is my fear of water. So you attempt to treat my description of fear rather than the inner mechanics of the suffering itself.
You simply can't get what I'm feeling because neither you or I can fully describe it with words. (Though sometimes experiential wisdom will get you closer compared to process-based techniques.)
The question I ask myself and others: How do we cut through words and work directly with the inner experience of a client?
This is what I'm starting to study, after watching a session involving a client with PTSD. What I observe is that the best results occurred when the coach was able to discover the structures of how she thinks, rather than placing therapeutic structures on her.
It's been fascinating to see a person with such personal issues that they are largely immune to common Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques for change, because PTSD apparently doesn't play the rules as another person just trying to lose weight or quit smoking.
Coaching and therapy needs to adapt to the structures of the client's mind, not the other way around.
More to come on this topic.
Thank you for reading,
Dom