What to Do?

From P.16 of the PDF "Statutes and Regulations" from the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (the regulatory agency that oversees MFTs, Social Workers, and etc):

"§4980. NECESSITY OF LICENSE (a) Many California families and many individual Californians are experiencing difficulty and distress, and are in need of wise, competent, caring, compassionate, and effective counseling in order to enable them to improve and maintain healthy family relationships."

Clients as above, come to us for wise counsel.  Among other things of course.  This idea has far-reaching implications, not just for our clients, but for us.  Wisdom is hard to come by!  Oversimplifying, "wisdom" in this case is often a euphemism for answers.

Claiming (or believing) one has wisdom or answers is of course a Bad Idea, yet it seems we have a responsibility to work toward them.  There's some great ideas and techniques supporting the principle of not giving "answers" (suggestions, direction, etc) outright to clients (or loved ones, certainly) from the therapist's chair.  My basic mode of operation is to try to lead someone to those answers, typically only giving direct suggestions when my efforts to lead a client to their own answers have been exhausted.

We do treat several diagnoses and/or issues that have "community standards", fundamental practices or "conventions" most therapists agree on how to treat.  Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other more severe illnesses for instance almost always direct the client to: not "self-medicate", takes the best supportive medication regime as directed, and is getting :talk therapy" and/or peer/familial support with their illness.  There are few that argue with the utility of these interventions.  There are other examples for addiction, depression, anxiety, and more.

Two things are of interest to me though.  The first is that during the therapeutic process, I often see clients get a suggestion, and dismiss the suggestion out of hand.  What I think is happening is that rarely do I suggest an idea that in a vacuum will ever be sufficient.  What I mean is, most any suggestions I have will never be singular.  It seems that the depth of our sadness or anxiety or pain or whatever often keeps us from "getting" what is offered, unable to accept the responsibility of taking several suggestions.  Summarizing: rarely is one idea sufficient to change anything in the therapeutic process.

The second thing that prompts me to mull this over is the "active" therapists versus the "passive" therapists.  In my view there is room (and each therapist I think, ought use) both styles, often with the same client.  There are times that we should be directive, and not just in terms of extreme examples like when a client is being abused.  Discouraging self-medicating, engaging a support group, ruling out medical concerns with a physician, ways to stop a behavior etc are all examples where there is little controversy over giving someone "direction" about an issue.

People come to us for answers.  We are paid to have a toolset, methods, principles of operating that in many cases should help diminish depression, stress, relationship conflicts, behavioral concerns and the like.  On the subject of not holding these ideas close to one's chest: there is a great (and occasionally controversial) martial arts instructor who critiques traditional means of training, idealizing the "teacher" and etc.  He also critiques traditional martial arts training as being "cultish"- keeping secrets, claiming answers from some (out of touch and unknowable) "higher source".  His "instructors" are all referred to as "coaches" or by their first names, and their focus is very simple: performance improvement.  That last idea is part of what I'm getting at here- the "answers" we give as therapists should improve "performance", which I would argue is diminished if we are too passive.  It is very significant of course, that what is being improved, is clearly defined.  If we think something might be helpful though- there are certainly compelling reasons we should disclose it.

When it comes to performance, we should be helping people get more in touch with their emotional condition, have those feelings gracefully, diminish (but not eliminate) the intensity of negative emotions.  Our interventions should help decrease or stop unwanted behaviors.  The direction we give should help increase intimacy.  Of course this is not an exhaustive list, it may take a long time for these things to happen, and some cannot happen without the others.

My experience has been that many (arguably most) of my clients have come into my office, suffering enough, and out of enough answers, that they are willing to do most things we come up with together.  Had they been in possession of this material on their own to begin with, there would be no (or little) need for my education and experience with the issues they struggle with.

My effort is to put me out of a job and it does people a disservice I think, to have an insight that I wait for them to come to on their own... which they've already arguably been trying to do.  Sometimes I ask my clients if they have spent a great deal of time in their lives, saying something like this to themselves: "I just wish someone would tell me what to do about this."  There are many things, that most (not necessarily all) people can do, directly, to diminish feelings of low self worth, sadness, struggles in relationships and most of the problems they come to a therapist.  If I didn't go to school to learn to help people know and do these things, then what exactly did I go for?