Ok, I have found myself reworking this material and also realizing that it is good content, but also long to read. So, first, persistent reader, I have summaries for you. I will then publish, below, all the remaining material I have written about this topic for the time being. I think it is time to get it out of my queue and let it go! Then, I will be cutting little bits from here sometimes and using it in bites on various platforms.
SUMMARIES:
VI
My next part of a discussion about truly excellent therapy continues to challenge the modern misconception of therapy as merely ‘complaint -> deconstruction -> problem-solving’, highlighting the deeper essences. It distinguishes between clever strategies, impressive as they can be, and the profound experience of being authentically accepted and supported in therapy by a mortal who can identify. This involves being encouraged to fully experience and express one’s present state, needs, wants, thoughts, and feelings in the presence of a compassionate witness. This is, so long as we don’t forget or dismiss it, in sharp contrast with superficial interactions common in social media and everyday ‘prosocial’ conventions (“I’m [NOT] fine, how are you? [HELP]”), as well as AI.
The post suggests that computers can only mimic but never truly replicate this human-brain-mediated experience and emphasizes the unique power of genuine human connection in therapy / counseling. One threat is that it is indeed easy to dismiss or forget such things, because often much of that identification and influence process is not openly discussed in sessions until a resistance, conflict, or perfect developmental opportunity comes up! It is happening all the time, unconsciously, but in today’s world we tend to cast aside what we cannot consciously track and immediately point to in a sensory way. If we do forget, we are going to lose this dimension and then wonder, ’Gee, why isn’t the AI working? I have all this narrative analysis and homework, I’ve been working on its facial expressions, etc., but something is missing…Oh, well. Let’s just keep training it.’ Wrong approach.
VII
I explore the importance of error and unpredictability in therapy, challenging the notion of perfection and emphasizing the value of human interaction in all its minute and more noticeable flaws, as important in themselves. Errors and unpredictables, when handled with care, can lead to profound psychological healing and growth, because they address a major, fundamental human anxiety: uncertainty and the unknown. Unlike computers, therapists are fallible humans who can thereby provoke more spontaneous emotions and provide real understanding–and repair–in the face of unexpected events. This uncertainty in therapy helps build tolerance and resilience in the patient / client, bridging the gap between the desire for certainty and control, and the reality of life’s unpredictability. The therapeutic process is enriched by the hard-to-predict, impossible-to-completely-know interplay of conscious and unconscious minds, fostering growth through shared experiences of uncertainty and adaptation to it.
VIII
Effective psychotherapy necessitates cooperation with someone who shares a similar human predicament. This predicament involves being aware of one’s mortality and limitations, striving for control despite recognizing its limitations, and occasionally getting into some emotional, behavioral, and mental weeds by denying these realities. The term “control” just means the innate desire to manage and influence one’s circumstances, rather than implying “control freak”. In therapy, the focus is on uncovering unconscious or conscious attempts at control and addressing them with compassion. It is so important to accept one’s current state without seeing it as a problem and to cultivate conscious, responsive decision-making rather than a reflex insistence upon specific outcomes. Therapy redirects attention to the present moment and helps you unwind the encoded ways you confuse desires with needs and become overly anxious about that. Ultimately, therapy emphasizes the significance of being present, alive, and related to now, and acknowledges the impermanent and imaginary aspects of desires and outcomes.
IX
There is a transformative nature of therapy or counseling, facilitated through interactions with a human therapist. Therapists possess an art of gently unsettling individuals, fostering manageable uncertainty that prompts receptivity and a searching for better explanations. They then offer personalized insights, enhancing the individual’s growth. Even in psychoanalysis, where therapists refrain from direct influence, individuals are still influenced within the therapeutic context, by way of being in a safe, highly structured setup, in which there is an all-accepting attitude and minimally structured process, but then that process turns around and appropriately challenges them and makes them question! Stability allows, and interacts with, the emotional risk-taking, and vice versa. That unique relational dynamic fosters self-development and healing. Therapists’ ability to empathize with existential positions, modify their empathic understandings, and notice when they are interfering with the process is critical in helping patients discern what really matters to them, develop compassion and forgiveness, and develop the courage to pursue new answers and new ways of doing and being.
X
It is important to understand often-overlooked aspects of therapy. One personalized aspect I can recommend, in keeping to what is going to be best for patients / clients in need, is to watch out for the growing influence of digital and social pressures dictating individual priorities, which are anxiously reminiscent of historical control tactics–in fact, potentially more deceptively compelling and insidious. These semi-real modes of social media and AI give the illusion that it will work to do away with a human, real-time therapist’s role in authentically responding to the individual’s current state. It attempts to do away with, in the interest of wealth amassing and social control, the fostering of a genuine, subjectively shared connection that enhances therapy’s effectiveness. Such existential ‘presence’ enables individuals to trust and internalize direction and discoveries, facilitating meaningful progress in their therapeutic journey.
XI
The final post emphasizes the importance of “presence” in psychotherapy and counseling, highlighting its often overlooked yet significant role in the therapeutic process. I distinguish between the verbal content of therapy and the underlying process, suggesting that even silence can be purposeful and useful. I underscore that therapy provides a unique space for individuals to fully embrace their current state, explore their identities, and release assumptions and anxieties in a safer, more supportive environment–but not too safe: the uncertainty and risk feelings, when handled well, are vital for real, integrated progress in a person. I argue that therapy offers a holistic healing experience beyond problem-solving, and emphasize the importance of understanding and navigating the unpredictable trajectory of personal growth, and not having to do it alone. Lastly, I suggest that while purely ‘prescriptive’ approaches (problem, text analysis, homework) have their place, harnessing the power of process and presence can supercharge the therapeutic journey, offering individuals a much more enriching and fulfilling experience.
*****************************************************************************
FULL POSTS FOLLOW…
Full VI
To continue my latest series of posts here, I return to the over-modern misconception of therapy as ‘complaining followed by vetted, rational problem-solving strategies that you then take or leave.’
Sure, people come to therapy to solve a problem. And decent therapists are good at helping them with it. Putting out fires, finding both obvious and underlying causes. Being strategic. Being clever with theories, inventive with what is known about learning, influence, conditioning. Etc.
And it’s good. Good like safely prepared pizza. (There is no bad pizza if it is fresh and safely prepared, but some pizzas are better).
However, in 2023 and part of 2024 I purposefully thought hard into what, for me, might distinguish excellent therapy from average therapy and—probably for a good long time—from simulations.
That critical distinction is not based on ‘getting more cleverness’. It is not secret knowledge of any book-based, searchable, computerized, or rumored source. It isn’t advice. It isn’t the latest flashy technique. And it’s not so-called intelligence based on statistical predictions, at least not in a computer-like sense.
(Prediction by way of past data is very helpful, but it is based on something dead. If something is measured and put into word cages for description, it’s already over. Dusty bones can tell a lot, but they’re not alive.)
Instead, what I refer to is more like what gets conveyed and absorbed when people, surviving in the real world, sit around the campfire in the deep night for a while….or for generations…and live out what was gathered over those centuries, adding to it in the process and experiencing it as a mortal human. Or when a critically joyful, painful, or emotion-provoking moment happens and packs a huge punch of meaning.
Now, I will go back and correct myself a little…I’m happy to. I’ll admit that this stuff is a bit of a secret in today’s world because we’re all on a hyper go-go-go trip, unsure what’s real, and even forgetting that we didn’t ask for all this. Or maybe many of us have simply decided to say that we like this current situation or, at least, ‘should’ or ‘must’ like it, obeying all the current, ever-increasing techno / cultural trends.
Anyway…
Whether alternative ideas, coaching, suggestions, or behavioral homework is presented or not, excellent psychotherapy or counseling is a place where you are gently encouraged, reminded, and supported to first:
- Be where you are
- Be who you currently are being
- Be needing any needs you are needing
- Be wanting—now—what you want, and don’t want
- Be feeling, thinking, saying, and doing, what you currently are (hint: because of a need or want)…
- All in the presence of a benevolent, trained witness who is ultimately in the human predicament with you, and can therefore truly identify
In short, good therapy / counseling is where you are allowed, encouraged, even provoked, to be what and who you are, now. It is extremely powerful to be allowed to do this and still be truly and openly accepted, even admired for it, in a safe-enough-but-not-too-safe setting.
Sounds like a nothingburger?
Well, go try it. If your therapist can work with your defenses and be patient, inquiring from time to time about what and how you are right now in those shifts and changes, you will find unanticipated power. Something suddenly jumps to mind, or your therapist notices a change in you and asks about it, and… you’re suddenly seeing much more clearly or experiencing a feeling the therapist can encourage or help you with and help you through.
Social media is, honestly, often the opposite of the above. And day-to-day social conventions are like, but not as curated, as social media. “How are you?” “Good, good. And you?” “Fine.” – though inside, both have much more to say, yet it’s not cool to say it. (see Beier & Young on social conventions and therapeutic interventions…)
A computer can only ever mimic these aspects. Its stock value is low in this area because it’s just a machine, and we know it is. Even if it disapproves, disagrees, encourages, agrees, and so on…well, that’s great but there’s nothing really at stake, because it’s a simulacrum, at best a mass of dead data from a huge swath of the past experiences of people. Not an individualized, semi-unpredictable, singular, living person right in front of you, having a raw experience of a body-mind that is mortal.
If we have gotten (hypothetically) anxious about simulated disagreeableness, tone-deafness, ignorance, rejection, or unrequited love, or are freaking out because a glorified search engine does not agree with us or might hurt our feelings…then we are in big trouble.
More on all this, in time….
Full VII
The cliffhanger resolution is that the best therapy includes a vital ingredient that is counterintuitive: error. Or, to rephrase in a less controversial tone: ‘the unplanned’ or ‘unanticipated’.
Before you get scared, error is common in psychotherapy, counseling, and coaching, but it usually occurs in ways that can be tolerated and grown from. It also sometimes occurs in ways that, when needed, can lead to forms of repair and subsequent growth. Error is also relative to situations and people.
That is, two unexpected things are critical to psychological healing. One is a recontextualized or repaired error—this encompasses even small miscalibrations or simply ‘the unexpected’. The second, given a secure setting and relationship, is a therapist’s partial avoidance of the familiar and expectable when working with you.
And hardly anyone talks about it these days.
Now, to stick with the concept of error or unexpected things that end up being useful…
A therapist is human. So, although a decent human therapist generally won’t do it purposefully and consciously, you will know that they conceivably could fail, upset, confuse, or disappoint you. And sometimes they might for real. Because they are human.
I’m not saying that any such failure or misunderstanding will be massive or permanent. Remember, what is useful here is teaching you through experience that relationships can be secure enough and can be repaired to maintain and even improve that security.
A well-trained, ethical therapist would never do any of those things just to do them. Nevertheless, when you are with a real person, even someone you know well or who is supposed to act according to a set role, the encounter carries real emotional weight because of a feeling of risk.
The chances you must take in therapy are a protected replication of, or preparation for, those that must be taken and managed outside the therapy room, to have your best life.
Those include dealing with: uncertainty, the unknown, small relative control in a massive universe, limited influence over others, the ability of others to make choices independently of us, blind spots in us or of others, the issue of ‘same but different’.
While good therapists try hard not to upset you, small bits of relative or subjective disappointments (or even small overindulgences) may occur. If properly recognized and repaired / corrected, such events can be an incredibly potent source of growth.
Now, would we purposefully program a computer to be capable of mistakes or unwanted surprises in psychotherapy, just so there could be repair / recontextualization? Even if such elaborate ruses were programmed in, a consumer would know that any programmed ending will at least turn out ‘so-so’. Where’s the emotional challenge and growth impetus there? The sense of at least some risk and immediacy?
When a living therapist makes manageable errors or tolerably unexpected interventions, when they must use a stronger therapeutic statement of ‘what is’, or when they soften their approach because you’ve had enough ‘harsh’ in life, or when they must maintain good but flexible boundaries (necessary disappointments), that will provoke more real emotion in you than if you knew it was all a computer.
In real-life interaction, there is a unique opportunity for a therapist to facilitate real understanding and repair, right when part of you had started to fear that things were going quite wrong, were stagnating, were perhaps ‘too’ satisfying, and so on.
If a therapist never makes semi-random, human mistakes or is always predictable, they never show the patient how to understand, mend, and grow by recognition, acceptance, and adaptation. They also never model how to manage one’s imperfections and errors. What kind of therapy is that?
A limited kind, that’s what. Even if a computer learns to make targeted ‘mistakes’ of understanding or technique and then, all-too-perfectly, repairs them, a patient will already know the computer is programmed ahead to do so. And we will thus be…not that impassioned.
Even solving that twisty problem still does not solve the ‘low stock value’ problem. That is, the problem that comes from needing to feel that bit of uncertainty and risk in our encounters, even the ones that go well or that are relatively familiar.
So, have I lost it? Why wouldn’t we want a perfectly non-upsetting, perfectly supportive, perfectly knowledgeable, perfectly analytical, perfectly perfect computer therapist? Why am I talking about a (limited, controlled) experience of emotional pain or disillusionment being necessary?
Because being helped to tolerate uncertainty, and thus getting better at doing it on one’s own, does at least two things.
One, it maximizes receptivity. When we are lost, we begin a more courageous and open ‘search’ for resolution and finality.
Two, when that search is weathered and mysteries repeatedly solved (but with merely temporary satisfaction), uncertainty tolerance helps strengthen our faith that things can go relatively well when connecting—live—with life and fellow humans. (For an excellent book on the psychology of uncertainty, see xxxxx)
Let me put it one more way. Computer therapy would be like watching a movie with some suspense, a splash of humor, and some drama, but knowing all along that the ending will almost certainly be at least blandly ok and will probably be acceptably positive.
A more evocative and enriching film would not give away as much and would yank us around a lot more first. It might even have a rough-but-positive, ambiguous, or negative ending. We would still know it’s only a movie, but we would have learned something about the artists and about ourselves.
Real life is a similar mix of joy and pain, but joy and pain that is really occurring, can be shared in real time, has real consequences, can be unpredictable, and can have non-foregone conclusions. Except for one conclusion: we don’t get to be here forever. We need each other to manage that, and other, pure existential facts.
To extend the example, a human therapy experience should be partially protected and foregone regarding ‘what happens in sessions’ but should also contain a tolerable dose of real uncertainty, unfamiliarity, risk. The dose can be gently adjusted based on what the therapist is seeing and what the patient / client seems able to tolerate and seems to need.
The beneficial uncertainty arises, in part, because sessions are being done with another real person who is in real time, in the real world, in the same human predicament, and has some human flaws and blind spots just like you.
This process of reality tolerance helps form what I might call a bridge of management between two cliffs. One cliff is the way we try to sustain the perception of impossible certainty and absolute control. The second cliff is a live experience of uncertainty and lack of control in life that, oddly enough, we learn to accept, digest, and use as growth fuel.
I’m not saying that therapists should strive to mess up. They naturally strive for the opposite. But the good ones know that it won’t work precisely as planned all the time, but it will usually work out well.
The complex interaction of two conscious and unconscious minds, each with its rational and irrational qualities, both being anchored in a body that is mortal, will result in some unanticipated results. That isn’t a bug—or if it is, it’s a beautiful and necessary one. It is instead a feature, and the most curative kind of psychological treatment.
Both the patient and the therapist can use unpredicted events and results to grow—by way of getting better at tolerating the uncertainty of it all, together. The therapist can help in yet another way, by anticipating the unanticipated…but not anticipating exactly what it will be, until it arrives. Again, a good therapist models ‘uncertainty tolerance’ and ‘dyscontrol tolerance’.
Full VIII
Psychotherapy only works in its full spectrum when it transpires in cooperation with another being who is in a human predicament very similar to yours.
What is an example of the human predicament?
-A living being aware of its own end and its own limitations, who
-Tries to control and predict things, but sees again and again that it can only influence things, who
-Sometimes, consciously or unconsciously, tries really hard to deny the facts above.
A note about the word ‘control’. It is very telling about our world that when I use ‘control’ to explain a great many troubles, people automatically think I am referring to a jealous, sadistic, suspicious, or power-hungry person in the way they might usually think of a “control freak”. A brief explanation usually does the trick:
I mean that organisms, especially humans, want to somehow control their situations—make them comfortable, predictable, need-matching, and desire-matching. Whatever methods we use, however we express the wish, whatever kinds of control we seek, we are all wishing and striving for more control. One author I enjoy has even quoted another as, “you are control”.
The therapy part, in finer-grained detail, is unveiling the ingenious ways you unintentionally or intentionally try to control, as well as how you also try to forget about (or hide) the methods of control and try to forget about or hide the raw ‘being and existence’ stuff.
Then, the way you (we) do the controlling and hiding is also loved and prized by the therapist, which helps you give yourself permission to let it go.
Who, what, where you are, what you are feeling, thinking. None of that is really a problem. But what we try to ‘do about’ our human predicaments, to try to gain more predictability and control? That can sometimes become a problem.
Also, your personal state is not a problem. It’s a fact that reveals things about how you are, who you are, and how you can be helped.
We make our states out to be problems. And then we try to ‘do’, acquire, blame, assign, or reject our way out of them. No—the answer is to fully be what you are right now and then decide, consciously, what to do next.
The trouble comes from confusing being with some particular doing or outcome.
Good therapy also helps you remember or realize that: recalled, current, or planned ‘doings’, ‘gettings’, and ‘havings’ of impermanent things and situations, are perhaps not as worthy of deep, repetitive anxiety as you thought. (Desires are not needs.)
While we all want what we want (and that is all right), the above are ways of trying to forget about the issue of ‘being’.
Therapy firmly but considerately pulls the focus back to needs, desires, and states of being, that are alive now.
Full IX
Ok, a short bit this time, but a good one:
In therapy or counseling, you become clearer and more confident about what’s *really* important to you through a process of running commentary shared with a real, human therapist.
Basically, even if some therapists don’t always know exactly ‘how’ they do it, they have developed an art of disturbing or surprising you just enough, but not too much. That takes you to a place of bearable (because supported) uncertainty. (again, a great book on this that uses different language is by Beier & Young…)
Why do that? Because when uncertain or confused, you then search for explanations. The searching and wanting makes you more receptive to possibly useful answers. Then, good counselors gift-wrap (personalize) a targeted bit of input—even if not an iron-clad answer—and give it to you, to help you. (Thank you—I think—Jeffrey Zeig, regarding the gift-wrapping imagery). The opposite of therapeutic influence is a so-called brainwashing influence. Intent and effect make the difference.
Yes, in my view, even in the most textbook-rigorous psychoanalysis in which there is no advice, little revealing of the therapist’s self, rules for practitioners to ‘not influence’, and so on, you are being influenced.
In fact, the psychoanalytic setup is just one of a range of special therapy contexts that increase your likelihood of being influenced. (see Jay Haley’s works). That’s because any such setup is going to be ‘asocial’ (unconventional). How is it not conventional?
First, therapy is to risk change, tolerate anxiety, and be challenged and (politely) questioned, but, paradoxically, it is also consistent, stable, safe-feeling, and all-accepting, so that you feel you can take such risks.
Such a relational situation was a rare context in yesterday’s world, let alone today’s world. Such a context is intellectually obvious as a part of therapy. Yet, it’s a whole other thing to be in it and to do it. That experience, not just a ‘knowing about’, is solid, nutritious food for self-development and healing.
Second, the way you are also periodically pushed slightly off balance is the spice of the therapy, the part that presses on you, subtly or not, to alter yourself (with help). It is also what makes each therapist, therapy, and session unique.
Because they are human but have taken time to look at themselves and others, most therapists can automatically, organically understand your more general existential position. Because of their humanity, talent, and training, counselors can also grow and learn to better identify with you and understand your more personal position, too. Because they are trained, they can get back out of the way when they realize they are distorting, expecting, or forcing something.
The above aspects make it possible for you to see past what you just think should be important or, more to the point, what you were always told or felt for a long time is important.
Stay tuned for more.
Full X
A second-to-last bit on the modern misconceptions / under-stating of therapy these days: “Now, why is any of this important?”
Well. First, it’s some of the so-called hidden aspects of therapy. So, if you want the good stuff, you now have my personalized version of a field guide—if you think therapy is for you. It’s not the only field guide. Maybe it doesn’t work for you or it’s not appealing, but I think it’s ‘an’ angle on the truth.
Second, there’s going to be more and more voices telling you, through better and better programmed digital and social prophets, what should be important to you. What you ‘must’ do, think, feel.
Old, ancient stuff: “It’s all the fault of [person x] but if you just give up your money, access to your partner, sanity, self-determination, ability to think, etc., and reject [person x] with us, you will be spared and get some version of what you want.” Etc. All might have started innocently but grew to control you with the promise of, “if you go along, everything will get easier, so never mind how everything will also get worse in terms of quality and meaning.”
Yet, with the digitally increased ability to proliferate these word viruses through the culture, and now maybe the capacity to try following through with it, will any spaces be spared? (I credit William S. Burroughs regarding the concept of the ‘right [authority] virus’…)
The virus has spread so much that some feel like an expert on anything if they did a day of web-searching and skimming. Yet, it seems to be a new rule that all (even real) experts are to be torn down at their first mistake or at the whiff of any personal flaw.
Before answering the question of what will be spared, first I must take a quick detour that will track back to a more important point.
The job of a therapist is to respond, with relational immediacy, to the status and shifting of your current state of being, concerns, and desires. To respond to what exists now and do so in their role and as a whole person, without violating any boundaries.
If that order is mostly met, the therapist, even if they are rather private in the sessions, is still real in a way that can help you more than advice or pre-programmed content. That realness helps you finally discover, find, or take good advice and really digest and use it. It helps you stop telling the good advice to buzz off, forgetting about it, spacing off, etc. Helps you to trust it and stop despairing that even the best advice won’t be special enough for your situation.
We might say a therapist succeeding at that balancing act has presence.
See you soon for my final installment…
Full XI
So, regarding the real, organic psychotherapy and counseling…I’m going out in my last post with more on ‘presence’
Presence is simple but not easy to develop, maintain, or even find these days.
Some consider this aspect of therapy a facet of unconscious and relational process. It runs alongside, or under, all the verbal, behavioral, and symbolic content.
For example, one tradition of psychoanalysis (Kleinian and post-Kleinian) sees adult speech like a child plays or acts out things. That tradition is more interested in what the speech / behavior itself causes or ‘shows’, rather than what caused the speech / behavior. I also appreciate the latter position (thinking of what might have caused the speech / behavior), which is more in line with psychoanalytic ‘ego psychology’. (I found this comparison in Akhtar’s book on psychoanalytic listening)
Anyway, the therapy process—what we are currently doing and therefore being—is frequently ignored. Yet, it has some major effects on its own, often even without discussing it in the therapy session. When the time is right, it can be very powerful to purposefully bring process into the light.
Process and presence are not something we usually consciously track—we just intuit and feel them. So far, we know that we need presence from living beings. An AI is probably not going to produce the same confidence in, and reverence for, the feeling of presence arising from a real-time human-to-human interaction.
I am a bit more active in sessions (overall) compared to some psychodynamic psychotherapists. I happen to enjoy working on problems in a focused way, in addition to a less directive overall approach. However, I know that even if you sit and say very little, something important can come of that, too. Because in an on-point therapy, there’s more than words and defined problems and plans. Way more.
With presence, even the way a therapist helps with very practical problems can open things that stretch beyond the concept of ‘therapy = problem analysis, psychoeducation, and homework’.
In fact, the best discoveries are usually not planned. Instead, they are provoked or evoked to emerge from / with you, not handed to you.
Even if you talk the entire time and I get interested in that, the process part is still going on in parallel or as subtext.
For example, if you’ve been talking almost non-stop in a session—the therapist can infer that you have much you feel you must get out and express and that somehow that is the most urgent and priority thing for you right this moment. The therapist might also notice that they end up feeling interested and compassionate but also unable to help the way they had planned, because of the avalanche of material.
But then they might realize that they need to look closely at their need to urgently help or do something ‘productive’ right away. It might be coming from their response to how overwhelmed and urgent you seem. And, once all this gets digested and more settled, they might be able to use this process information to make a deeply connected, personal, acknowledging notation or interpretation about what seems to be occurring for you—and between the two of you—now.
Back to the point, and coming full circle (basically): Regarding psychotherapy and counseling, where else are you allowed to
- Be in whatever state or identity you are today, while also
- Being supported to talk about and embrace that, so you can
- Be curious, discerning, and finally safe enough to release assumptions and anxieties, so you can
- Do or not do something (now with fuller awareness), and then
- just BE?
Where else can you slowly learn to hide less from What. Is. Going. On. ?
I see very few places for that today, other than the kind of therapy / counseling / helping I am discussing.
We each deserve some precious, encouraged, protected moments of really knowing just who you are and what you want, right now—while solving some problems, too. One venue for that is full-spectrum, organic, two-person psychotherapy and counseling.
You can always work on problems directly and do it better with help. However, you can also absorb something more holistically healing than topical information, data collection, and pre-mapped action plans. Without a somewhat unpredictable trajectory of understanding and figuring-out-in-the moment, therapy is less alive. And that’s what we’re concerned with here—life.
Now, I’m not saying that psychoeducation, analyzing ‘errors in your rationality’, plus vetted behavioral homework, minus consideration of process and presence = bad therapy.
In my opinion, if such prescriptive work is of high quality, it will usually fall in a solidly good range of quality and effectiveness. (I base that estimate on the wide variability I know is out there in the market.) ‘Process’ will be going on even in such treatments, but it will be less actively highlighted and harnessed to deepen the treatment.
That said, if you are going to dedicate your time, effort, money, and vulnerability to take your difficulties to a human, I think you could and should get more than a script, a checklist, some memorized actions or phrases, and a prefabricated behavior plan. This series of posts has been an attempt to explain what that ‘more’ could be for you.
I hope this has been helpful, and there is now more clarity about why present, presence, and process-oriented, person-to-person therapy is here to stay or, if it somehow isn’t, why that would be a tragedy.
image:
Myriams-Fotos (Pixabay)