States of change

A good friend from Spain (thanks, Almudena Uribe! Bisous!), who is also a therapist, posted this lovely picture from a Polish artist who created this piece of artwork.

Even without speaking Polish, doesn’t it make sense?

This sums up something core about what I believe we do together in psychotherapy–as therapist and as client. What is great about this picture is that yes, the therapist is there to help ask questions and use their expertise, but the area of meaning making is the client’s. Yes, the making of meaning is yours, as a client!

When I start working with a client, one of the first questions I ask during intake is, “What brought you to seek therapy? And what do you hope is different in 3, 6, 9 months, or a year?” Beyond that, in the first few sessions, I’m assessing their “state of change.” Although a client may come to therapy, their readiness to work explicitly and implicitly on changes to that problem varies a lot.

Early stage work is about getting the issue that the client wants to work on, clearly on the table, and to examine together what has been challenging about making that change. Sometimes there can be parts of us that don’t want to change–there can be avoidance or defense. Hey, we’re human!

If we make the implicit explicit, in safe, titrated ways that don’t cause us to go into defense or avoidance, there is real opportunity to work with what is explicitly known. There is something different about putting everything “out on the table” without any defense or avoidance or any pressure at all to do anything except take a real look without the lenses of your upbringing, gender, class, soceioeconomics, early trauma…it is just a really authentic chance to…just look…and often, to see.

Often that is a pivot point for clients, and I am always amazed at how each client comes to it. Things open up, and clients often start to weave their own tapestry of meaning, and reorganize how they see themselves in action, in their own lives. They question and they might even trash old definitions of themselves (or parts of themselves).

In short, they own all of themselves. again.