A look behind the curtain…
Sometimes therapists act like the Wizard of Oz. They’re not supposed to reveal to anyone that they have concerns, worries, even (gasp!) neuroses! But everyone knows this, so it’s a little silly for me to pretend that I am the healthiest human on the planet. Every once in a while, I’ll write in this blog about my human side, and how it actually helps my work.
So here’s one of my hangups: I sometimes worry about how I sound when I’m talking with clients. We’ll finish up a session, schedule the next one, say our goodbyes, and I’ll go back in my office and think, did they notice that I keep hammering on one issue, and one issue only? Are they frustrated that I sound like a broken record? Or is it just me?!
The broken-record topic for me is self-confrontation. When I first began working with couples (and they now make up about half of my practice), my mentor said to me, “You need to find out what your theory is. It’s not that you need to find a theory. You have one already, and whatever it is, you’re using it.” Since then I’ve come to understand that my theory about couples–and individuals–is this (drum roll):
Self-confrontation is the path to ecstasy.
(Huh?)
This is what I mean. When a client begins to complain about their partner, I criticize the quality of their complaint, not the behavior of their partner. I push them not to drop their complaint, but make it better. Make it more effective. Take the poison out of it and get in touch with what you really want from your partner…and get in touch with the fact that this is your want, not your partner’s, and your partner was not put on Earth to meet this want that you have.
So far so good…but then at the next session the person complains about a different behavior their partner is doing (often enough, it’s a fairly bad behavior, to tell the truth!) and I do it again, except from a different angle. Instead of troubleshooting the complaint, I’ll push him to confront his own misbehavior in the relationship, according to his own standards. He wants his partner not to shout or hurl insults? Okay, that sounds reasonable. So…why are you yourself hurling insults at the top of your voice?
Maybe now you can see how this is irritating. I get downright uncooperative when I feel a person is not challenging herself first. But I wouldn’t do this if it didn’t really help. A person who confronts herself gains an enormous amount of emotional strength and relational influence. If you’ve done your personal homework, then your complaint about your partner won’t be half-assed (pardon the industry term), and it might get you what you want. And if you’ve done your personal homework, you can stand much taller than your partner when she’s shouting. Soon enough, she’ll figure out that the shouting is getting her nowhere…at least in her relationship with you.
So until I come up with a better theory (and this is a pretty robust one, if you ask me), I’ll just have to deal with the worries that crop up when my clients leave the session. Most of them come back, after all, and the ones who got past their irritation with me were able to find out how self-confrontation can take them farther than they ever imagined.
