Therapy has to somehow bring in newness, because people seek therapy when they want something to change. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll only get what you’ve always got.
These are pragmatic times, so it is understandable that many people come in wanting strategies. I am all for making well-reasoned, pragmatic changes to see if they help. My own life is better thanks to strategies I’ve learned and applied, and of course I have shared many with my clients (and learned some from them, too). Strategies can’t be effective without insight, because if you don’t understand what’s happening and why, you won’t know which things to try. Insight has the additional benefit of fostering self-compassion – and a softened heart can be an emollient to stubborn habits.
Some people opt to do all their therapy this way, combining of insight and strategy. The therapist supports and encourages, asks judicious questions, brings in clinical insights. It can feel very sensible and productive – a comfort when dealing with our vulnerable, messy insides.
The limitation is that both insight and strategy come from a point outside and above the experience itself. I mean the experience of being in your life and living it. Perhaps at the outset the therapist models standing outside and above; as time goes on and you get thoroughly therapised, you can become your own observing expert: “I’m doing that thing I always do.” “I’m being dishonest about my motives again.” But this can become its own trap: of coming to think of one’s system as a defective machine. At the extreme, it becomes an extra full-time job to keep checking oneself for malfunctions and devising new fixes. Exhausting in its way, this can become just another same-old same-old, a new loop to get stuck in. (Those who always worried they “weren’t good enough” can be especially susceptible.)
This is why I like to include an experiential, or creative, dimension to therapy. From time to time, I will invite you to pause, and get back into the lived experience itself – because this can turn out to be a trove of things you didn’t know you know: things you long for, things you’re running out of patience for, gifts you may be ready to share. I’m not so much talking about a classically Freudian, suspicious approach to the unconscious. Of course, we may avoid knowing things that feel particularly painful or confusing to confront. But sometimes I think it is more just about what we’re habituated to seeing and not seeing; and that, when these more experiential truths are surfaced, there is a full-body feeling of relief and recognition, like, “Thank you! I’ve been trying to tell you this!”
Clients also often find that, when they touch into real experience, they stop feeling like an endless project. It turns out, when they tune into themselves as a being, they feel like something entire and decent and good-enough, just as they are right now. Not that the insights retrieved from the encounter with experience are always grand. You might simply realise you’d rather call your friends weekly than text them daily, or that your body craves regular swims in the sea. But listening to experience can be powerful for uncovering truths your usual centre of command doesn’t want to listen to. If you’re just not a hiking person and your significant other is, it might be easier to drag yourself up another mountain and grumble silently – but it will probably be better for your relationship if you tell the truth. Going within your body, with compassion and curiosity, will help make the truth louder. It will also help you to feel why the truth matters – which can give you the courage to bring it forth more.
Of course it would be convenient if ordinary consciousness gave us access to all these inner truths automatically, but it doesn’t. We humans are simply too good at sorting and ignoring experiential information. It keeps us from data overload and, yes, reduces pain and confusion, so we can stay productive at our chosen tasks. But it also cuts us off from a lot. At some point we may have to admit that our very efficient pattern-recognition software, guided by a rather rigidified hierarchy of priorities, is making life feel kind of boring, constrictive, or false. We may be being blocked from change by being unable to imagine change – which can be frustrating if we are trying in good faith to grow.
Working experientially can widen the lens. It’s why a therapist might ask, “Where do you feel that in your body, and what is the sensation – hot or cold, heavy or light?” Or, “You said he was acting like an animal – what kind?” Or, “If you aren’t sure how to describe the feeling, could you draw it?” Your answers don’t have to be fanciful. Good therapists aren’t trying to take their wise, competent, adult clients back to nursery school. They are trying to help clients build a bridge to what they don’t yet know they know: that newness from which transformation can spring.
My own tendency – and that of most clients, I think, once they feel comfortable with what therapy is and how they want to use it – is to move between perspectives. We can pull back to the level of insight, and dip into the experience in its grain. (There’s a fair bit of just walking around in the story, too, because the events and encounters that make up our days are the material from which our “issues” or “patterns” emerge.) At points where we are delving into the experience-as-felt, we might pick out sensory details, pause on spontaneous imagery (even if it makes no sense at first), reflect on what is happening between us in the conversation (am I understanding you? Did what I just said give you an odd jolt, or make you feel bored, or annoyed?), or become aware of a gesture that wants to be made, or a nonsense sound that wants to be uttered.
I hasten to say that a client can’t be tricked into working experientially – at least not the way I do therapy! You aren’t going to find yourself with coloured pencil in hand, or talking to an empty chair, without my first seeking your permission (and telling you why, if you ask), and your agreeing to the experiment. But I do find that when clients feel safe enough to touch into these non-verbal, non-analytical ways of knowing, a great deal of new information can be unlocked.
The truth is, you can’t always just think your way to the answer. If you could, you would have by now, and you’d have no unanswered questions. Thinking – propositionally, in words – is great, don’t get me wrong. Telling your story can be hugely healing, especially if you haven’t had the space before, or if you’ve felt distorted or dismissed by people who found your truth inconvenient. And you may eventually wonder, is this the only story that could be told about me? What if I want to tell – or live – a different one? You will need material and inspiration for that new story, whether you find it in the world or in yourself. No therapist or other “expert” can find it for you, because only you will know what’s got the juice – what feels alive, and adds to your aliveness. To locate this new material, you may need to touch into your real, live experience. That’s where the “no” and the “yes” live, those motive forces that will lead you to what you don’t yet know you know.