his year after considerable reflection I decided to create a formal referral policy for any party referring clients to my UK clinics. This was after I received a number of really inappropriate referrals from one c therapy centre which meant I later had to sort out a host of problems that could have been easily avoided with a bit of common sense. I later discovered that I was not the only therapist who has experienced this problem!
The Dangers of “leading the witness” with unhelpful suggestions in therapy
When you work as a therapist you are going to experience all types of clients and all manner of problems. The PCW approach is solution focussed, so although I will explore past events, crucially we will not dwell on them or worse still begin to mind read how the past has influenced the current behaviour. Some psychotherapists (not all) unwittingly “lead the witness” (the client) by making very unhelpful suggestions that although are well meant, are extremely damaging to the client. When clients finally decide to seek help it’s usually when they have reached a point where the problem is at boiling point and when in this state they are understandably highly susceptible to any suggestions. They will be especially susceptible to suggestions made by someone presented as “a professional therapist”
Its therefore essential that the therapist works to elicit key information from the client and not map their own ideas onto the client, insisting that they know the reason for the client’s problem. I have seen many examples of this and have noticed that the problem therapists are usually far too analytical and have an uncanny ability not to properly pay attention to the client’s needs. Here are some examples of really unhelpful suggestions made during “client assessments”
One of my clients who had been referred was given the suggestion that his current anxiety might have been created because he has asthma as a child. Another client was told that her current bladder problem was a result of previously unexpressed emotions. This is of course total guesswork on the part of the therapist and wonderfully catapults the client into a state of further unhelpful anxiety!
Pay attention to the process, NOT just the content
In PCW we learn to pay attention to the process of how the client is creating and maintaining the problem state, rather than doing what Frank Farrelly called “the therapeutic archaeological dig” Frank had 50 years of clinical experience originally training with Carl Rodgers and pointed out that in the thousands of cases he witnessed, this delving endlessly into the past was mostly unhelpful to the client. To date I have conducted over 6500 clinical hours using PCW and remain convinced that most client problems can be helped by using this approach. This conversational approach avoids these kinds of problems and allows the client to find a new sense of personal empowerment, so they don’t become unhelpfully reliant on the therapist for their state of well-being.