ADVICE FROM "CHALLENGING" CLIENTS:

BROADENING THE POSSIBILITIES OF CLIENTS & THERAPISTS

Harlene Anderson, Ph.D.
Houston Galveston Institute -Taos Institute
www.harleneanderson.org - harleneanderson@earthlink.net

• Uniqueness: Respect and appreciate that each person is unique and their "problem" and its "solution" are particular to their life circumstances, relationships, and context.
• Temptations: Avoid the temptation of across-the-board diagnoses, goals, and strategies for reaching goals. Consider the uniqueness of each person, the multiplicity of possibilities for each person, each context, and each situation.
• Identities and labels: Each person has multiple identities. Labels risk creating and fixing limiting identities. Clients are more than just their problems. The whole person and their relational context, not just the problem, should be the focus of treatment.
• Coherence: Invite, listen to, and have humility for each person's story. Maintain coherence with it.
• Client's story takes center stage: Be genuinely curious and ask questions that come from within the conversation and that lead to other questions, not answers. Ask questions that help a client tell, clarify, and expand their first-person narrative.
• Client authors his or her own story: Create and safeguard room for each person to present, his or her story, to develop his or her own views, and to recreate his or her own story. Together (client and therapist) create knowledge that is unique and specific to the client and their circumstances.
• Stay in sync: Walk along side the client; stay within each person's rhythm, pacing, and timing, not the therapist's.
• Familiar: There must first be room for the familiar before there can be room for the new and novel. Explore the known in a way that allows for doors to be created where none existed before.
• Public: Make invisible therapist ideas and prejudices visible; keep them open to question and change.
• Try to understand: Do not know, assume, or fill in the blanks too quickly or privately.
• Trust and believe: Try to make sense, from the client's perspective, of what appears non-sense or illogical from a therapist's perspective.
• Self-identity: Foster the development of self-identities that free and allow for multiple, contradicting, and simultaneously existing selves--a new sense of self leads to self-agency.
• Community: A sense of community is essential for healing and growth. Balancing independence with interdependence is a key to self-agency.