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 Written by:
Darren Haber
05/07/2008
I think I may have forgotten to practice beginner’s mind with a prospective client who came for a consultation a month or so ago. He was a very intelligent middle-aged man having marital difficulties, a man who’d never been to therapy before. He was a little bit hard to connect with, and his therapeutic “goals” appeared at first blush to be somewhat simplistic (which isn’t that uncommon): namely, he wanted to “make sure I’m doing things right” in helping his newly-sober wife stay on the recovery path. I fielded various questions he had about living with a newly sober spouse, he gave me examples on a micro and macro-level: his wife was fairly new to recovery and he didn’t want to “enable” her (by coddling her after she blew off AA meetings) nor did he want to be unfairly harsh (lecturing, scolding, etc). His descriptions were fairly bloodless and he seemed hyper-rational.
But then he related a horrific incident wherein his wife almost died from a drug overdose, shortly before she got sober. He described what it was like for him to find his wife passed out on the bathroom floor after she’d overdosed (in a word, terrifying); he’d called 911 in a panic, and held her in his arms until they arrived. His eyes glistened as he related this to me, recalling the horror he felt while waiting for the paramedics. Thankfully, she pulled through and decided to get clean. “Wow,” he said, after finishing his story, “we really went deep”.
It’s at this point that I may have missed an opportunity. I took for granted the fact that this gentleman was new to therapy, and that “going deep” might have all sorts of emotional implications for him. Instead I offered empathic support for the traumatic experience, noted his obvious love and concern for his spouse, and explored the O.D. incident viz. any emotional fallout he likely carried to this day, which seemed to have brought him to therapy in the hopes of “doing it right”.
In other words I proceeded along an axis of vertical rather than horizontal disclosure (in Yalom’s terms), exploring the emotional content of a past experience rather than the present experience of exposing this story to a therapist (for him, a relative stranger) – which was a new experience and likely impacted his viewpoint of what therapy was, is, could be, etc. I’ll bet he wondered if he himself was “doing it right” as a prospective client right there in the room! Towards the end of the session he asked if therapy was about “general exploration” or if there was more of a specific strategy. He was probably telling me he was feeling a little confused about what the point of our entire discussion was and how it might connect for his need to be “correct”, which is really a camouflage way of saying “I’m very anxious I’m going to screw up with my wife and have another hellacious experience of finding her O.D.’d in the bathroom, and I’m not sure any of this just helped me”….a statement rich, I’d say, for therapeutic exploring. I might have asked him what he thought therapy was for him now (vs. the ideas he’d brought to the room), if “going deep” was a risky proposition (it probably was, perhaps even in his marriage!), if he had any feelings about my providing (or not) the level of assurance he appeared to want.
I forgot, in other words, what it was like to be new…or, at the least, I didn’t show enough curiosity about it, as it pertained to him in the here-and-now.
To quote a grad school professor, he threw me a softball and I whiffed. I can’t really remember how the session ended, only that he didn’t return. Interestingly, at around the same time I began seeing a new client who struggles with perfectionism and wanting to be “flawless” at her job. I think I can use some of the above to empathize…accurately. She did come back, and things are proceeding apace. I guess we get the clients we’re supposed to have.
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