Info for Current Clients
This page is under construction, and will soon have materials for use for all of our current clients, and others.
Communication Skills
In every human interaction, efforts to communicate are both verbal, and nonverbal. As a rule, most forms of communication are centered in taking feelings or concepts from one person’s head and/or heart, and transmit them to another’s, without distortion or concealment (to quote HAL-9000, the computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey”). Some suggest that there are four forms of communication- passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive (or as my friend Jeff oft refers to it more accurately, “covertly aggressive”), and the ideal means, assertive.
Rather than give a detailed description of all of these, am going to leave some simple encouragements here to communicate in the spirit suggested above by HAL. It is not an exhaustive list, but a list that I encourage all of my clients to get used to using.
• Don’t yell.
• Don’t be critical and/or judgmental.
• Don’t try to change others’ mind or behavior.
• Don’t interrupt.
• Don’t only have feelings of fear or anger, or not have feelings at all.
• Be graceful with the feelings you do have.
• Don’t interrogate. *only be a parent* (meaning, resist the temptation to be a police officer, financial adviser, career counselor, etc)
• Don’t interrupt.
• Don’t say one thing, then do another.
• If someone says something you don’t understand, ask them to explain it.
• If someone starts yelling, speak quietly.
• Avoid power struggles.
(Here is where some adolescent specific ideas begin):
• It might seem a good answer to them (when it comes to understanding them), despite it not making sense to you.
• Don’t be afraid of technology. Learn to text. Email.
• Ask their opinion.
• Tell them you love them, and what you like about them.
• Learn their language. You don’t have to use it. (www.urbandictionary.com)
• Use the “rule of five”, particularly in crisis. Five words a sentence, five letters a word.
• Find a way to be interested in them- what they think, what they like and care about, and why.
There’s a lot of “don’ts” above. As far as “dos”, would also encourage a couple of other simple ideas- use “I” statements (“I think…”, “I feel…”). Ask open-ended questions. Most of these are ideas that a lot of other therapists encourage as a means of talking to one another. Many of us are taught, to use a skill that looks like this: “When you said/did __________, I felt __________. What I want/need is __________.” My encouragement is a little different. Would suggest using “__________, when you said/did/didn’t say/didn’t do __________, I felt, __________.” The first blank is the name of the person, the second is a fact- not an inference, judgement, prognostication etc. The third, would use only the feelings mad, sad, glad, afraid, ashamed, hurt, and/or more than one of the above. And last, would omit “What I want/need is __________.” The details of why I encourage this method is too long to be posted here. Again, is an incomplete list and doesn’t fully explain the rationale, but is simply a list of encouragements as a starting point.
Wanting to Stop __________
Frequently, clients ask me specific questions about wanting to stop (sometimes called “abstaining” or “cessation”) doing some “behavior”. Drinking, smoking, gambling, over/undereating (or not at all), self-harm behaviors (cutting, burning oneself etc), “codependent” behaviors, controlling behaviors, manipulating, even saying or thinking certain things and more. While some of these require more intense interventions (stopping alcohol or drug use for instance would require medical intervention), some other behaviors can be stopped or minimized by other means.
Though we (therapists) are oft charged with the responsibility of helping clients stop these behaviors, we’re not always direct about how to help someone do so. There are real-world, practical means of helping us stop these kinds of behaviors. It should be noted though: in many cases, these are caused by unresolved emotions. It’s really important to note this, because no intervention we might suggest will work if there is a sufficient mental/emotional/”spiritual” and/or physical prompt to do so. Or more simply and by way of example, if someone is suffering enough emotionally (or otherwise), no intervention will stop the behavior. The feelings (even if physical) have to be transformed/diminished enough for the intervention to work.
These things in mind, here’s some ideas. Some of them are direct, some of them will take hold over time:
Post Script: It should be noted that the soul of such things is what Carl Jung would have called “illegitimate suffering”- meaning, we do these things as an alternative to simply feeling whatever we feel when we don’t do the behavior. One of the things we do these over is feeling “bad” (about ourselves), broken, less than, “not enough” and the other variations on that theme. Often, if we do the behavior we’re trying to stop, we feel those very things (“bad”, broken, etc). As we often do the behavior to diminish or eradicate feeling those things, then we feel those very things for doing the behavior. Simplifying: I feel “broken”, less-than, etc, I do a behavior to not feel that way, then feel “broken” (less-than, etc) for doing the behavior. It sets up a vicious cycle, a repetitive cycle.
Where I’m going with this is, if you happen to do the thing you’ve been trying to stop, “beating yourself up” for doing the behavior may be the very thing that prompts you to do it again.
UPDATE: In addition to these items, there’s an update of a similarly themed blog, here: “From the ‘Something That Came Up Today Department’: More On ‘Stopping'”