What I’ve managed to do since my last post

Before starting this post I ran through my previous blog entries. It looks like the last four posts have focused on over-explaining (OE) and intellectualisation (Intel) in my therapy. I’ll then call this Part 5 of the series looking at OE and Intel.

In tackling OE and Intel my focus continued to be on practicing these three steps in my therapy sessions:

1. taking a long pause
2. take deep breathe
3. Use a ‘you feel x’ statement to reflect a client’s emotion

In recent posts I spoke about how I was hesitating on the first two steps above, but now with practice I can use all three steps with ease, in fact, I enjoy doing all three steps. I’ve noticed that clients seem to pay very close attention when I pause and take a breathe – they know I’m about to reflect something big back to them. Then it’s almost quite magical to see how they react to the emotion I call out, like my long pause and deep breathe has given the emotion and moment more weight. This is almost always followed by the client speaking more deeply about their experiences, often about the emotion itself but not always – either way it gets the client talking, which is exactly what I want.

What I’ve realised over the last couple of weeks

Now that I’m feeling fairly comfortable with my most recent deliberate practice activity (performing the above three steps); I started to think what my next step could be. As is often a case an analogy hit me, that what I’m trying to do here is pass the ball back to the client, which is symbolism for letting them talk, the more a client has the ball in session the less OI and Intel I can engage in (which is like me holding the ball longer than needed).

I decided to do a mind map on how I could pass the ball back to the client in session, as below. The mind map focuses on what I can do to give the client the ball whenever I’m not actively explaining something, e.g. when I’m focusing on listening to the client. I could ask a client to speak to an emotion, a thought/belief or a behaviour. Branching off those nodes I’ve written potential open ended questions I could ask the client in the interest of giving the ball back. Apologies my hand writing is the epitome of chicken scratch…

Where to go next?

The current idea behind the mind map is to pick one of those questions e.g. “what’s the story you’re telling yourself?” and practice asking it once in a therapy session. For now I’ll focus on testing this out. If it works I could do a similar mind map of actions I can take to give the ball back to the client while I’m actively explaining something e.g. in the middle of psychoeducation, to hopefully mitigate over-explaining. Alternatively I could increase my skillset and comfort in exploring emotions with client’s by learning components of Emotions Focused Therapy (EFT). Lets see what happens, I’m very excited about the possibilities – watch this space, folks.

Till next time and as always – thanks for reading.

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