It’s been a really busy time with my partner and I tackling the final stages of our wedding preparations – with our wedding in late march. Most of my spare time has focused on the wedding and life in general outside of work, which means I haven’t focused much on what I’m doing for Deliberate Practice.

I haven’t even put much time to reflecting on my work, so I thought this might be a good opportunity to reflect on why I have chosen to tackle over-explaining (OE) and what I have been doing to move away from OE as a behaviour in my sessions. All the reflections here then are going to be in real time – so get ready.

A little while ago I wrote a ‘conceptualisation’ of how OE plays out for me, but I don’t think I wrote about it in my blog. I started this conceptualisation by reflecting on the behaviours I engage in when I start to over-explain at work:

• Asking double barrel questions
• Providing an example to a client instead of asking the client to express their own examples
• Going into lots of detail when explaining a concept; using more sentences and layers of explanation then I need to.
• Providing the client with a solution instead of encouraging them to explore one
• Providing lots of tips to a client on how to practice a skill we covered in a session

So what do I think the underling purpose is to these behaviours? To protect the client and myself from a challenging emotion/experience, especially doubt. A worry that they will disengage or not find what I do as helpful if they experience doubt in the approach I am taking with them or if they don’t understand how to ‘apply’ what we talk about. That isn’t necessarily the conscious thought that runs through my mind – it’s almost like I get a sense that the client is experiencing doubt, so in response I don’t even think, I jump straight into action by explaining more to the client in an attempt to steer them away the doubt I am sensing. I know I do worry about client’s doubting my approach or client’s saying things like “this doesn’t make sense” or “this isn’t helping me”.

The issue with my trying to steer the client away from doubt is that it doesn’t help myself or the client to learn to sit with that doubt, to learn that such doubt is normal, nor does it help either of us build up a tolerance to doubt. Not only this but the doubt may not be coming from the client at all and may be coming from me alone, so I end up trying to resolve a problem that isn’t even there. I become a party to experiential avoidance – an attempt or desire to suppress unwanted internal experiences, such as emotions, thoughts, memories and bodily sensations. This is of course counter-intuitive to the therapeutic process.

It’s funny – it make me think that I am ok accepting my own doubt outside of the therapy room but as soon I walk into the room I turn to my self-doubt and say “sorry, you can’t come in here”. I see it as a distraction and roadblock as soon as the therapy show starts.

As from my previous post – trying to pick one question to ask a client each session (e.g. what’s the story you’re telling yourself) didn’t end up happening, I think because the questions I drafted are quite specific, creating narrow windows of opportunity to use them.

Instead I noticed myself engaging in other small behaviours to pass the ball to the client and encourage them to reflect on their own reactions. For instance:

• Asking a client “what’s running through your mind right now?” as I explain a concept to them.
• Asking a client “do you have any scepticisms or any concerns with this idea?” when running them through a coping strategy/skill.
• Reinforcing to myself and the client that we’ll “debrief” on how they went with a coping strategy at the next session and make any tweaks then.
• More often asking a client “what are you feeling right now?” as they reflect on a challenging experience from their week
• Stopping myself and saying “I’m going start this again” if I notice myself over-explaining and going back to pick one question if I ask a double barrelled question
• Saying that a drop in SRS scores is an opportunity to improve our approach

My hope is that these small actions and behaviours help myself and the client build up a tolerance of experiencing doubt, to respect doubt as a normal human emotion and to address the doubt together instead of me trying to go it my own by over-explaining.

Till next time and as always – thanks for reading.

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