Hello everyone – how are you? I am well. I’m here for another instalment of where I’m at in my deliberate practice (DP) journey. I’ve had a fairly encouraging sense of progress in my efforts to create more emotional engagement with clients. If you had the chance to read my previous post – you’ll know I had created a list of ‘reassuring’ behaviours I can engage in when sensing hesitation in my therapy room. This post will be all about my most recent coaching session with Nathan Castle, my DP coach, on tackling those behaviours.

I came to the coaching session with the list of behaviours and ran Nathan through it. With the reassuring behaviours in mind we decided to look at an audio recording of one of my therapy sessions. In that recording we honed in on a specific moment – the client was retelling a time when they had hurt their partner with something they had said, there was despair in the client, I had an opportunity to connect with that despair… but instead I responded with a piece of psychoeducation.

Changing my response in that moment of despair became the target of the coaching session. How does that work? Well Nathan led me through ‘replaying’ the scenario, drawing on principles for me to create a new, more effective response to the client. Nathan played the role of the client. We ran through it a few times with Nathan giving me small notes to strengthen my response to the client’s despair. Eventually my response turned into “hearing that – are you feeling right now?”, with some variations practiced as well. The idea hear was to draw out the client’s emotion, but also to let me sit with it.

We then took things further for me to practice normalising the client’s emotion. After a few runs a realisation hit me – that when I label a client’s emotion (or they do) and I normalise it, I then can get hooked by this idea that the client is thinking something like “ok we know how I feel and that it’s normal to feel this way… but what do I do about it?”. That’s where my CBT brain would feel pressure to direct the conversation towards a practical solution to that emotion.

This realisation was strengthened by some words from Nathan, that it’s ok to let the client’s emotional experience be the intervention – I don’t have to provide a fix or solution.

Now my task is to practice (where appropriate) taking opportunities to ask a client what they are feeling in the moment and then just normalise that feeling. I have since added in the step of observing the client’s facial expressions and physical reaction after I normalise and then sometimes I’ll call out my observation of the client e.g. “I just saw your body tighten after I said that” or “I’m sensing some hesitation…”.

The step of observing has been crucial – if I notice that I’m getting hooked by the idea that I need to fix things for the client; my body will tighten, my face becomes tense and I literally get tunnel vision. When this happens I just remind myself to take a step back and get return to the space of the observing the client – I unhook and I keep going. I have already noticed that these simple steps are helping me swing more often to emotional connection with client, I’m getting more confident verbalising my observations of their experience and letting them just feel. It can be done, folks. So I ask you – how do you feel right now?

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