As human beings, we never seem satisfied with simplicity. It’s one of those stories that’s as old as time. We start off with a simple idea, simple ingredients or a simple procedure, but eventually for any number of reasons we decide that the simple place we started on, isn’t enough. We need to add more. More nuance and detail. The logic that more is better. It’s another natural human impulse to seek out more, to never quite be satisfied with what we have. Could that impulse be an issue when it comes to therapy?

I’ve seen it time and time again in other therapists and this includes myself as well. I start out with a surge of inspiration, after just having an idea on how to tackle a particular problem in therapy differently. At first the idea starts off simple enough. As my mind continues to chew on the idea it becomes dissatisfied and bored – the idea starts to feel too basic, like it’s not encapsulating enough of the problem I started trying to solve. I lose that sense of excitement I found through novelty. So my mind pumps me with more and more inspiration until the simple idea I started out with is now a behemoth system. What started as a simple sentence, is now four pages. Sometimes so much has been added that I’ve completely lost or forgotten what the simple idea was in the first place!

I don’t know whether it’s a fear that builds over time; that if we keep things simple we’re missing an important part of the answer, that other people will discard our ideas because they are too simple or it’s a competitive edge to feel a sense of mastery.

Are we too easily being pulled in by the allure of adding complexity in how we do therapy?

I just know that if I went on the directory for therapy training workshops on the Australian Psychological Society website I would find hundreds of courses on all these fancy therapy concepts and modalities on how to treat clients more effectively. I’m going to start putting a dollar in a jar every time someone mentions Polyvagal theory – I reckon I’ll be a millionaire by the end of the year.

I think in pursuing greater effectiveness through complexity, we’ve got it all wrong – we’ve become naturally caught up in human instinct. We don’t need to engage in this never ending pursuit of turning over new stones, in the hopes we find a golden method for how to help people. My gut feeling is that we hit the sweet spot of effectiveness around the time that the ideas of Carl Rogers became commonplace. That’s perhaps where we have started to take a wrong turn.

That instead of then looking for more stones to turn over on the back of Roger’s ideas, we should have stayed on the stones he presented.

My thinking is also on the back of some research that has supported the idea that therapy effectiveness has not grown for at least 40 years, like the study here and here.

Of course the stones I am referring to are the common factors of therapy; therapeutic relationship, client goal/process alignment and empathy, to name a few. These are the simple ideas we have had in front of us for over 40 years. Most of our energy should be going into mastering these core foundations of good therapy, not getting better at moving our fingers back and forth in front of a client’s face (I’m looking at you EMDR).

A fellow therapist put it perfectly to me in a comment on Facebook, they said “simplicity is deceptively difficult to master”.

It also might be boring or not as sexy as new ideas that get put in front of us every day, but I think simple is where we need to stay.

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