Inside This Moment by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications Inc.
Published: 2015-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Practical Clinical Tips

The softening phase of present-moment experience can be a very emotional yet transcendent experience for both clinician and client. After all, we are often dealing with universal themes that everyone must come to grips with in life. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of hitting the “sweet spot” in a client’s life experience and seeing that client’s sense of self-empowerment grow exponentially. Naturally, such an important clinical event must be approached within a specific framework that allows the clinician’s artistry and creativity to reign. In this section, we’ll discuss some important guidelines to follow when doing this type of clinical work.

Go Inside the Pain

Rather than talking about the client’s emotional pain, the clinician’s verbal behavior should be oriented toward having the client experience the pain directly while maintaining ongoing contact with the clinician. Clients typically bounce off their pain in the present moment. When this happens, gently steer them back toward whatever they’re avoiding. Your demeanor should be calm and relaxed, with a soft focus. Some clinicians feel that they’re being mean or intrusive in such circumstances; however, the purpose is to create an opportunity for clients to see their pain from a different point of view that might allow a transcendent, self-compassionate stance to emerge. If there’s any concern about the pain being too much for the client to handle, as was the case with Joanne, it’s okay to tell the client that the plug can be pulled at any time. In our experience, clients don’t take advantage of this escape hatch very often because they’re in therapy to find a different way to handle their personal pain.

Don’t Intellectualize

Concepts like self- and other-perspective taking, self-compassion, and transcendent awareness are pretty cerebral, which can lead to clinicians lecturing about the virtues of these mental skills. The paradox is that the more you talk about perspective taking and self-compassion, the less sense they make to clients. We’ve seen many therapeutic encounters where clinicians intellectualize, realize that they’ve lost contact with the client, and then lecture even more as the client slowly drifts out of the interaction. The key thing to remember is that the kind of perspective taking needed involves action, not words. We’re trying to build skills, not intellectual muscle. Give clients experiential tasks that require perspective taking, and then help them discover what the act of shifting perspective feels like from the inside out.

That said, self-compassion can be tricky to introduce without some type of intellectual explanation. It’s pretty risky to just go straight at clients and ask whether they can accept their flaws and imperfections without providing any grounding. Based on our experience, we recommend that, when introducing self-compassion skills, you first talk about the paradox of self-kindness. For example, you might mention that people are generally kinder to others than they are to themselves, and tend to forgive mistakes in others but not the same mistakes in themselves. Offer some humorous examples of limited self-kindness in your own life, then ask the client to provide similar examples.

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