Who I Help and How They Benefit
Sometimes people who have had difficult life experiences struggle with their emotions, their relationships, or feeling good about who they are. What I do is help clients see how experiences from the past are effecting what they do now… then we find opportunities for them to do something different. The result is my clients make changes in how they think, how they feel, and what they do… the gains they make last a lifetime. The benefit is my clients find what works for them… they like who they are and what they do… they can be their true self.
How Counseling Works: Solving Problems
One way of looking at counseling is to think of it as a three phase process for solving a problem. The three phases described by Hill in her book Helping Skills are exploration, insight, and action. Interestingly, any of us who routinely solve problems, meaning all of us, are well aware of these three phases of problem solving. At least at a general level, there should be no big mystery as to what counseling is about.
A great model of problem solving is repair. First, if there is a repair to be made it is necessary to “size up” or look at, or in Hill’s words explore, what is wrong. Is it a car? Is the tire flat? Is it a sink? Where is all of the extra water coming from? Insight takes the form of “knowing” what the situation entails. Oh, yeah, my tire is worn, the suspension in my car is shot, and I need to fix both of them. Or hmm, yes, the leak is in the hose from the dish washer, not the spay unit in the kitchen sink. Action is always where problem solving needs to go. The leak does not go away solely due to our knowing that it exists. No surprise, problems that involve our selves don’t go away either unless some new action (thought, emotion, behavior) is taken.
Exploration: Life experience & mental models
First let me talk about how experience works. You participate in the world and gain what we think of as “knowledge” of how the world works. That is you see things, smell things, taste thinks, touch things and do things. You try to do things that are pleasing to you. Some things you try work and some don’t work. You do this right from the beginning when you are a baby and continue through adulthood. The sensory inputs that result from your interaction with the world are organized into knowledge. That is, you make sense of the experience and create a “mental model” for what that means to you. You use the mental model to guide actions that accomplish what you want.
During the exploration phase of counseling we learn about your life experience and the mental models you have developed.
Insight: Knowing what needs to change
Sometimes the old model needs an update, or just stops working in the current world. Remember how we used to cry and then we were fed by our parent? That worked really well. Now if we cry too much our boss thinks we are a complainer and wants to fire use. When what we used to do no longer works, we need to think about change. That is, we need to “do something different.” My sense is that we go through change processes throughout our lifetime. For the most part, the things we do work. Sometimes, something we did earlier stops working. We have changed or the world has changed and our models need to be updated to match these changes.
Insight involves finding very specifically which models are causing a problem and how that happens. We look closely at the situations you encounter and “see” how the model guides you action.
Action: Building new mental models
The purpose of the action phase is to create new experiences that help build new mental models. Having a new experience helps you gain new knowledge that is organized into a new understanding about how the world works now. The old mental model has been around for a long time so making a complete switch from one model to another will take a lot of focused effort. The new action needs to be repeated many times for the new experience to become the dominant experience.
The counseling process itself can be thought of as a new experience, and is a powerful mechanism for change. You can also create a new experience for yourself by being conscious that you are trying to make a change and then finding opportunities to do something different. During this phase the role of the counselor is to “coach” you while you make the changes you want to make.
You will learn to become aware of what you do during the exploration and insight phases. As you move into the action phase you will learn observation-in-action. You will see what you are doing while you are doing it rather than after you have done it. As you observe what you are doing you see opportunities to do something different. Instead of saying “Why did I do that?” you will be saying “Do I want to do that or something else?” The something else will help to create and sustain your new experience. The process looks like this:
Observe your Self in action
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Make a choice
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Try that
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Check the result
Over time, just like you did in the beginning, you gain experience with new thoughts, feelings, and actions on your part. The new experience is organized into new knowledge. The knowledge becomes a new model of how the world works. Eventually, when the new model works in a satisfactory way, you accept it as the model for how the world works today. It slides into your unconscious were it can be activated automatically.
Summary
The short version of how a problem begins and is resolved goes like this. We interact with the world and receive sensory input from it. Our mind is build such that it takes sensory inputs and organizes them into experience. Our experience allows us to make sense of the world and allows us to create mental models. Sometimes one of the models needs an update. When we decide to improve our lot in life, we deactivate an old model and build a new one by consciously creating new experiences for our self by changing the actions that we take. When we repeat these new actions and gain the associated experience, new knowledge is stored in our memory. We are building a new mental model that can be activated automatically when needed. This of course is simpler so say than to perform. Sometimes a more experienced or trained person is needed to help us with more complicated changes. These people are called moms, dads, teachers, coaches, mentors, counselors, and psychotherapists.
Note: For the record, not every counselor or psychotherapist thinks about therapy in this way. My approach is “psychodynamic.” The shorter versions of my approach are called “brief dynamic.” The specific theories and techniques I use are well supported by research.