"Finding solutions is more important than dredging up the past."
Stuart Schneiderman has a new column up over at the Right Network that explains how to give advice:
When people come to see me now, they expect me to show them a new way to analyze their real-life dilemmas, and they expect that I will offer guidance and advice.
They may not always follow the advice to the letter. But they do consider it, factor in what they find valuable, and draw up their own plans for dealing with their problems.
Telling someone that “These are your options” is a lot better than saying: “You must do as I say.” And both are far superior to: “Let’s wait until we understand why your mother didn’t love you enough.”
Labels: psychology
posted by Helen at 9:57 AM
6 Comments:
Propers to Stuart for his excellent approach. Too much of the therapy industry has become a self-parody by encouraging (if not requiring) endless dredging of the past. "How are we going to fix this?" and "What steps are we going to take this week?" create a climate for actual progress.
Of course, you can't keep someone in Freudian psychoanalysis for 20 years that way.
In this post you sound like Dean Gano from Apollo Root Cause Analysis. I forget why, but in the Apollo training the instructor indicated that solution based (reality charting) analysis did not work for personal problems. - may be something to compare to?: apollorca.com
Understanding the historical injuries only help in terms of casting aside emotional and behavioral responses that are more attuned to history than the present. Knowing what is happening in our emotional systems can really help change what we are doing now. But that approach is just a tool to understand and change what we are doing now. I think it works well for people who do not understand why their feelings are so intense.
Trey
Finding solutions is more important than dredging up the past.
In a sense, pursuing the "why" is an infinitely futile task. Each why is followed by another why and a complete or fully satisfactory answer is never reached. Finding ways to adapt and cope in a constructive manner is a reachable goal.
If your current problems were caused by the behavior of your parents, you can help protect future generations by demanding more accountability from parents in general.
A long list of societal problems can be traced back to the fact that any bigot, bully, batterer, drug addict, or psychopath is allowed to reproduce and raise its children as it sees fit.
in many of my family sessions, the parents sit back as i "fix" their kids.
that attitude lasts about five minutes with me, and occasionally the parents will defend their postion so strongly that work becomes impossible, leaving the child or children locked out of process.
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