Values clarification

When people are unhappy with their lives they can either live with their unhappiness or do something about it. When they decide to do something about they may thrash about almost randomly, making poorly considered decisions. The "mid-life crisis" and the cliche red sports car are examples. So is the "geographical cure" or the "vocational cure" in which the person hopes that moving or changing jobs will cure the unhappiness. It rarely does, though we have probably all tried it or considered it. Those "cures", like marriage, only change problems; they don't solve them. Desperation doesn't lend itself to making good decisions.

Most psychotherapists spend much of their professional lives dealing with people who are unhappy in this way. Such people are not "mentally ill" but their unhappiness arises from psychological causes. They may be repeating patterns from their past (see the section on Injunctions) or they may simply be suffering from values conflicts which have not even been considered, much less resolved. They think they want a particular thing or to reach a particular goal; they don't realize that this aspiration is incompatible with other goals, either present or in the near future. They may not even want to consider the conflict of present wants and future goals, because they might (or certainly would) get frustrated.

Consider the young married person who desperately wants to succeed at his/her demanding job, but whose marriage is failing because of lack of attention, and child-raising is essentially abandoned to others or hired help. Imagine that same person at age 50, divorced, with family distant or uninterested, with lots of money but nothing special to spend it on but him/herself, wondering what went wrong. Yet that same person, back at the start of the disaster that his/her life has become, could have told you what his/her long-range values were. The person might well have said he wanted a loving marriage, children who grow up healthy and happy, and to have some time for fun. They didn't want to think that what they saw as an "interim period of sacrifice" was actually becoming their life. They didn't recognize that the values they were living by were inconsistent with one another, and that the outcome was in many ways predictable.

The therapist working with such people spends a lot of time getting the client to listen to themselves. The therapist makes the client listen to their inconsistencies, their self-deceptions, the incompatibility of current behaviors with future goals. The therapist makes the client start to pay attention to what the client's actual future goals may be. A very wise therapist once said "The hardest question of all is 'What do you want?'"

I call this sort of therapy "values clarification". It is not based on exploring your past, except insofar as it clarifies present choices. It is based on honesty with self and others. The therapist struggles to say what he means and mean what he says, and he encourages the client to do the same. Dealing with dishonesty of all kinds is at the center of the therapy. Self-deception is easy and ubiquitous. Omitting the truth is considered acceptable, and in public it is acceptable, but it is not in psychotherapy, which is not bound by social rules and "tact", though it is bound by the importance of kindness.

I see my task as a therapist as fairly active and confrontational when I detect inconsistencies and conflicts among people's values. Sometimes the client is uncomfortable enough with their conflicts to conceal them or avoid them; sometimes the client simply has never thought about where their choices are inevitably taking them. In some ways this particular job is a more difficult task for a young therapist than an older one, and in human history this task is most often undertaken by the "elders" of the human tribe. I suspect that in our abandonment of grandparents as advisors we have lost the natural source for this sort of wisdom, and are reduced to having to pay for it.