Who I Help and How They Benefit
Many times people struggle with the situations they encounter. When faced with a particular situation they may become upset, frustrated, disgusted, blame themselves, blame others, or give up. Deep down, what is wrong is that they have not learned to deal with a current life situation. The options they have available do not work. What I do is help people make better choices. The result is that people change the trajectory of their life. A small change now can make a huge difference for the rest of their lives.
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? Why is the ride so rough? Are the tires bad? Is the road rough? Exploration is about asking the right questions and getting reliable answers to these questions. Insight takes the form of “knowing” what the situation entails. Oh, yeah, my tire is out of balance, not to mention the suspension in my car is shot, and this roughness always happens at 55 mph. Clearly I need to fix both of them. Even if I "know" this, my car still rides rough. Action is always where problem solving needs to go. The car does not ride smoothly unless action is taken to make the necessary repairs. No surprise, problems that involve our selves don’t go away either unless some new action (thought, emotion, behavior) is taken.
Exploration:Situation; life experience & mental models
The objective in exploration is to understand what is going on with a client and what is not working. In general, we use our life experience to help us understand our immediate situation. As you participate in the world you gain knowledge about the world and how it works. The sensory inputs that result from your interaction with the world are stored as bits of information, more technically these are called schema. That is you see things, smell things, taste thinks, touch things and do things. Then, you store this information as a schema. When a given situation is encountered a working model of the situation is organized using related schema and the immediate surroundings as input. The resulting model is like a map that focuses on the situation at hand and acts as a guide for choosing your action.
Say I have schemas for yelling, ball game, and friends. I put these together in a working model and cheer my team on at a football game. My model works fine. I also have a schema for boss, work, and employee. I am the boss, I constantly yell at my employees to get them to work harder. That model likely does not work so fine.
During the exploration phase of counseling we learn about your life experience and the mental models that guide your action.
Insight: Knowing what needs to change
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 mental models need to be updated to match these changes . 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. That is, we need to develop a different mental model for the adult situation we are facing. Keep in mind that life is very complex and therefore, we need to build working models specific to each life situation we encounter. My sense is that when we are flexible and adapt well, we continue to modify and adjust our mental models throughout our life.
A good indication of a faulty mental model is that we develop a pattern of action that does not work, and we keep repeating the pattern over and over. So, first we look for patterns indicating there are situations or events in your life that you do not handle well. Then, we look closely at these situations and see what model is activated and how it guides your actions.
Insight is understanding the models you use and the resulting choices you make to guide interactions between you and the external world. Insight also includes making a connection between the actions we take and the responses we receive from the world.
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 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 activate a new mental model in an old situation. During this phase the role of the counselor is to “coach” you while you make the changes you want to make.
Skills that support making a choice
You will learn the skill of self-observation during the exploration and insight phases. You learn that by reviewing real situations in your life and coming to an awareness that other options are available. As you move into the action phase you will learn observation-in-action. That is, 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 choose a different action. Instead of saying “Why did I do that?” you will be saying “Do I want to do that or something else?” When you choose to try or experiment with doing something else you create a new experience. The process looks like this:
Observe your Self in action
↓
Make a choice
↓
Try that
↓
Check the result
When using a new mental model, you gain experience with new thoughts, feelings, and actions on your part as well as new responses from the people around you. The new experience is organized into new schema. Eventually, when a new mental 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 to 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, mentors, coaches, 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.