Liz Long Rottman
Today we’re going to talk about curiosity in the therapy room using a hypothetical client scenario.
The client has CPTSD and came to therapy. They did two years of great work with real breakthroughs, sleeping through the night, no more nightmares, panic and agoraphobia subsiding, relationships are going better. They’re able to set boundaries and also get close to people.
So around month 24 after experiencing these moments of progress, the client starts to feel confused and they start to feel fearful. They start wondering to themselves, am I backsliding?
The client doesn’t tell the therapist for weeks, not because they don’t trust the therapist, but because they don’t want to believe it’s happening. So they keep going to therapy. They keep focusing on their career, focusing on their relationship breakthroughs, but they don’t bring up that their symptoms are starting to return.
Finally, the client gets the gumption to speak and say, “I think I’m losing everything we’ve worked for, and I’m scared.”
So, here’s where there is a fork in the road for the therapist. The therapist can either go down the fix it route and start overly reassuring the client, giving them a lot of psychoeducation, and we’ll talk about what happens when we do that. Or the therapist can get really curious and allow the fear and the concern to be there. We’re also going to apply this, we’re going to go back to our story, but we’re going to apply this to other scenarios as well.
Understanding Non-Willful Behavior
Behavior that is the result of systems—whether that’s an internal system in the client or an external system in the world—systemic behavior is not willful action. Robert Sapolsky published a book a few years ago now called Determined which is his psychobiological behavioral approach to understanding why willful action is a fallacy and that most people are actually not behaving willfully, especially people with trauma.
So, some examples of non-willful behavior that we see in therapy a lot are when clients can’t remember the therapeutic boundaries. They’re not being ornery. There’s a part of them that’s not letting them remember it for some reason, or therapy is a lot to learn for the client and they may due to executive functioning issues caused by trauma not be able to remember. So, not their fault.
You may be in a session with a client and they’re cooperating and then all of a sudden you see their body get tense and then they start to get a little hostile with you. Again, not the client’s fault. There’s something going on there. Time to get really curious. Even if you’re feeling a little flustered.
Or the client might become ultra dependent. This is a very healthy developmental stage for not all, but some clients need to become overly dependent on the therapist for a period of time because they were never able to become dependent with a safe person in the first place and they need to practice. And there’s many more. Those are just a few examples.
Why This Is Challenging for Therapists to Track
One of the main reasons and the one we’re going to focus on today is that the psyche is not a unified entity. The psyche is a collection of habituated subpersonalities. And to use more user-friendly language like IFS, internal family systems, we are a collection of parts.
So IFS was not the first group to talk about parts. Parts have been discussed since the ancient Grecian times. There’s a famous dancer philosopher named Gurdjieff who spoke extensively about subpersonalities and parts. Virginia Satir discussed parts. I’m a member of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute and we deal with parts a lot. Dan Siegel talks about parts as well. He uses it in his modality. So parts is something that shows up across philosophy and psychology. This is a well-known thing in a lot of traditions and theoretical groups.
So it’s one thing to understand parts theoretically and intellectually. It’s quite another to actually see parts in someone. And let me tell you, it’s a little spooky actually. It can look like different ghosts with the same flavor are moving through the person. They are not haunted. It is not ghosts, but that’s what it looks like to the untrained eye. So it can really throw you for a loop when you allow yourself to acknowledge that’s what you’re seeing.
And therapists are people and they defend when something challenges their perception of reality. And so when a therapist sees these parts moving through, they may defend their own psychic integrity—meaning your ability to stay in coherence within yourself and to not feel like you yourself are fragmenting.
So, we may protect ourselves by judging the client, getting hurt, and focusing on our hurt, scrambling for explanations, and then offering those without consent to the client. Anything but getting curious. And that’s really what this video is about is the importance of curiosity and how to get curious.
Path One: When the Therapist Tries to Fix
So, let’s notice with our story what happens when the therapist tries to fix.
So, the client confesses their fear and confusion and the therapist jumps to an emotional exploration. What’s triggering this? When did you notice it? Did something happen outside in your life? Did something happen at work? Did something happen in one of your relationships?
These questions start to stir the activation in the client. The client starts to get more confused and resistant.
The therapist feels the resistance and takes it personally. It’s subtle and it’s unspoken. So then the therapist starts to get more activated.
The client picks up the rupture and reverts to an old fawning pattern trying to calm the authority figure down even though the therapist isn’t really obviously agitated. It’s a really quiet tension in the therapist’s body, but the client is responding.
The client makes up some plausible answers. “My friend Sally had to have surgery and it reminded me of a time when I was alone during surgery and that’s why I feel this way.”
The therapist’s ego gets satisfied, has the explanation she needs. She starts to calm down, but now the client is more destabilized than they were before.
This subtle but impactful experience is so unpleasant that they unconsciously mutually agree to never speak of it again. So the healing opportunity vanishes into mutual defending. This is actually called an enactment. We’ll talk about that in some other video.
Path Two: The Curiosity Approach
So let’s look what happens when we go down the other fork in the road. This is the curiosity approach.
The client says, “I’m terrified that I’m reverting back to the way I was and I’m never going to heal.”
And the therapist says, “Hey, let’s slow down and just be with that fear for a moment. Notice this shaken feeling you have inside.”
And then the client quietly starts to cry. Tears start streaming down the face. They don’t know why. They say, “I don’t know why.”
The therapist says, “You don’t have to know. Just let the tears be here and notice that I’m here with you right now as you feel this.”
90 seconds later, the tears subside.
And the therapist says, “If these tears could talk, what would they say?”
And then the client says with a shaky voice, “I’ve done so much work, but I still don’t feel safe and I really blame myself for that.”
The therapist, “You blame yourself.”
And the client says, “Why can’t I just feel safe? It’s not fair.”
And the therapist says, “No, not fair at all.”
And then from here we can actually get into the work because we’ve reestablished the connection. The therapist is in the confusion and in the pain with the client. We’re joined together now. We’re energetically holding hands and we can start working through the grief process that goes along with this fear relationally.
Why This Matters
So my hope here is that we are demonstrating that this curiosity and this openness is actually powerfully mature. This is not a soft stance on the therapist’s part. It requires a lot of strength.
When the therapist has an open nervous system, we telegraph safety to the client. The client can let go.
When we have judgment or we need to explain something for our own comfort, there’s a contraction in our body. We get tight and the client feels it. And even if it’s all on the unconscious level, it’s not like the client’s saying to themselves “my therapist is tight. I don’t feel safe.” We don’t say that in our minds, but we notice it. Maybe there’s a subtle turn in the body and the eyes start to shift in the eye sockets and then the client stops the depth process. They stay on the surface level with our first example.
So if you’re calling clients resistant, you need to check if you’re actually a part of the problem, if you’re generating the pattern.
And I need to pause and say this too. Part of the reason why I talk about stuff and make these videos is because I make these mistakes too. I’m not here on some high horse pedestal trying to tell everybody what to do. I really see my own practice as my own laboratory. So this is what I do if I see resistance in the client. I am like am I part of this? I’m not going to blame myself totally but what’s going on with me? How am I contributing to this?
The Kind of Intelligence That Matters
It’s important to note because I know a lot of therapists want to be perceived as intelligent and knowledgeable, but your sharp intellect is not the effective kind of intelligence here. It’s sincerity, openness, vulnerability, curiosity. These character traits are the things that always win out way more than being brilliant or clever or knowing a lot of facts or knowing a lot of tools and techniques.
So when you notice yourself tense up and do track yourself, when you start to tense up or your breath starts to get shallow or you start to get self-conscious, you go into your head. That’s your cue to pause and check what’s activating you. You don’t need to judge yourself.
