Hello. Today we’re gonna be talking about the dangers of slowing a client down too quickly. Clients often avoid slowing down in therapy because it grates against the internalized obsession of modern industrialized cultures orientation towards productivity and keeping it together in part.
Okay, we’re gonna focus on how it can reveal fragmentation that has been outside of the person’s awareness, which is really frightening to feel slowing down. Reveal reveals fragmentation that busyness aims to hide. So let me show you how to slow your clients down without destabilizing their systems.
Fragmentation is the absence of a cohesive. An internal sense of self. It’s what’s underneath. When someone has never had consistent enough mirroring to develop a solid feeling of, I exist, I’m real, and I’m okay. Your clients aren’t gonna come in and say, I’m fragmenting. They won’t have that language. What happens instead is they walk in already running from an ambient dread.
They can’t even fully register. Before the fear becomes a feeling, the defenses are already online. They launch into stories, explanations, justifications, a rapid stream that keeps everything organized on the surface. this is someone treading water over an empty void, the speed, the talking, the performance.
Sometimes that’s their organization without it. There’s nothing holding them together, and on some level they know that.
So here’s what we do. Step one, meet them where they’re at. Notice their pace, but don’t change it. Get curious about how they’re using speed and what it’s communicating. That speed is information. It’s not a problem to fix immediately. Step two. Start contacting contact is something that we do in our systems where we allow the client’s system to impact us a little bit, and we use contact statements to help us get into that state.
contact. Is when we resonate or match the client’s energy a little bit, and we use very short phrases to touch what’s happening. Oh, angry, huh? You really did not like that so much. Stress phrases like this.
So you’re not interrupting their momentum. You’re just letting them know that you’re tracking with them.
Step three, notice the response. Notice how they respond to the contact. Do they start to slow down or do they speed up even more? Sometimes you’ll, they’ll just be going continuously and you’ll contact and they don’t even notice. Do they feel more seen or do they get irritated with the interruption? This tells you everything you need to know about what to do next.
Step four. Use this information you get from the contact. If they slow down, naturally, keep contacting, slowing them down even more. If they barrel ahead, it might be time for psychoeducation education. Hey, client, I’ve noticed that you go fast throughout our sessions and don’t leave a lot of space for input from me.
It’s okay if we keep operating like this. But before we continue, let’s talk about how this current mode feels to you and what slowing down and allowing me to have input might feel like. Let’s identify the pros and cons of both, and then intentionally decide how you want to proceed. Even if the client wants to keep doing fast monologues, you’ve introduced some awareness and intentionality into the relationship.
The client can start to take responsibility for how they want to behave in the therapy. Number five, what to expect when the client starts slowing down. You can expect a few things to happen. More emotion, maybe some confusion, slowing down for a moment than speeding back up because they feel the anxiety.
Step six, normalize and titrate. This is the moment for normalization, validation, and titration. Hey, client. It’s really normal to feel hard feelings when we slow down a bit after having gone fast for so long. You don’t have to torture yourself by white knuckling it with these emotions.
Let’s feel a little at a time and balance that by going back into speed or talking about things you enjoy when it starts to feel like too much. This is called titration. We’re just feeling a little bit of the yuck, and then going back to something more comforting, pleasant, or tolerable. Doing this enables people to see that the yuck can be felt without overwhelm, nor does feeling it mean you have to live from this yucky place from now on.
So why this matters and what this actually looks like. Let me give you an example. Imagine a 45-year-old client who grew up with significant neglect. As a kid, attention wasn’t guaranteed, so they learned to earned it. They became an incredible storyteller, funny, engaging, always entertaining. That strategy worked.
It got them seen. Now they’re in your office and they’re brilliant at filling every second of the session. They talk fast. They’re charming. They pivot seamlessly from one story to the next. And they do not leave gaps. If you try to interject, they talk over you or they redirect. This can be genuinely annoying for therapists and it must be respected.
This person is treading water. Persona is the only self they know. The moment they start dropping the performance even slightly, they contact a profound emptiness. There’s no felt sense of a solid self underneath the act, just disorganization and a kind of internal free fall.
You as the therapist can see the edges of this. You can sense the fragmentation, hovering just behind the charm, but the defenses, they cycle so fast that there’s no space to help the client explore the sensation of no self. They they clinging it to the adapted self reflexively because it is terrifying not to.
You can’t find enough room in the session to slowly start metabolizing that terror with them. The, the system is set up so that they don’t even start to feel that terror that’s there. So this is why the approach matters if you rush to slow this person down, or even worse, confront the direct, the defenses directly.
You will blow past their capacity. You’ll expose the fragmentation before they have any internal. Scaffolding to tolerate it. And then you’ve got a destabilized client who either never, never comes back or doubles down on the defenses so hard. You can’t reach them at all for a while.
Let them feel you tracking them inside their speed and introduce choice about the pace you’re building that scaffolding first, you’re giving them a relational experience of being held while still organized, so that when the organization starts to soften, they’re not falling alone. If we rush to slow people down, you will hit the resistance.
And their underlying fragmentation resistance is not defiance. It is a protection against not having enough mental organization to function in the world. We need to help clients keep their organization intact as we open and work with the unconscious
Avoiding deeper material, creating a lot of resistance. Or exposing the client’s fragmentation too soon. So speed in the client isn’t the enemy. It’s a protection system doing its job. Your job is to help the client decide if they wanna keep using it or if they’re ready to see what’s underneath.
