SDS Debate: Award Winning Neurologist Challenges Our Therapy Practice

Here's a question for you: What do your clients spend most of their time talking about when they are with you?
• About how worthless they feel?
• About their negative core beliefs and how to challenge them?
• About their damaged histories and how these might be overcome?
• Or what they have been doing over the last week, month?

Marc Jeannerod may not be a name you're familiar with, but he is an internationally recognised expert in cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology. His research has highlighted a significant process that is both theoretically interesting and contains very challenging implications for our practice.

Firstly, he has found that at a neurological level, the brain operates in exactly the same way when “simulating an action or behaviour as it does when actually doing it." In other words the same areas of the brain are used in exactly the same way when we talk about or visualise an activity or action as those that are used when we actually do that action.

Secondly, we have known elsewhere for a while that repeatedly using the same areas of our brain reinforces such connections and makes them MORE LIKELY to be used in the future.

Putting the two together suggests that what our clients spend their time visualising or thinking about increases the likelihood of them doing those things in the future. Basically, if our clients spend their time with us talking about their inactivity or inability (even when thinking about how to overcome it) INCREASES the likelihood of them continuing with their inactivity or inability.

The implications for us are more than just trying to make our clients "more positive". Firstly and most importantly, it has major implications for the agendas and protocols that both we and our clients use. Any time spent NOT talking about "successful" activity (as defined by the client) is at best a wasted opportunity and at worst – reinforcing the problem. Even if we only spend 50% of our time with clients talking about the problem, this is 50% of time spent on reinforcing the problem. Secondly, talking about "overcoming the problem" is little better – unless it focuses on what the client wants to be doing instead. Focusing on how to overcome a problem is not the same as focusing (e.g. visualising) on actually overcoming the problem.
For those of you who are wondering where ‘listening to the client's worries in order to engage them’ comes in, the answer is in the question. Attending to the client’s inaction, confusion, or distress is a necessary activity to engage the client initially, but should never be a central tenet of helping because despite best intentions it ultimately leads the client back to the place where they do not want to be.

If this issue interests you and you'd like to explore it further, or even if you fundamentally disagree with it, I'd love to discuss it with you.

You can do this in a number of ways:
• You can reply to this email directly
• You can post your reply on the SDS Blog (http://sdsmedia.blogspot.com)
• Or even better – come along to one of the SDS Seminars "All New Brief Solution Focused Therapy" (http://www.skillsdevelopment.co.uk/seminars.php?courseid=70). Anyone who has worked us with before will know I love lively, honest, and considered debate.

Looking forward to hearing from you and working with you again.

Take care

Paul

Paul Grantham
Consultant Clinical Psychologist