I have an article in the current issue of Psychotherapy Networker about working with a client who had been terrorized and immobilized by a doctor’s “death sentence” pronouncement about her health. My main outcome was to reduce her certainty about this, but I think the session also illustrates a number of other useful aspects of doing personal change work with people, one of which is that curiosity and knowledge is an antidote to fear.
I would be interested in any comments you have about the article, which you can post either on my blog, or on the Networker site. If you have specific questions about the session, I will do my best to respond to them.
Here’s the first paragraph of the article…
We’ve all seen clients who suffer from debilitating and obstructive feelings of uncertainty: “I don’t know what to do with my life,” “I don’t know whether to stay or go,” “I can’t motivate myself.” But sometimes the problem is that people are so certain of a particularly paralyzing perception of themselves or the world—“I can’t make it on my own,” “No one else will ever love me,” “My life is over”—that they can’t take productive action to improve the quality of their life. In such cases, reducing certainty can be an essential first step in working effectively with a presenting problem, or even defusing it completely.
