'AI-Thou': Can There be Relational Depth with an AI Therapist?

At the recent conference of the UKCP (United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy), it become increasingly evident that AI-delivered therapy is not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’. We will have Chat GPT-like technologies, ‘humanised’, providing therapy to people. But will there always be something missing? Will AI ever be as good as real human therapists? The question is not so much about now—with all the bloopers of Chat GPT, Siri, and other AI platforms; as well as their horrendous environmental impact—but in the near- and further-future, when AI will be refined and developed and able to do even more amazing things than it can do now. Nevertheless, I guess, like a lot of therapists, I am still hoping that there is something unique and special that only human therapists can provide.

And if there is, it is likely to lay in the capacity for providing a deep, interpersonal connection. AI, no doubt, will be able to remember what clients say better than us, to detect patterns and emotions in their language, to provide potential diagnoses or formulations in ways that far exceed our capabilities. In this way, I am sure that AI will become a tool to support our therapeutic work (though issues like confidentiality and data protection will need ironing out first). But, perhaps, the one thing that AI will never be able to do is to relate in the human-to-human way we have defined as relational depth: ‘A state of profound contact and engagement between two people, in which each person is fully real with the Other, and able to understand and value the Other’s experiences at a high level.’

Relational depth can be understood as a state of relating in which each person experiences the other as a ‘Thou’ rather than an ‘It’. This links back to Martin Buber’s concept of the I-Thou attitude. The I-Thou stance has a number of facets to it: (a) We stand alongside the other rather than survey and study them as a thing; (b) We encounter the other as a dynamic stream of being rather than as an object; (c) We relate to the other as a whole rather than as a collection of parts; (d) We recognise the other’s freedom and indeterminism; (e) We encounter the other as a particular, unique being rather than as a representation of particular classes: an ‘Other’; (f) We deeply accept this Other; (g) We relate as a whole, ourselves, rather than from our parts; and (h) We let go of our established ways of doing things and allow ourselves to be transformed in the relationship.

Could a client relate to an AI therapist as a Thou? Perhaps. They could experience them as a unique, accepting, empathic stream of being. The client could relate as a whole, revealing their innermost thoughts and feelings, and in ways that allowed themselves to dive into the ‘relationship’ and be transformed. But the client would also know, at least at some level, that the AI therapist was not free: that it was determined rather than self-directed—programmed to be. There would be a lack of a volitional agency meeting them, such that clients might feel drawn into relating to the AI therapist as a ‘Thou’ (the ELIZA effect), but I think they would also know that, at some level, they were experiencing an It.

And there is also the question of whether the AI therapist could experience the client as a ‘Thou’. I think, here, the answer would definitely be ‘no’. AI, however it was programmed, would always need to break the person down into parts, and to understand them through heuristics and rules. It could never go beyond it’s own knowledge base to comprehend the client in their freedom and indeterminism. By definition, AI would always need principles and procedures by which to make sense of—and respond to—the client. It could only go beyond through new principles and procedures. What’s more, in our research on relational depth, we see that a key feature of it is a genuine care towards the other: that the therapist really, genuinely wants the client to do well. AI, however well programmed, and however caring it acts, can never experience a genuine care. Things, people, cannot matter for AI. So, for the AI therapist, the client would always be an It rather than a Thou.

When people describe the experience of relational depth, they often talk about its interconnected quality: not just ‘I know you’ but ‘I know that you know me’. In those moments of meeting, we feel that the other is meeting us: that we are their Thou just as they are ours. You cannot relate at depth to something or someone who, you know, is not relating at depth to you. Will clients know that, to their AI therapist, they will always be an It? I think, again at some level, that consciousness is always going to be there. We can imagine our AI therapist really recognises us in our uniqueness, that they are able to go beyond their procedures and heuristics to experience us in novel, a-procedural ways; but won’t the client, always, at some level know? And, if so, that knowledge of the ultimate it-ness of themselves in the eyes of their AI therapist will disrupt any true sense of relational depth.

Apologies for the crudeness of this analogy, but the subject of sex toys does come to mind. Sex toys can give stimulation and pleasure, sometimes more so than other humans, but there is also a distinctive human quality missing. It’s not making love: it’s not having that deep physical-psychological-intimacy that, I think, can only be experienced with another human.

Relational depth requires reciprocity. And it requires what has been termed co-intentionality: the sense of another agentic, directional being coming towards us. Daniel Stern describes the way that, in this ‘moments of meeting’, the client and therapist—or, earlier on, the parent/carer and child—come together to share wants, needs, and goals. They align, move towards the same shared possibilities. Could an AI therapist understand and share a client’s goals for therapy? Yes, possibly. And they could certainly align on the tasks of therapy. But would a client ever have a sense of being joined by another agentic being? Like many others, in my book Integrating Counselling and Psychotherapy, I argue that the most distinctive feature of living organism is their directionality: their movement forward to fulfil wants and needs. When I look at my cat Bonnie, I can experience a relational depth because I am sensing that she is wanting something from me, is moving towards me and into me as a means of moving onto somewhere. We can join. But, if passive, dead, responsive-only, then that sense of co-doing-something-together can never quite be there. I’m in the lead—and, fundamentally, alone.

I think this question of whether AI can relate at depth is one that needs asking, and exploring, more and more for the future; because it is essential to the issue of where humans will be—and what humanity will mean—in an AI-infused (or AI-dominated) world. Almost certainly, AI is not going to stop, it’s going to evolve, and probably at a faster and faster rate. So however scary that might be, it’s an issue that we probably need to stare in the face. I’d love to know what people think: do leave comments. Perhaps the issue comes down to the ‘at some level’: to what extent will we—or will we want to and be capable of—denying what we ‘know’ as the truth? People perceived ELIZA, the ‘Rogerian’ chatbot developed in the 1960s, as having empathy and experiences. But did they really? Did they really feel and know this at an existential level? Perhaps, indeed, the non-humanity of AI will become the fifth existential given (alongside death, isolation, meaninglessness, and freedom): something that we all know, unconsciously, is true, but often deceive ourselves into believing does not exist. ‘I will not die… there is a given meaning to my life… and my AI therapist really cares for me as the unique being that I am.’ Perhaps, for the future, retrieving the actuality of human care and connection will be the greatest challenge of them all.

A final thought: If human connection is irreplaceable, it does give me some optimism that, as a humanistic- and relationally-oriented therapist, our approach may have some endurance and importance for the years to come. It’s fairly easy, for the future, to imagine AI delivering sophisticated and personalised CBT techniques, and perhaps also psychodynamic interpretations based on the client’s verbal and nonverbal expressions. And such interventions, I am sure, could be incredibly helpful. But, from a humanistic and relational perspective (including contemporary relational psychodynamics), where the heart of the therapeutic enterprise is in-depth relating, there’s always—at least, as I’ve argued here—going to need to be a human providing it. CBT and classical psychodynamic practices, delivered by AI, may do much to help people pinpoint and address particular problems that people face; but where the deepest client issues are to do with isolation, alienation, and disconnection—with feelings un-accepted by the world and outside of relationships and community—only a human being may be able to provide the ‘deep soul nourishment’ necessary to heal. AI, ultimately, might be able to replace all forms of ‘psycho-technology’ in the counselling and psychotherapy field, but relational depth may always be beyond its grasp.

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Postscript

Interestingly, AI (ChatGPT), itself, agrees with me on this one. This is how it answered the question, ‘Will an AI therapist ever be able to have relational depth?’

Relational depth refers to a profound level of connection between two individuals, where they experience mutual understanding, authenticity, and emotional resonance. This concept is deeply rooted in human qualities like empathy, shared vulnerability, and the ability to adapt to subtle interpersonal dynamics.

While an AI therapist can simulate many aspects of human interaction—such as listening, offering thoughtful responses, and even expressing simulated empathy—it may face challenges achieving true relational depth due to several inherent limitations:

Challenges for AI in Achieving Relational Depth

1. Lack of Subjective Experience:
   Relational depth often arises from shared human experiences, emotions, and the therapist's personal awareness of their own vulnerabilities. AI, being devoid of consciousness or subjective experience, cannot genuinely share in or fully comprehend these dimensions.

2. Authenticity:
   A key aspect of relational depth is the perception of the therapist as a real, authentic person. Knowing that AI responses are algorithmic may create a barrier for some clients in fully trusting or connecting at a deeper level.

3. Subtle Emotional Nuances:
   While AI can analyze verbal and non-verbal cues (e.g., tone, word choice, facial expressions), its interpretations are limited by the quality of its programming and datasets. It may miss or misinterpret the unique subtleties of human emotion, which are crucial in building profound connections.

4. Mutuality:
   Relational depth is often characterized by mutual openness and vulnerability. AI lacks the capacity to share its own vulnerabilities or develop a dynamic, evolving relationship.

Potential Strengths of AI in Therapy

That said, AI does have significant potential to contribute meaningfully to therapeutic processes, particularly for individuals who might feel stigmatized or uncomfortable with human therapists:

1. Non-judgmental Presence:
   Clients might feel less judged or intimidated by an AI, enabling them to open up more freely about certain issues.

2. Accessibility and Consistency:
   AI can provide immediate, around-the-clock support and maintain consistency in its responses, which can be comforting for some individuals.

3. Data-Driven Insights:
   Advanced AI systems can analyze patterns in client speech and behavior to offer tailored interventions, sometimes faster than a human might.

Future Possibilities

AI may approach relational depth if:

• It becomes adept at mimicking emotional resonance.

• Users' perceptions of AI evolve to accept its unique "authenticity."

• Future advancements allow for personalized learning, where AI adapts over time in a way that feels dynamic and deeply attuned.

However, it’s unlikely AI will ever fully replicate the ineffable qualities of a deep human-to-human connection. Instead, AI therapists might excel as complements to human therapists, offering preliminary support, data collection, or ongoing care in between human-led sessions.

SMART Goals for Counselling and Psychotherapy? Try HEALING CRISPS

It’s often stated that people should aim for SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-related). However, most of the research and theory for this comes from the field of profit and productivity maximisation. So while SMART goes might help people to hit performance targets, they’re not necessarily the ones that are going to maximise wellbeing and help clients overcome psychological distress. A person, for instance, might achieve a SMART goal of increasing their earnings by £5,000 within a year but, as the research shows, such ‘extrinsic’ goal achievement is not actually associated with greater happiness. 

So what kind of goals might clients be encouraged to consider if goals are going to be used in the counselling and psychotherapy work (and research suggests that most clients do like having goals). This is a question that I asked in my new book, Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social justice (Sage, 2019) and will be explored in a one-day CPD workshop on ‘Working with Goals in Counselling and Psychotherapy’ on Sunday 5th July. It’s also a question I would have loved to come up with a brilliant new acronym for. Unfortunately, after many hours on acronym generator programmes, the best I could come up with was ‘HEALS CRISPS’: that clients’ goals should be: Higher-order, Effective, Approach, Longer-term, Synergetic, Challenging, Realistic, Intrinsic, Small steps, Process-focused, and Specific. Sorry!

‘Higher-order’

Generally, clients should be encouraged to identify goals that relate to those things that are most, fundamentally, important to them: for instance, relatedness, self-worth, or safety. As discussed below, goals also need to be relatively specific and realistic, but ensuring that they link up to something of ‘higher-order’ value is essential in making them meaningful to the client.

Effective

A client’s goals need to be credible ways of actualising their highest-order wants and needs, rather than random strategies; so it may be important to reflect with clients on how, and whether, their goals are really going to help them get to where they want to be. If a client, for instance, says that their goal is to lose weight, because they wants to be happier, some discussion might be needed about whether this is actually going to get them there.

Approach

Research suggests that it is better for clients to be oriented towards positive, promotion goals (for instance, ‘Increase my social networks’), rather than negative, prevention goals (for instance, ‘Stop feeling so alone’). The latter may be particularly problematic if all of a client’s goals are avoidant rather than approach: essentially, this means that they are asking the therapist to help them ‘go nowhere’. For Elliot and Church, therapists should be ‘discussing the ineffective and potentially problematic nature of avoidance goals [with clients], and working to reframe these goals in terms of approaching positive possibilities’. Similarly, where clients want to reduce ‘unhealthy negative emotions’, such as anxiety, it may be helpful to refocus them on increasing ‘healthy positive emotions’, such as concern.

Longer-term

Many psychological difficulties may relate to the prioritisation of very short-term goals over medium or longer-term ones. It may be helpful, therefore, to encourage clients to look towards longer-term objectives, as well as short- and medium-term plans, so that there is a focus beyond immediate obstacles or rewards. At the same time, however, clients’ goals need to be realistically attainable (see below). Again, then, it may be important that clients strive for goal balance, where they are pursuing a range of short, medium, and long term goals. 

Synergetic

Goals should be supportive of other therapeutic goals or, at least, not in conflict with them (for instance, ‘I want more time on my own,’ when the client has already stated ‘I want to be closer to my partner’). Therapists should be particularly mindful of ‘rogue goals’: where the client’s stated objective seems to run against many other wants in their lives. An example of this might be a client who wants to get fitter; but where time spent at the gym is damaging their family, relational, and work life. Generally, clients should strive for goal balance, where they are pursuing a broad number of goals, through a range of strategies, rather than being too focused in any one area.

Challenging

While clients seem to benefit from realistic, small steps; therapists should also bear in mind the psychological research that difficult goals tend to lead to greater overall progress. A client whose goal, for instance, is to cut down to six units of alcohol a day might be encouraged to consider whether two units might be a better objective. For Ford (1992), this is the ‘optimal challenge principle’: working with clients to set goals that are difficult but still attainable.

Realistic

Clients’ goals need to be achievable within the therapeutic time frame. Goals that are based on unrealistically high expectations should be challenged, especially when these are expectations of feelings or other ‘metagoals’ that may fuel vicious cycles (for instance, ‘I want to feel calm all the time’). Equally, therapists should challenge goals that are unrealistic because they are dependent on others, or the world, doing something (for instance, ‘I want my girlfriend to stop criticising me all the time’). These should be reframed in terms of what the client, themselves, can do (e.g., ‘I want to feel confident to challenge my girlfriend when she criticises me’). Therapists should also be mindful of the number of goals that clients are setting: are there too many to be realistically achieved (or too few to be sufficiently challenging)? If, as the work proceeds, it becomes apparent that clients’ goals are unattainable, it may be important to support them in the process of disengaging. 

Intrinsic

Closely related to the above, clients’ goals should be directly related to their own, personal higher-order desires and values—such as connectedness, autonomy, or self-worth—rather than contingent on the attitudes or actions of others (‘extrinsic goals’). Clients who are oriented towards such ‘intrinsic’ goals are likely to be more committed to those goals, take greater ownership of them, and experience them as more appealing.

‘Small steps’

Although, ultimately, clients should be aiming towards higher-order, longer-term goals; in many cases, the importance of being realistic means that it may be most therapeutically beneficial to set smaller subgoals with clients. These are objectives that they can succeed in, one step at a time. This process, also referred to as ‘goal stepping’ or ‘goal laddering’, can help boost clients’ self-efficacy and hence their ability to achieve subsequent goals, in a virtuous cycle. For instance, if a client wants to develop relatedness in their life, an initial goal might be to join a club, followed by a goal of forming a friendship, followed by a goal of sharing more personal narratives. Research suggests that this process of breaking down superordinate goals into more manageable tasks is experienced by clients as helpful: facilitating both a sense of achievement and relieving pressure. Given such perspectives, Ford (1992) suggests that the best approach to goal setting may be to have a, ‘strategic emphasis on attainable short-term goals combined with a periodic review of the long-term goals that gives meaning and organization to one’s short-term pursuits’ (p. 99). 

Process-focused

Goals that extend over time (for instance, ‘enjoy my final year at college’) rather than a single endpoint (for instance, ‘get a good final grade’) may support a more ongoing sense of wellbeing and be less pressurised.  As Miller et al. (1960), for instance, write:

successful living is not a “well-defined problem,” and attempts to convert it into a well-defined problem by selecting explicit goals and subgoals can be an empty deception.... it is better to plan towards a kind of continual “becoming” than towards a final goal.  The problem is to sustain life, to formulate enduring Plans, not to terminate living and planning as if they were task that had to be finished. (p. 114)

Specific

Goals that are specific: clearly-defined, concrete, verifiable/measurable, and simple (e.g., ‘Talk back to my bully at work’); may be preferable to goals which are vague, abstract, and complex (e.g., ‘Be assertive’).  In part, this might be because they are easier to monitor.  However, the specificity of goals needs to be weighed against their relative order (see above).  Also, goals that are too specific may lack flexibility, and make it difficult for the client to revise their goals to a more meaningful, or realistic, objective.

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In day-to-day counselling practice, it is not easy to remember all these characteristics. But perhaps the three standout ones are approach, intrinsic, and small steps: helping clients establish goals that are positive strivings, towards things that they really want, and that are manageable within a relatively well-defined time frame. A lot of this is about fostering the hope-generating element of goal-oriented practices: where goals work (and not all clients want, or benefit from, goals), it is often because they can help clients feel more about positive about where they are going—and their possibility of getting there.

[Adapted from Cooper, M. (2019). Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change. London: Sage. Image by Marco Verch (CC BY 2.0)]

A Chinese translation of this blog is available here

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What is Evil? A Directional Perspective

I had an email recently asking me what I thought about ‘evil’.

It’s hard not to see evil at the moment. The violence of police officers against people of colour. Members of the ‘English Defense League’ defending racism and racists. I wrote a Facebook post about the sheer stupidity of the EDL fighting for English rights but at the same time pissing on a statue of a defender of English democracy but then took it down. Just too negative and angry.

Maya, my 20 year old daughter, and I watched Othello last night (a brilliant 2013 production by the National Theatre). Partly just that we’re working our way through Shakespeare. Partly it seemed relevant to everything going on. Iago is one of Shakespeare’s greatest sh*tbags — maybe one of the greatest in all of literature. It’s almost too painful to watch as he manipulates Desdemona, Othello, and everyone around him to destruction. Othello, too, an appallingly vicious act of domestic violence.

Evil everywhere. And yet, just calling it ‘evil’ doesn’t seem to do much to address it, or change it. Or make things different. And it creates the kind of splitting that seems to just keep an unbridgeable gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In an era of #BLM how do I, for instance, as a White person, address my own racism if it’s something ‘out there’? And where does this evil come from? Do we just look at the man urinating over PC Keith Palmer’s memorial and see it as some deliberate act of viciousness? Is it a choice? Or is it the expression of some innate, inborn tendency to evil? If the latter, then that would seem to go against everything that, as a therapist, I’ve learnt to believe: about the need to understand people and make sense of their lives and actions in their own personal context.

Iago, perhaps quite uniquely, talks his thoughts. He takes the audience through all the machinations and the reasons why he’s doing what he does. Iago (brilliantly portrayed by Rory Kinnear in the NT production as the kind of man not a million miles from the EDL), hates Othello for all that Othello has achieved. He feels belittle by him — by his very existence. And he fears, without any justification, that Othello has slept with his wife. And then there’s the underlying streams of racism that fuel his hatred: that a man, but not just any man but a black man, could be his superior.

There’s no sympathy watching Iago, and there’s no taking away from the horrors of what he brings down, but there is understanding. There’s reasons for why he’s doing what he’s doing; and, ultimately, I want to say that those reasons are reasons that, to some extent, we all share. That, and to be absolutely absolutely clear, doesn’t justify in any way what he does, but it might help us understand it and ultimately tackle and change it.

In my latest book on directionality and social change, I talk about the idea that we are all directional: meaning that, as human beings, we are fundamentally purpose-oriented beings: striving towards particular wants, needs, and goals. And that, across all of us, there are certain wants and needs that seem to be ‘highest order’: that is, that we all, in different ways, seem to be striving for. Certainly there will be individual and cultural variations, but different psychological theories — from Maslow to the behaviourists — have identified such needs as pleasure, growth, self-worth, relatedness, freedom, meaning, and psychological and physical safety. Everything we do, from this perspective, is a means towards these ends.

From this perspective, there’s nothing here in these highest order ‘directions’ that is, in themselves, intrinsically evil. No one, ultimately, strives to be bad. But how people act towards these ends can be very destructive of others. Iago seems to be striving, ultimately, to maintain some semblance of self-worth. In itself, it’s something many of us share; but what he does to get himself there takes his down a path that destroys many others. The evil then, from this perspective, is not intrinsic or inherent to Iago, but in how he chooses to actualise his most fundamental desires.

Why does he do it that way? One of the things that I talk about in my book is the idea of rogue goals. These are directions that take over the person to the exclusion of the rest of the system. Iago gets overtaken by his desire for revenge, and anything else that might do him good in his life gets sidelined by it. it’s an obsessiveness. Othello even more. When he kills Desdemona, he is so caught up in a jealously about her — a desire too, perhaps, for self-worth — that he cannot see anything further into his desire for relatedness or care or compassion. He’s taken over to the detriment of himself — let alone to Desdemona and their community. And, at an interpersonal level too, Iago’s desire for revenge becomes ‘rogue’: it takes over the whole interpersonal system in a way that is to the detriment of everything and everyone around it. That, in a way, is what we mean by evil: that a person acts towards their own highest-order directions in a way that savages across the needs and wants of others. As in racism, or homophobia, or other forms of bullying: one person, or one small group, allows their needs and wants to dominate to the exclusion of the whole. And when they have the power to enforce that, it becomes a systematic and endemic form of abuse.

Human beings may not be born with a tendency towards evil, but I do think we are born with a tendency towards narrowing of focus. To become oriented towards specific goals without being able to keep the wider whole in mind. John Bargh, one of the leading researchers on unconscious goals, writes about the way that, while we think ‘we’ have ‘goals’, it’s actually goals that have us. We are the vessels through which multiple goals act: and bringing those goals into some kind of coherent whole — whether within people or between people — requires a conscious effort. Otherwise, there is fragmentation and dis-coordination… and evil. Evil is where things act apart from, and against, the wider whole. I was talking to my 12 year old son, Zac, about this during the recent #BLM march. He asked why people could be racist and we were talking about the research that the difference between prejudiced and non-prejudiced people is not in their initial thoughts: we all, to some extent, have stereotypes, prejudices, and biases which pop up in response to certain groups. But the difference is non-prejudiced people then put those to one side and go on to act in equitable and non-discriminatory ways. It’s an effort not just to go rogue: not to let our thoughts and actions go down whatever prejudiced road they like.

When people talk about the stupidity of evil, then, in many ways I think it is. It’s a laziness in thinking that follows fragmented, unprocessed thoughts rather than staying with the complex whole. Urinating on a memorial of a man who protected British freedom while claiming to fight for British freedom: that’s the kind of un-joined up illiteracy that, perhaps, is at the heart of evil.

But it’s more than that, of course. Iago is brilliantly clever. So why is Iago ‘evil’ and not others? Why doesn’t he join himself up, and join himself to others, in a way that so many other people do. A deeper need or a deeper wound than most, perhaps. And a socialisation that leads him to believe that his means are acceptable to those ends. Not learning the values of fairness and equality as highest-order goals, in themselves. Perhaps, alongside self-worth and relatedness and freedom there are highest-order, value-based ends for democracy and equality that we need to learn: and that, without those ends, it is all too easy to fall into fragmentation. And choice? It’s an interesting question of where choice comes in and whether, amidst all of this, there is also a person choosing not to act towards the interests and concerns others. Yes, I do absolutely think there is a choosing being — not just a determined mechanism — acting towards these ends. But a choice ‘to be evil’? In my experience, it’s very rare choose deliberately towards this end, in itself.

Many years ago, in fact on my first counselling training, I wrote an essay about the difference between intent and effect, and I think that is so important to hang on to. Iago, Othello… racists in our society, the effects of their behaviour is incredibly, incredibly destructive on the lives of our black communities and also on so many other aspects of societies. It’s a privileging of one very small element at the expense of so many. And yet, to infer from that effect a particular intent isn’t, I think, that helpful. The reality is, people can behave in ways that are very destructive for reasons that, ultimately, may be fairly ‘normal’: and I am suggesting here that the massively destructive acts of racists, ultimately, come back to the same human needs as the rest of us: self-worth, freedom, probably even relatedness and community. That doesn’t make it right. That absolutely, absolutely doesn’t make it right — just as we can’t infer intent from effect, we also can’t say that because someone did something for intelligible reasons it couldn’t have been harmful — but it does mean that we can see the humanity behind the destructiveness.

Why should we want to do so? Why not just denounce these acts? Because, I think, we can denounce but also understand; and doing that, rather than just denouncing, gives us greater leverage to be able to change it and create a more tolerant and equitable society. If we understand, for instance, that at the root of Iago’s behaviour is a desire for self-worth we can think about how we bring up children in our society to ensure they feel of value. If we understand, in it, an inability to see the whole, then we can think about how we help children develop more holistic, comprehensive thinking: ways of being able to empathise and reach out into other minds and feeling. None of this means we shouldn’t be going out and marching and defending, actively and vigorously, the rights of all our communities: but it does mean that we can also work at more psychological levels to accelerate the pace towards a juster and fairer world.

How Different are the Different Therapies? A Directional Perspective

Person-centred therapy, CBT, psychoanalysis… there’s over 450 different therapies out there, and often we focus on the differences between them. But how different are they really?

Of course, the specific methods that different therapies use can be very different (interpretation, for instance, vs two chair work vs behavioural experiments). But, in this blog, I want to suggest that where they are trying to help clients get to, and the underlying principles by which they are trying to do that, are actually pretty similar.

What I think all the therapies are trying to do, in a nutshell, is to help clients find better ways of getting from where they are towards where they want to be.

Yup, ‘better’. That’s something of a taboo word in the therapy field. But, of course, I don’t mean ‘better’ as defined by the therapist, or by society more widely; but in terms of what is most helpful for the client on their journey. So that might include more positive self-talk, or trying to see friends more, or mindfulness exercises. In every therapy, however implicit, there’s always some hope for change—even if the change is a move towards greater acceptance of where they are at.

Some therapies, like CBT, do that by providing a lot of structure and guidance. Others, like non-directive approaches, do it by providing clients with space to work out for themselves where they’re at and where they want to go. How different is that? Well, some teachers do a lot of standing up and delivering content. Others prefer to provide pupils with time and space for self-learning. There’s certainly variations in these methods, but that doesn’t mean that they’re trying to do different thing. All teachers want to help pupils learn (I’d hope) , and all therapists want to help clients find positive ways forward in their lives. At least, I’d hope that was the case.

But what about real theoretical differences in how well-being, distress, and change are conceptualised? In my latest book, Integrating counselling and psychotherapy (Sage, 2019), what I suggest is that, in fact, there’s a set of common principles that underlie all the different models, methods, and understandings. These can be summarised as follows:

• Human beings are directional: that is, we act towards our worlds in meaningful, intelligible ways. We do things for reasons, not just randomly—striving towards the things that we most deeply want in our lives, like safety, love, or closeness with others.

• A ‘good life’ is one in which we can get towards those things. This is not just about achieving them, but feeling like we are oriented towards them and progressing at sufficient pace.

• Sometimes we experience problems because the way we try and get one of these thing can make it more difficult for us to get another. For instance, a client really wants intimacy in their life, but they’re also afraid of being un-safe by opening out to others. These conflicts (or what I call ‘dysergies’) might be a consequence of what we’ve learnt from our pasts about how to get the things we want, our environments, or because of ‘biases’ in the ways that we think.

• And, sometimes, we can experience problems because we just haven’t learnt the best ways of getting the things that we really want. For instance, we haven’t learnt the communication skills that we need to get closer to others.

• So what all therapies do is one of two things, and generally both:

  1. They help clients find more synergetic ways of getting what they want: e.g., getting both safety and love. So, for instance, a therapist works with a client to help them realise that they’re avoiding intimacy because they’re scared of getting hurt, and then helps them think about ways of maybe bearing some of that hurt so that they can, ultimately, experience love in relationships and feel safer at the same time.

  2. They help clients find more effective ways of getting what they want: for instance, learning that they can experience more intimacy by being more honest about themselves, or that the best way of overcoming a fear is to face it.

So what does this mean? One implication of seeing a common set of principles underlying all the different therapies is that it can then make us more open to the many different methods and understandings that are out there: less ‘schoolist’ and ‘tribalist’ in our approach. Supposing, for instance, that I am trying to help my client find answers to their relational problems by providing an empathic and accepting non-directional environment. Great. And maybe that’s what I’ll keep on doing. But perhaps I’ll also help them through some psychoeducation in effective communication, or perhaps also by interpreting some deep-seated fears they have of intimacy. Of course, I need appropriate training in any method or set of ideas that I am going to use, but a common framework helps me see other approaches as resources and possibilities, not as competition. There’s been far too much sabre-rattling for years between the different therapeutic schools. Articulating a common set of principles can help us break down some of the walls and meet each other as friends rather than enemies.

Yes, integrative and eclectic approaches have been doing that for years. But, even for these approaches, it can be difficult to articulate the principles on which an integration is based: why it’s a coherent—rather than mish-mashy—approach to therapy. So what’s described here can still be of value in working out the common underlying threads behind an integrative or eclectic form of practice. But, importantly, the inference here is not that we should all be practising in multi-method ways (and that’s something we also emphasised strongly in our pluralistic approach). The fact that there is a common thread underlying the different therapeutic approaches doesn’t make a purely psychoanalytic practice, or a purely person-centred one, any less valuable.

If you’re interested in these ideas, do have a look at my latest book. It starts by introducing this idea of directionality and how it relates to wellbeing and distress, and then goes on to talk about the way in which the main therapeutic approaches (psychodynamic, humanistic, existential, and CBT) can be aligned with it. The final part then talks about some common practices that come out of it, like helping clients to identify the things that they want most in life. The book covers a lot of ground (maybe too much), but it’s part of a pluralistic striving to bring lots of different therapies together and to find what is common amongst us. That’s not, in any way, to minimise the unique contribution that each of our different therapeutic approaches can make. But to help establish some common touchstones that can bring us further into dialogue with each other.

The 'Actualising Tendency': A Directional Account

What is the ‘actualising tendency’? It’s something that is referred to throughout the person-centred and humanistic field. But what does it actually mean, does it make sense, and, perhaps most importantly, does it really ‘exist’?

Carl Rogers (1959, p. 196), in his classic monograph, defined it as the, ‘inherent tendency of the organism to develop all its capacities in ways which serve to maintain or enhance the organism.’ To be honest, I’ve studied and quoted that definition again and again over the last 30 years, but I’m still not entirely sure what it means. The problem for me is the term ‘capacities’—what actually are they? Similarly, when the Dictionary of person-centred psychology defines the actualising tendency as ‘the tendency in all forms of organic life to develop more complex organisation, the fulfilment of potential…’ (Merry & Tudor, 2002, p. 2), I’m left with the question, ‘What actually is this “potential”?’ Presumably it’s something we are born with. But was I born with the potential to become a professor, or a football player, or a sociopath? And, if so, why did I actualise some potentials and not others? I guess, for me, terms like ‘capacities’ and ‘potential’ just feel too vague and non-specific, and don’t seem to give us much concrete direction about how to engage most helpfully with our clients.

So does the ‘actualising tendency’ mean something about an inherent capacity to self-heal, or ‘self-right,’ as Bohart and Tallman (1999) put it? I think that is how it is most commonly understood. That is, we each, within us, have the capacity to sort ourselves out—to find the answers to our problems. If we get cut, our bodies form scabs to heal us; or send out antibodies to help us overcome an infection. In the same way, then, deep inside of us is a tendency towards psychological healing, maintenance, and growth. We know what is right for us: an amazing, organismic wisdom that can help us overcome even the most challenging of circumstances. Viewed in this way, the concept of the actualising tendency becomes a revolutionary and deeply democratising challenge to those approaches—like traditional psychoanalysis and behaviour therapy—that see expert knowledge and intervention as the source of psychological healing. Here, from this humanistic standpoint, we don’t need to depend on others, or look to our ‘betters’, to sort ourselves out. Rather, it’s we, ‘the people’, who are our own authorities in our own lives.

Progressive though it is, this understanding of the actualising tendency begs an obvious question: if we’ve got such a deep tendency towards healing and growth, how is it that people can get so f*%£ed up in their lives? Why, for instance, do people end up addicted to drugs, or battering themselves psychologically or physically, or chasing after money in a way that drives them to an early grave? Fortunately, from a self-righting perspective, there’s a pretty good answer to this: because, instead of trusting our own inner wisdom, we end up being guided by the outside world. So, for instance, we come to believe that the most important thing in life is to have a Rolex watch, or thousands of Facebook ‘friends’; and we come to ignore that own inner voice that is just wanting to have fun, or be creative, or lie in bed with our partners watching the rain against the window pane. In Rogerian terms, we develop an ‘external locus of evaluation’, instead of an ‘internal’ one.

There’s evidence in support of this position. For instance, we know that people feel happier and more satisfied when they achieve ‘intrinsic’ goals, as opposed to ‘extrinsic’ ones (Sheldon & Kasser, 1998). However, the idea that our actualising tendency gets scuppered by the outside world is problematic in several ways (Cooper, 2013). First, it tends to position the person as a ‘victim’ of their external circumstances, which isn’t consistent with the person-centred idea that we are all inherently agentic. Rollo May, the founder of existential therapy in the US, criticised Rogers for this, saying it was the ‘most devastating of all judgements’: that we are all essentially ‘sheep’ following whoever is ‘the shepherd’. Second, it’s based on a very individualistic view of human being: that we come into the world as a separate entity, divorced from those around us, and with an ability to return to an independent, individual self. For a lot of contemporary ‘postmodern’ thinkers, these individualistic assumptions are more a product of western, patriarchal culture than an ‘objective’ reality; and they would argue that human beings are always, inevitably, inter-mixed with others. So, from this standpoint, it really doesn’t make sense to pitch ‘the individual’ against ‘society’. Third, and perhaps most basically, is it really true that we always know what is right—social forces or not? If I get lost, for instance, sometimes I have a deep, intuitive feeling about where I need to go, and it’s absolutely spot on. But sometimes I don’t. And sometimes my deep intuitive feeling takes me in totally and utterly the wrong direction, while Google Maps is perfect at getting me there. So surely we do learn, sometimes, some very helpful and healing things from the outside world? As the developmental psychologist Piaget argued, growth and learning comes from both ‘assimilation’ (fitting the external world to what we already know) but also ‘accommodation’ (adapting our ways of seeing the world to what we learn from outside). So to only focus on ‘inner wisdom’, and not the wisdom of others or the outside world, would seem somewhat myopic.

Given these issues, I want to propose another way of thinking about the actualising tendency which, for me, helps to make sense of some of these problems. It’s based on some thinking and research that I did for my latest book, Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change (Sage, 2019).

The book starts with the assumption, derived from existential philosophy, that human being is essentially directional. This is not entirely dissimilar from the idea of an actualising tendency—indeed, the actualising tendency has been described as directional. However, directionality isn’t defined, per se, in terms of pointing in a healing or necessarily growthful direction. Rather, it refers to the way that, as human beings, we are always ‘on-the-way-to-somewhere’: agentic and acting intelligibility (i.e., in the best ways we know how) towards different possibilities, rather than being sponge- or machine-like ‘things’. Of course, we can have many different directions; and what the framework goes on to suggest is that these directions fit together in a ‘hierarchical structure’: with our strongest, most fundamental directions at the top (for instance, for relatedness, self-worth, or meaning), and lower-order directions as the means by which we try and fulfil these higher-order desires. So, for instance, we might have a desire to find a good TV box set on Netflix (lower-order direction), so that we can spend time with our partner (higher-order direction), so that we can experience relatedness in our lives (highest-order direction).

This distinction between higher- and lower-order directions may be helpful in trying to make sense of the actualising tendency, because what I want to suggest is that, whilst our higher-order directions may be an expression of some inner, self-righting wisdom, our lower-order directions may not necessarily be. So the first part of this is that only we can know what we most fundamentally want and need in our lives: no one, for instance, can tell me that I need faith, or that the most important thing for me in my life is to be powerful and dominant. I know, deep inside, that what matters for me most is intimacy and love and social contribution. And even if I didn’t know it, it’s my right to set those highest-order directions for myself. But when it comes to lower-order directions, the means to get to where we want to be, there is maybe a lot more that we can learn from the world; and a lot more that we might get, intuitively, wrong. So, for instance, my desire to experience relatedness in my life: yup, definitely actualising. My desire to do that by watching TV with my partner: yup, probably so, although there might be better ways towards intimacy. My desire to sit through sit through six seasons of Gossip Girl … Hmm… ‘anti-actualising’ for sure, and this is where I could definitely do with some external guidance and advice.

This directional understanding of the actualising process has clear implications for how we might work with our clients. If all the wisdom is within the client, then the best thing we can do to help them is to really step back from any guidance, advice, or directions; and just allow their own self-righting force to come to the fore. In other words, classical non-directive client-centred therapy. But if we say that, at lower orders, people can get things wrong, then guidance, and directions, and specific therapeutic methods can also have a legitimate place. So, for instance, we might teach a client social skills, so that he or she can get the intimacy that they are yearning for. Or we help them to discover that the best way to overcome a phobia is by facing up to it, through exposure techniques. Here, we’re not telling the person what their highest-order directions are; but we’re helping them learn about the best ways to get there—on the assumption that that wisdom is not always inside. Of course, we can’t all offer these different methods, and the suggestion here is not that we should all become polymaths (or even integrative or eclectic) in how we think and practice. But it points towards the ‘pluralistic’ principle that we should all be as aware as possible of what we can, and cannot, offer clients; and have the knowledge and skills to refer on, as and where appropriate (Cooper & McLeod, 2011).

In summary, an understanding of human beings as self-healing is a great reminder of the incredible creativity and wisdom that clients can have in finding their own answers. But, as a complete model in itself, it can also be limited and lacking in nuance. Most importantly, perhaps, it can mean we overlook times in which clients could really, genuinely, do with some external guidance, to help them towards the things that they most deeply want. From a directional perspective, human beings are still conceptualised as agentic, intelligible beings. But there’s an acknowledgement that, while we may always be striving to do our best, that’s not always the best thing we can be doing. Sometimes, with the best will and reasons in the world, we end up doing things that really mess us up. Hence, while therapists need to really, deeply listen to what it is that clients want—and how it is that they think they can get there—it may also be important to recognise that, at least for some clients, the pathways towards getting there are not always ‘inside’: there’s a place for wisdom without, as well as wisdom within.

References

Bohart, A. C., & Tallman, K. (1999). How Clients Make Therapy Work: The Process of Active Self-Healing. Washington: American Psychological Association.

Cooper, M. (2013). The intrinsic foundations of extrinsic motivations and goals: Towards a unified humanistic theory of wellbeing. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 53(2), 153-171. doi: 10.1177/0022167812453768

Cooper, M., & McLeod, J. (2011). Pluralistic Counselling and Psychotherapy. London: Sage.

Merry, T., & Tudor, K. (2002). Dictionary of Person-Centred Psychology. London: Whurr Publishers.

Rogers, C. R. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships as developed in the client-centered framework. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A Study of Science (Vol. 3, pp. 184-256). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Sheldon, K. M., & Kasser, T. (1998). Pursuing Personal Goals: Skills Enable Progress, but Not all Progress is Beneficial. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24(12), 1319-1331. doi: 10.1177/01461672982412006

[An edited version of this blog post was published as ‘Cooper, M. (2019). What does the 'actualising tendency' actually mean? Therapy Today, 30(7), 42-43’.]

What Does it Mean to Say that Life is Meaningless? A Directional Account

Imagine there’s a chandelier above your head. One of those long, dangly ones with branches of glass hanging down. It’s throwing light all around the room. Now imagine that you look at the base of the chandelier and realise that it’s not, actually, attached to the ceiling. It’s just hanging there, suspended in space. Right above your head.

Hold that image.

So this blog is about something I’ve struggled with for years and years and years and have found a way of conceptualising it that makes sense for me. It’s not a particularly upbeat or reassuring blog, so if you’re struggling with things and feeling low at the moment you may want to stop reading now.

The blog is about the notion that life is meaningless, and what that actually means. It’s a key tenet of a lot existential thought (though by no means all of it). Camus, for instance, writes about the ‘absurdity’ of existence; and Yalom, in his classic text on existential therapy, describes various therapeutic strategies that can be used to help clients address profound feelings of meaninglessness in life. But what does that ‘meaninglessness’ actually mean?

Here’s one way of describing it. The term ‘meaning’ can mean many different things. But when we speak about the ‘meaning’—or ‘meaninglessness’—of life, what we are asking about is its significance: the reason why it is there. It’s like, ‘What’s the meaning of work?’ or ‘What’s the meaning of going out every Friday night?’ We’re asking what those things are trying to achieve. Why we’re doing them: for instance, ‘to make money’, or ‘to make friends’.

From a ‘directional’ standpoint, this is about going up to a ‘higher order of direction’. That sounds horribly jargonistic but let me explain. It’s based on the directional framework that I’ve recently outlined in my book, ‘Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social justice’ (Sage, 2019), which draws on the work of highly-respected theorists like Powers and Grawe.

So the directional framework says that we do things for reasons (i.e., we have directions in life), and we can trace those reasons up and up and up to higher and higher orders of directions. So, for instance, we go to work to make money, and we make money because we want to have leisure time, and we want to have leisure time because we want to have pleasure. And we can also trace those directions downwards, and we do that by asking ‘how’? So, for instance, How do we get to work? We did training, and we got trained by turning up at college every day, etc. And then we could go back up the hierarchy from turning up at college to training to working to money to leisure to pleasure. From this standpoint, everything has a reason for it, and everything has a way that it’s done (right down to the very micro motor movements that help us make things happen in our lives). And we can think of the whole thing like that dangly chandelier, with a few highest-order directions (like pleasure, or love, or actualisation of potential) right at the top, and then branching down to an increasing number of lower-order directions as the means to achieve them.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. The thing is, we can go up and up and up to highest-order directions like pleasure but then, when we ask, ‘What is the meaning of pleasure?’ we’re stuck really. There just isn’t any answer. Or ‘Why actualisation of potential?’ or ‘Why spirituality?’ They’re there, but there’s no real way of going above them to something higher order. One option might be to say that these directions contribute to a wider social direction, like global harmony or planetary healing but still, then, so what? What does that lead up to. Essentially, there’s nothing ‘fixed’ up there. Nothing solid that we can hang the whole chandelier on. Nothing that can help us make sense of our lives and our worlds. And that’s why, sometimes, standing underneath it, we can feel that sense of dread that everything is about to come crashing down. That everything that shines light on everything is just an illusion and there no real meaning or purpose to any of it at all. For Heidegger, these were moments of genuine insight and authenticity. When we see the world for exactly what it is. Baseless. Unattached. Dangling.

Of course, most of the time we’re not that focused on that chandelier. We’ve got things to do, getting on with our lives. And anyway, like Yalom’s Staring at the sun, there’s limits to how much we can look into that direct light. Indeed, some people have probably never looked up at all. Or looked up and never seen that that base is unattached. But for others of us, even if we’re not looking up, there’s some constant awareness—sometimes better, sometimes worse—that something isn’t quite right. A sense of uncanniness. Unease. And for others of us, it’s like we’ve been born staring up and just can’t pull our eyes away. Once you’ve seen how unattached things are, it’s something you can never forget.

Camus talks about building castles in the desert. We can create, and commit to, local meanings, even if there’s nothing ultimate solid that they lead up to. Similarly, Yalom writes about re-engagement with the world. But, personally, I think there’s just no way out of recognising that life is, ultimately, unattached to any fundamental meaning, and that’s just a really painful, dreadful ‘truth’ that many of have to live with. Indeed, I think it blasts a fairly sizeable hole into all of our therapeutic practices, including existentialism and pluralism, because it means that a lot of our anxiety and sadness just can’t be ‘therapised’ away. However much CBT someone has, or psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the reality is that many of us live in the deeply unsettling, deeply ‘rational’ knowledge that there is no real, fundamental reason for anything we do.

At best, perhaps, talking about these things can help us feel that, at least, we are not alone with it—that’s there’s others there standing, staring up and feeling unsettled too. So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s all about and felt despair at the apparent purposelessness of existence, at least know that I’m there as well, and so is Albert Camus, and perhaps many others: great and not-so-great minds alike. And as Viktor Frankl put it, the great meaning-centred therapist, it can ‘never be taken as a manifestation of morbidity or abnormality’ to challenge the meaning of life. Rather, ‘it is the truest expression of the state of being human, the mark of the most human nature in man.’

Synergies are Good: Why ‘Win-Win’ Configurations Matter More than you Might Think

How can you help people make positive changes in their lives?  

If you’re starting from the position that people are getting things wrong—maladjusted, dysfunctional, misinformed, etc.—then it’s pretty straightforward: teach them the ‘right’ way to do things.  But if your starting point is that people are already doing their best—for instance, that they have an ‘actualising’ tendency, as the humanistic and person-centred therapies hold—then it gets more complicated.  Because how do you help someone who is already actualising to actualise more?

One way of tackling this might be to say that, ‘Ok, the person does have a potential to actualise, but the problem is that the environment they’re in gets in their way.’  So it’s not that the person isn’t capable of actualising, it’s that their world isn’t letting them.  Problem is, that then makes the person little more than a pawn to their world.  Are we really so powerless?  And, if so, what does that say about the human being’s natural capacity to actualise?

For people who believe in an innate human ability to ‘grow’ and act in prosocial ways, there’s a similar paradox at the socio-political level.  It’s easy enough to explain social ills if we start from the premise that people can be intrinsically selfish and competitive; but if people are inherently prosocial, how do you explain gun crime, or homophobia, or Nazism?  How can something so bad come out of something so potentially good?

This is where the concept of ‘synergies’—and its opposite, dysergies—comes in.  Synergies are win–win relationships: where two things go together to make something more than either alone.  Let’s take a really simple example.  Narek wants to be in a relationship and so does Paul.  Narek and Paul get into a relationship together.  Now they’ve both got more together than either had alone.  So we can say here that there’s a synergetic relationship between Narek’s desire for a partner and Paul’s desire for a partner: because the more that one of these things happens the more the other thing does too.

Synergies have been described by Peter Corning as ‘nature’s magic’ and, in a way, they are magical, because they make something out of nothing.  They’re where 1 + 1 = 3.  Here’s Narek, and here’s Paul, and without either bringing in more than what they’ve had, they’ve managed to create something more than what they were.  That’s amazing, isn’t it—something out of nothing?

Synergies don’t just operate between people, they operate within people as well.  Say Narek, like most of us, wants to feel good about himself, and he also wants to have a relationship with another man.  So if he can feel good about himself as a gay man, he’s got a win–win relationship on the inside too. 

Contrast that with a dysergetic internal relationship, where Narek doesn’t feel good about being gay.  Now his choice is to either (a) express his gay side and feel bad about himself, or (b) try and feel good about himself by suppressing his gay side. But either way he loses out: 1 + 1 = 1.

What this example should also begin to show is how the concept of synergies and dysergies can answer the opening question in our blog. Because it’s totally fair enough that Narek wants to feel good about himself, and it’s totally fair enough that he wants to express his gay side.  Both of those are parts of his actualising being.  But because they are pulling against each other, he ends up getting less out of life than he could otherwise.  He’s an actualising being that’s not actualising to his full potential.  And it’s not because he’s maladjusted, dysfunctional, or misinformed; it’s because the things he’s trying to do, with the best will in the world, are dysergetically-related rather than synergetically-related.

Ok, so here’s where I want to make a really bold claim.  I think that nearly everything we do in therapy, whatever orientation, and whether we consciously call it as such or not, is about helping clients reconfigure their ways of doing things so that they are more synergetic.  What we do is we help them think about their lives and how they’re acting, reflect on what’s working and what isn’t, and then think about ‘better’ ways of moving forward (better, of course, for the client, not for us).  So that might mean, for instance, reflecting on ‘defensive’ strategies that have emerged in their childhood, and thinking about whether they want to continue with that; or looking at black-and-white patterns of thinking and seeing if it’s better to see shades of grey.  And it may also be about helping clients to process things at more embodied levels: for instance, to really feel their anger and hurt towards their parents, and to recognise that those feelings are really legitimate.  But, in all of this work, what we don’t do is to pathologise their ‘unhelpful’ ways of doing things.  We don’t intimate to clients, for instance, that their defense mechanisms are really dumb, or that black-and-white ways of thinking are just pointless.  And the reason we don’t is because we can see the intelligibility of these ways of doing things: of course, it makes absolute sense that we want to protect ourselves, or that we want to see the world in more simple ways.  It’s just that those ways of doing things act against us in other ways and are ultimately unproductive. So the question is not about right or wrong, but about how we can get all our needs met in ways that support each other: i.e., how we can be more synergetic.

So I’m suggesting that positive change at the individual level works through the development of synergies; and I think positive change at the social and political level can be conceptualised in a similar way too.  Two communities talk across their differences and start to value each other, nations move from the ultimate dysergetic state—war—to peaceful co-existence, people learn to live in synergetic harmony with their environment.  Groups, striving to do their best, strive to do their best in ways that other groups can also do their best. 

This is a humanistic perspective: not a radically socialist or a radically libertarian one. It’s a politics of understanding rather than a politics of blame. It’s saying that people, even when they act in oppressive or highly damaging ways, aren’t generally setting out to do so. Rather, even the most oppressive people are essentially like us: trying to get their needs met. Only they’re doing it in ways that are incredibly dysergetic to the rest of us, and not always willing to recognise that they’re doing so.

What does any of this mean in terms of what we can do—at the personal or socio-political level—if we want to try and make things better?  In my just published book, Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change (Sage, 2019), I try and outline some of the principles by which synergies can be developed, whatever the level.  There’s establishing trust, and communicating more clearly, being assertive, and embracing creativity and difference and diversity. 

I guess my hope is that, by seeing positive change in this light, we can begin to try and understand the common principles that make things synergetic or not.  As things stand, the development of synergies is always implicit: an underlying process that we try and make happen, without much conscious thought.  Perhaps we can move to a place where we more consciously think, ‘How can we create synergies here?’  And we can also look at the limits and challenges of synergetic processes (for instance, over-compromise), and perhaps develop even deeper and more integrative principles of positive change.

Perhaps, most importantly, what the concept of synergies does is allow us to understand people, and societies, as doing best but could also do better. It means that we can engage with people in deeply respectful ways, while also holding on to the potential for improvement and change. That’s something that, albeit implicitly, is right at the heart of our therapeutic work. And if we can also put that ethos at the heart of social and political change activities, I really believe it maximises our abilities to bring good things about.

Why Doesn't Therapy Always 'Work'? A Directional Perspective

Research indicates that a substantial proportion of clients, maybe 30% or more, don’t show reliable improvements during therapy. So why is that? Why is it that therapy doesn’t always lead to change?

In my forthcoming book—Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social justice (Sage, 2019)—I’ve developed a framework for understanding social and psychological change that, I hope, can help us to answer questions like this. The basic principle underlying the book is that human beings are fundamental directional: that is agentic, purposeful, acting in meaningful ways; and that we experience psychological difficulties when we can’t ‘actualise’ those directions that are most important to us in life, like self-worth, relatedness, or being in control of our own lives.

From this perspective, a first reason why therapy might not help is because there simply aren’t any ‘levers’ for therapeutic change.  That is, the client is doing everything possible to actualise their most important directions, but the world just isn’t going to let them get there. For instance, a homeless young woman is depressed because she feels unsafe on the streets, marginalised, and drawn into drug dependency.  She wants physical security, self-worth and some sense of purpose; and she is doing everything she can—within her context—to actualise this.  Here, then, there may be nothing that therapy can help her reconfigure.  Rather, what she needs is social, housing, or employment support to help her back onto her path; and probably wider social and political change.

From an existential perspective, the leverage that any of us have will, to a great extent, be limited.  That is, there is a ‘cold’, ‘hard’ reality that is not just about the world we live in, but woven into the very fabric of human being.  For instance, our longings for life, to achieve all the things we want, to have meaning, to stay connected to others, are all, ultimately, be doomed to fail.  And yet, it may be in the very nature of human being to strive for these things.  From this perspective, then, as philosophers like Schopenhauer have argued, we may be condemned to fail: to experience hopelessness, futility, and despair.  Here, therapies don’t ‘work’ because people, ultimately, are going to fail in many areas of their lives: and no amount of talking about it or striving to reconfigure can ever save us from that existential reality.

Another possibility is that levers for change are possible, but that the client and therapist cannot—or do not—find them.  A client, for instance, might have the potential to achieve greater relatedness by improving his communication skills, but the therapist focuses instead on trying to unearth childhood traumas, or on challenging dysfunctional beliefs.  This is why assessment and formulation may be such an important part of the therapeutic process, and to be conducted in a relatively open, ‘non-schoolist’ way.  Through this, therapist and client may be more able to see where the client’s problems lie and the points of therapeutic leverage, and then to either try to address them, or to refer the client on to someone who may be better able to do so.

It is also possible that the levers for positive change are there, but that the client’s directions away from them are just too great.  Mostly, that means that the short-term emotional pain that they fear they will experience outweighs their directions towards longer term benefit.  This may include the anxiety of facing the unknown and doing things differently, the burden of taking responsibility for one’s life, or the guilt of not having made changes sooner.  As we know from the research, short-term directions—proximal, salient, and viscerally-felt—can have a much greater pull than long-term, inevitably amorphous, future possibilities.  Short-term gains are like a powerful magnet, close by, that constantly pull people back into established ways of doing things: overpowering the effects of more distant, albeit ultimately more positive, attractors.

When assessing or working with clients, then, the question of whether there actually, are, levers to therapeutic change should always be kept in mind.  Does therapy have the potential to help this person?  And, if it does, what might draw a client away from ‘pulling’ those levers?  As with ‘motivational interviewing’, acknowledging the power of the forces against change may be an important step in helping it to happen.

If people have a natural tendency to 'actualise' their potential, how is it we get so f...ed up?

It’s the quandary that just about every trainee on person-centred or humanistic courses asks (or, at least, thinks) on the first day of their training program… If human beings have a natural tendency towards self-healing, if they know what’s best for them, if they have an ‘organismic valuing potential’—why is it that we can end up in such messes in our lives?

An immediate answer might be that we have this natural tendency towards actualisation and growth, but it gets suppressed by the world and others around us. The problem with that, though, is that if we’re such actualising beings, why is it that that tendency so weak? Why does it just give up the ghost the moment it gets challenged? Not much of an actualising tendency!

Based on the work I’ve been doing for my new book: ‘Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change’ (Sage, Feb 2019), here’s three inter-related answers that, for me at least, can help to resolve this quandary.

First, we might know and feel what we want and what’s best for us, but we don’t always know how best to get there. I know, for instance, that I want to be close to my friends, or that I want to feel calmer in my life—and that’s my internal, organismic sense of what’s best for me—but that doesn’t mean that I’ll always have the skills or tools to make that happen. With the best will in the world, sometimes we just haven’t learnt the best ways of doing things (I still haven’t learnt how to change a car tyre), or we’ve learnt ways of doing things that might have worked in the past, but don’t work in our present circumstances. Maybe I learnt as a boy, for instance, that the best way to make friends was to act cool and distant because people respected me that way, but as an adult what that actually does is just keep people away. And, of course, people who have been traumatised and deeply hurt in the past learn that, to keep themselves safe, they may need to do things like avoid relationships and intimacy altogether. That’s exactly what they might have needed to get through life as a kid, but as an adult, when the world is different, it’s now become a barrier to closeness. So although we can say that people are always striving to do their best, doing our best isn’t always the best thing that we could be doing. Sometimes we need to learn better ways towards getting the things that we really want and need in life: and that’s something that therapy can be great for. We start with working out what we really want—self-worth, relatedness, autonomy, safety, etc—and work back from there to think about how we might get it more effectively.

Second, sometimes the things that we want are pulling us in opposite directions, so that the more we actualise one potential in our lives, the more we can end up actually getting less of something else that is really important to us. For instance, we really want to make the most of every moment in our lives. We want to be always doing things and being active and engaging with the world around us; but then that takes us away from actualising our potential to have a calm, relaxed, and relatively sane existence. And, of course, the basic tension at the heart of person-centred theory can be understood in this way: that we really want people to like and value us, but the problem is, the more we strive for that, the more we end up doing things that don’t suit other parts of ourselves: for instance, our desire for creativity or freedom or being unique. Again, that’s where therapy can be really helpful because it can give us a chance to weigh up these different wants, and also to find ways of living our lives more ‘synergetically’: that is, getting more of what we most deeply want more of the time. For instance, if the problem is that we want to be really creative, but the people around us are judgey’ about that, then maybe we can come to see that we need different people around us in our lives so that we can get creativity and relatedness at the same time: they don’t need to pull in opposite ways.

And that brings us to the third possibility: that some times the world around us makes it really difficult for us to get to the places that we know and feel, deep down, we really want to get to. An asylum seeker, for instance, wants safety in her life, and to feel self-respect, but living in the midst of a racist social context makes it really difficult for her to get that. And note here, it’s not that her actualising tendency gets squashed or suppressed or goes away, it’s that, with the best will in the world, she can’t get to where she wants to be because her world is standing in her way. In fact, when we look at both of the two other answers above, they’re also very much about a person’s social context. So, for instance, we don’t learn from the world about how best to actualise our most important directions; or the world creates conditions for us (like judgemental friends) that means the actualisation of one direction means the undermining of another. Here, therapy can help us think about how we change our world; but, as in the case of the asylum-seeker above, it sometimes needs more than that. If the problems are obstacles in the world, it needs real social and political change—equality, social justice, ending racism, etc—to help more people get more of what they deeply want more of the time.

So, for me, it makes really good sense to say that people know, deep down, what they want in their lives, and what’s good for them. No-one can tell me that what I really need in my life is closeness, or becoming a writer, or caring for others. I know, ‘inside’, what works best for me, what feels right. But when it comes to me trying to actually achieve that, things can get a lot more complicated, and however much I might try and do my best, I’m not always, necessarily, doing the best thing that I could be doing. Sometimes, for the world I inhabit, it’s not always the most effective way, or the most synergetic way—and that’s where therapy is great. But sometimes, however smart I am, the world just isn’t going to let me get to where I know I want to be: and then we might need to change that world, through personal or collective action. As human beings, we can be amazingly smart, but that doesn’t mean we always get it right all of the time. Recognising that things can be better—both at the individual and at the social level—is what gives us our incredible capacity to grow.

Critical parent or lazy slob? What's the real conflict at the heart of human being?

At the heart of each of the different approaches to therapy is an understanding of human beings in terms of a core inner conflict, and each one sees it in a slightly different way.

In the psychodynamic approaches, it's like a fight between a lecherous, aggressive drunk and a police officer who's wanting to keep the peace. And with a bossy, nasty magistrate pointing fingers over the police officer's shoulder.

In the humanistic approaches, it's like the battle between a free-spirited child and a critical, controlling parent who's worried what the neighbours will think.

In the existential approaches, it's like an argument between two disputants who cannot--and will not--seek a compromise. It doesn't matter what they're arguing about. You can guarantee that one of them will always disagree.

And in the CBT approaches, it's like a row between two flatmates: one a sensible, hardworking student (who's not averse to having fun), and the other a lazy slob who has never really developed the skills or confidence to make the most of things.

Which model is right? When you look at it this way, it's clear that there's no right or wrong, because all these different kinds of conflicts can happen between people--and within people--and there's no reason to think that only ever one of them is the 'right' one. Sometimes, we're lazy and need to give ourselves a kick, sometimes we clamp down on ourselves too much, sometimes we just can't stop arguing with ourselves and need to accept that there's always going to be some element of that. And when we view people in terms of all these possibilities, we get so much more of a richer view of human being than any one perspective can provide on its own.  All our theories are great, but they're even greater when we see them as a rich diversity of resources that we can draw on in helping to understand clients, rather than as exclusive truths. 

How do you go about getting what you want from life? Seven stages that might get missed

‘The central “business” of human life,’ writes James Bugental, the existential-humanistic therapist, ‘is the translation of intentions into actuality as we try to have the living experience which we believe we need and want.' In other words, human living is about striving towards the things we want--for ourselves, for others, for our world--and, ideally, with passion, excitement and success.

But how do we go about getting what we want? Based on the psychological theory and research, it's possible to identify seven stages in this process: 

1. Emanation: the bubbling up of wants and desires.

2. Evaluation: checking these out against reality and working out what's best to do.

3. Intention: making a commitment to achieving particular things.

4. Planning: Working out how we are going to do it.

5. Action: Getting on with it, and maintaining our activity.

6. Feedback: Monitoring how we're getting on and making any necessary changes.

7. Termination: Disengaging with our goals and bringing things to an end.

Of course, all these stages are entirely interlinked. And there can be multiple processes going on at once, all at different stages.

Ideally, we go through each of these stages--at least to some extent. So we give our wants and desires free flow to bubble up, and then we think about them in a reflective and mature way, working out what makes sense to take forward. We spend some time thinking about plans for making this a reality, and then get on with it, all the while keeping an eye to what impact this seems to be having. And when we've done enough, we're ready to disengage, enjoy our successes, and turn our attention to something else.

The problems can come, though, if any of these stages get missed out, done badly, or if we get too focused on them to the expense of other stages. So you might find it interesting to think about the stages in this process that you do really well, and those that you could pay some more attention to.

Emanation: Are you someone who pushes down your wants and desires, who finds it hard to be in touch with your intuitive sense of things? Or, conversely, are you someone who has so many different wants and desires bubbling up that they feel overwhelmed and in chaos.

Evaluation: Sometimes it's great to go with our desires. Sometimes, they can take us to some crazy places. So are you someone who tends to skip the evaluation phase, and just pushes on to doing things without putting the effort in to weighing up what's best? Or, conversely, are you someone who spends so much time evaluating and balancing things up that you never actually make a commitment to doing anything?

Intention: And then, do you have the passion, conviction and confidence to try and take forward what you know is best, or falter at this point and go back to evaluating? This is the big existential leap--into the unknown. The point of no return where, yes, you'll either fail or succeed and what you're wanting to do. But maybe, conversely, just run at intention and commit yourself to everything without really filtering down to what your priorities are. We can't do everything we want: try to do it all and you can sometimes end up doing nothing.

Planning: Some people are great planners. Some people are obsessive planners and drive everyone else crazy because they seem so locked in to the planning stage. And other people just think 'What the hell' and skip this stage entirely: leapfrogging from emanation to intention to action. But a bit of planning and forethought can go a long way: research shows, in particular, that working out what you are going to do when things go badly can be essential in reaching your goals.

Action: Once you get going, do you persist with it, or do you get distracted and go onto other tasks before you're anywhere near completing your current one? A million jobs left unfinished?

Feedback: Research shows clearly that attending to how you're doing helps you get to where you want to go to. If you're trying to make friends, for instance, is it working, or do you seem to be putting people off more than attracting them? And do you get defensive and obstinant, and push on regardless. But conversely, are you so concerned about feedback that you're bending and twisting like a willow, always trying to get it exactly right?

Termination: Keeping on regardless can be a waste of energy, particularly where goals are unattainable or futile.  But some people do exactly that. And the research shows it can lead to depression, and may also be tied in with things like obsessive behaviours. Some times, you need to let go, and knowing when to 'hold them and fold them' is, perhaps, one of the greatest life skills.

***

None of us are perfect at getting from where we are to where we want to be. And if you think about the millions of things that we're all trying to do at any one time, it's not surprising. But thinking about the places where you might tend to go wrong could be helpful: getting a bit more balance in your life, and a bit more of what you want out of it.

If you're 'prevention focused', don't expect to be happy (and don't expect to be calm if you're focused on promotion)

I love the chapter in the Oxford handbook of human motivation by Abigail Scholer and E. Tory Higgins (2012): 'Too much of a good thing? Trade-offs in promotion and prevention focus'.  Basically, it says that people vary in terms of how much they are 'promotion-focused' (trying to make good things happen), or 'prevention-focused' (trying to stop bad things from happening). But the really interesting point is that if you are a very prevention focused person--someone who's always trying to stop catastrophes from happening--then you can't expect to experience too much happiness: after all, that's not what you're aiming for. At best, what you're going to experience is calm and relief.  And the same thing holds for people with a natural tendency towards promotion: if you spend your life trying to get new experiences (that's me), then you can't complain if you don't have much calm or respite in your life (that's me too). What's the solution? Scholer and Higgins suggest that it may be best to have a balance of prevention and promotion focus, so that you can make the most of whatever situation and circumstances you encounter. So the first thing to ask yourself is whether you're a promotion or a prevention kind of person. Then think about whether you want to bring a bit more of the other one into your life.

Approach trumps avoidance

Just back from PRIDE in Brighton with our kids. So great to see so much celebration: of diversity, of partying, of doing things differently and having fun. Creativity and pleasure and colour and experimentation; and people doing it and other people watching it and everyone enjoying everyone else doing things they love.

It's such a million miles away from so much of what's going on in the world today: walls, fear, wars, people fighting other people and getting scared of things that are different and new. Brexit.  Retreating back into our homeland island out of fear of foreigners coming over and destroying what 'ours'.

In recent years, some psychologists have talked about their being two basic forces, two things that we strive for: 'approach' and 'avoidance'.  Approach is about going out in the world. About learning and growing and diversity and fun. It's about moving towards things--things that we might not fully know--and embracing them in all their otherness. And then there's avoidance, which is about keeping away from things. Pushing things back. Trying to protect what's out. Pride and Brexit. Love and fear. Expansion and contraction.

Of course, we need both. We need to learn to love and grow; but if a rabid lion is coming at us, it doesnt do much good to embrace it with a welcoming grin. We need to protect ourselves and the ones we love. We need to have the ability to shut down.  But there's reasons, psychologically, why taking an avoidance stance towards life tends to cause more problems than an approach one; and that's well supported by the psychological evidence. For instance, people who are more avoidant tend to have poorer mental health, and also tend to do less well in therapy.

So why does avoidance get trumped by approach? First, if you're focused on avoiding things, there's no real way of knowing when you've got to an endpoint.  A person striving for more friends, for instance, can know when they've achieved that goal.  But a person trying to avoid loneliness can never fully know if they've achieved that, as there's always the possibility that it'll return.  Second, closely linked to this, we're less likely to be successful in achieving avoidance goals because the warded off state, in most instances, simply can't be eradicated.  So you can try and 'get rid of foreigners', but you're never going to fully manage it: there's always that lurking feeling that it's never fully done. Third, the means towards avoiding something is often less clear than the means towards approaching something.  How do I avoid loneliness, for instance, when there are so many different ways in which it might be evoked?  It's like trying to hold back the tide.  By contrast, if I'm trying to achieve something, I can create plans and goals and work out a way of doing it.  Fourth, if I'm trying to get TO somewhere, there's likely to be a boost to my self esteem when I get there. But successful avoidance is unlikely to leave me with a sense of achievement.  Finally, trying to avoid things is inherently problematic because it requires us to call to mind the thing we want to avoid, hence making it more salient.  If I want to get rid of foreigners, for instance, I have to think of them, and then that gets me more fixated on what I'm afraid of. 

So while we all get scared of things, and all want to be avoidant at times; it's a philosophy of approach that is generally better for us--and almost certainly for the people and the world that we're engaging with. And I do believe, perhaps naively, that over time our world will move in the direction of approach.  I think it's a natural thing because, at the end of the day, avoidance so often just doesn't get us anywhere. Ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, there's no way that the police would have had a float at the PRIDE parade. But who does that benefit? Who gets something out of it? By contrast, today, seeing the lorries full of gay and lesbian police officers: they're having a great time, the crowds are having a great time watching them. They're off to a party. Is there really, any, sense at all in winding the clock back?

I guess, ultimately, what I'm trying to say here is that there's a good, strong, logical argument for why things like PRIDE and celebrating diversity make so much more sense than things like Trump's wall and ethnophobia. It's not just about being nice and sweet to people and rainbow flags, it's about a rigorous philosophy and ethic of what makes this place a better place for us all.

Feeling good means 'actualising' our directions in life

A lot of contemporary models of human being suggest that we are basically 'directional'. What that means is that we are always 'going to somewhere', always pointed in particular directions. We're striving, trying to improve things, trying to be something and somewhere more than we are: even if it's more chilled out! If that's the case, then we can understand wellbeing in terms of how much we're able to 'actualise' this direction: how much we're aligned with where it is that we want to go.

This actualisation process can be understood in terms of six As. First there is awareness: knowing what our goals are and where we are trying to get to. Second there is anticipation: having a sense that our goals are possible and things that we can achieve. Third comes approach: progressing towards the things that we want; and then comes acceleration: moving towards our wants at an increasing speed. Importantly (but maybe not the most important thing) is then achieving our goals. Finally, and particularly one that may become more important with age, is appreciating what we have achieved.

So, viewed from this perspective, the 'good life' is one in which we have things in life we're striving towards which are important to us, and we have a sense that we're making some kind of progress towards them. We don't have to get these goals all the time, or move rapidly on to other things, but just a general sense that we're pointed in a direction and that we're able to attain it in some way.  And from this perspective, psychological problems are associated with not being clear about what we want from life, or knowing what we want but feeling that it is impossible to get there--or not making any progress at all. Or even it might be about getting to our goals but then not taking the time to appreciate what we have achieved and just rushing on to the next one.

Last thing: if we think about wellbeing in this way, it also shows how what we feel is both about ourselves AND our social and political environment. I might not progress towards the things I want because I don't have good strategies for getting there.  But I also might not progress towards the things that I want because the world is telling me about all these amazing things I should have (a perfect body, the latest phone, a devoted partner) and then not providing me with any possibility at all of getting there. So helping people change the way they go about things can be important--through therapy or self-development work--but what can also be really important is focusing on social and political change. If we create a fairer world with more resources for everyone, then more people can move towards more of what they want more of the time.

Forging new habits

This isn't the most exciting story--it's about trains and commuting--but there's a point to it. When I first starting working at the University of Roehampton up in south London, I would get the 170 bus from Clapham Junction. It was slow and crowded--crawling along the South Circular with the school runs--but it got me there; and it was what I knew. A few people said to me that another way of doing this would be to get an overground train from Clapham Junction to Barnes first, and then get a quicker bus. But when I thought overground train I thought 'unreliable,' 'slow', 'waiting for ages'. And it was one more change. So I never tried it.

Then a colleague starting doing this journey with me. She was very nice, and even though she normally took the overground train first; she got the bus with me because it was my way of doing things. Then, after a while--and after a while of her hinting that maybe we should try the overground train--we did. Well, it wasn't miraculous, but the overground train came pretty quickly, was a lot calmer, and saved about 15 minutes on the journey.

Next time, on my own, I did the journey by 170 bus again; but it was so slow and painful compared with the overground train that I went back to the train, and have pretty much continued doing that ever since. And the overground trains are actually pretty regular--much more than the busses--and they're faster and more reliable, and it gets me into work a bit earlier now and a lot less frazzled.

So what's the point of this story? Sometimes, we don't do things that are better for us because we have assumptions and prejudices, and we don't think to challenge them. Indeed, we sometimes don't even know that they can be challenged. It's just the way that we think things are. So changing for the better means being flexible and open about how we see things, and always being alert to new possibilities and options. It means taking the risk of trying out something new. It means attending to feedback from others and hearing from them how we might do things differently. And once we've found better ways of doing things, it's about bedding them in so that they become new habits. Change, perhaps, comes about through forging one new habit at the time: making the things that we find out are better for us the things that we just naturally do, even if it's finding a different route to work.