 We demystify what goes on behind the therapy room door. Join us on this voyage of discovery and co-creative conversations. This is the therapy show behind closed doors podcast with Bob Cook and Jackie Jones. Welcome back to the first podcast episode of 2024. This is episode number 135 Bob. My god and it's the first it's god gosh did you have you had a good break? Yes yes he's been wonderful absolutely. Okay so what's the I remember the title actually but say it for yourself you know for the podcast readers. Okay the title of this one is is there ever any reality in the therapy room? This is a bit Twilight Zone. I feel like I need to have a backing music on this. Well off you go then what do you think? I want to say no off the top of my head. I think we can be in the moment in the here and now but I think there's an awful lot of perception and ideal age you know whatever that word is there's a lot of other stuff that goes on in the therapy room. Yeah I mean sorry I couldn't I couldn't agree with more that first sentence because for a lot of psychotherapies or psychotherapist models the aim for a lot of them is to help the client be more aware and reflect on their processes and to help them stay in the here and now and help them to be in their here and now with their own realities. Yeah and of course more disturbed a client gets the more they may slip out of so-called reality. Yeah start acting and feeling feeling from a different reality than other people's realities and that can lead to what some people call psychosis and when we look at diagnosis of psychosis it's out of touch with reality. Yeah definition. I think that's a phrase that I'm hearing banded around I don't want to say willy-nilly but it seems to be a lot more in general conversations now about derealisation and depersonalisation it seems to be used a lot more now. Well you know those are words which come with like a DSM for diagnosis of psychosis or moving away from reality or their defence mechanisms to enable people to defend against their own realities so yeah they are probably used more I think and it depends what you read as well in terms of this podcast I mean the first question surely and it's not an easy one to answer maybe it's in the land of what you often say woo-oo land or whatever but you know the first question surely is what realities what reality are we talking about? What is reality? I mean we can say you know what people often go to is consensus reality if you can get a consensus reality that often is the norm and XXX but when we have as clients of course even though we may have a certain reality which may or may not fit into the consensus of reality in so-called normality and this is a question to you as well as myself in my own head but really to you I think in this conversation is even though the person's reality might seem a bit distorted to you in front you know the couch in front of you yeah what do you do with that do you go with their reality as if it was the norm or do you go with that reality as a way of getting to understand them or do you go with their reality because you see their reality as pups have a higher lot of validity I mean I was wondering what you do when so when a client's reality isn't quite the reality that fits into your reality? All of the ones that you've just said I would say because I don't think I have a right to question anybody's reality it's the reality even if it's different from mine it's about finding some sort of middle ground where I can understand the reality rather than discount it because who am I to discount their reality so yes so I think you're saying is that you will use attunement or if you want to use that as a work it's kind of like memories memories our memories real because we've filtered out certain things that fit into what we think happened so even a memory and a recollection is that reality or is that our reality of a situation? Well I think you're absolutely correct in and I like what you said and you didn't quite say it well I'm going to say it but because I can't remember what you said these things like you want to make sure you honor and respect the reality of the client in front of you absolutely yeah yeah which is I think a very very good starting point yeah so I think that is vitally important so in this before that logic then so in a psychotherapy room we can say there's multi realities coming or there might be yes yes yeah I think that has to always be the case in my head yeah I think when when you look at it this is such a big topic really but when you look at it I know you said off screen off you know before we started recording this about the matrix there's so many different levels to to our perceptions and reality and what's real and what's not and everything I don't know whether anything is 100 real especially not when there's two people involved no and then we have group psychotherapy of course geez that's a minefield Bob all these different realities competing for what reality is real so with so with the clients with their different realities which is obviously the case because they have different experiences even they may fit into what might be called a consensus reality I really like what you said that you you respect persons where they're coming from to meet them etc etc you know I think there's a struggle that we all face and clients will face just the same and of course there's a continuum of health or people perhaps or deemed more disturbed or they come into therapy because they want to deal with their dysfunctional script what they're often struggling with I think in their consciousness and maybe sometimes their own consciousness is the realities of their internalised interjects yeah compete with let's say the here and now realities around them yes yeah I think and when you as a therapist when you start talking to the realities of their say parental interjects then we have even more realities in the room yeah or may have yeah I think when you said that I might if I'm on the right track that's where I would maybe you know discuss with a client about taking it to court and checking is this real is this true when we've got that internal dialogue and those interjects going on versus the here and now yeah so are we saying this is a very big question not necessary any answers to this but in this co-created discussion are we saying that the reality that the therapist holds higher has higher priority than the perhaps the realities or past realities that the client comes from I think it depends on the nature of those realities and how traumatic or damaging they can be I want to say I would challenge a client's reality certain realities that a client has that you know to better than rather than just going along with the reality I will pull a client up if I believe that what their reality isn't what I'm seeing you see I think we have a duty of clear care to our clients and most clients we see how often have a more dysfunctional damaged or toxic history yes perhaps up our own or let's put another way around I've done years and years and years and years of therapy yeah so hopefully I've got different healthy more script on the road than I had 35 40 years ago absolutely yeah the clients that come in to see me with their own unhealthy systems I think almost think it's a duty of care for the client to you know do what you just said really which is confront what might be happening in the from the realism or unrealism of the dysfunctional system of the client in front of you yeah but again I think it's worth noting that it needs to be done delicately without shame or anything like that and you know when the relationship is formed maybe yeah yeah I always like what TA therapists say I like it and on the other hand I think it's never how achievable is this when TA therapists not all of them so you know pardon me whether in different TA therapists just but in a lot of the TA books let's put it this way they talk about contracts treatment contracts coming from adult adult positions yeah you know what I'm going to do a world at the beginning of therapy and that's not so achievable is it not yeah so at the best I think I often may go with what I see as an adapted contract because it's not so easy to get an adult to adult contract yeah it's an interesting area that is about adult what's adult and yeah what you know adult adult defined in TA is often acting the appropriate that you know appropriate your age age you are in the room so me acting thinking feeling as though I'm 70 73 or you acting thinking feeling when you were 21 or whatever I agree totally but my adult changes moment to moment dependent on what's going on so my adult can be quite positive and you know uplifting but my adult can also be quite angry and whatever so it it it changes so I think there's many realities in the therapy with yeah now is it the therapist's reality that needs to take prominence though and now I don't think it's a particular artist but I do think one of the traps for a therapist is if they think or start going down the road where they think their own truth has a monopoly yeah when when you ask that question then the thought that went through my head was do we as therapists sometimes need to step into the client's reality then good really good question and if I'm thinking that then I would say no my reality does not take precedent over the clients a really good question and I think that's what you've just said this would be important I think we need to get somehow get to a place where we can be attuned to actually I would say step inside their reality but get to a place where we were of curiosity where we start to you know explore understand help people be aware of where people are coming from because however bizarre a person's reported reality might be if you go back in time to the context of that reality or that belief system it will be absolutely logical yeah yeah absolutely however illogical it feels today at the time it would be an absolutely amazing decision that they made yeah right yeah and that's where a therapist needs to go I believe yeah they need to almost suspend their own reality to do that yeah which again you've been able to suspend our own reality means that we've got to be aware of what our reality is in the first place which is why it is so important to have your own therapy and know your own stuff that's right if I look back at the last year 23 one of the most violent years in terms of you think of the Russian-Ukraine war the Israeli and Palestine conflict and we could go on and they're about realities they're about any sense yeah realities what's right what's wrong yeah I do hope this year is going to be better me too terms of peace and harmony yeah and I think it's important that we do have you maybe it's not a reality but we do have that you know child part in us that is always thinking the positive and wanting a better outcome see that's a fantastic gore yeah no no no no I think that's really true I think it's really important that we hold hope we hold positivity and we hold celebration we hold the goodness of heart and kindness and everything else of these values we're talking about here and at least the therapist reality so we can you know hopefully model down some of those values and some of those ways of being with the client yeah and again you know I think it's probably come from my upbringing that I am you know potentially a glass half full rather than one that's half empty that even in the midst of terrible things there are people there that are doing wonderful work oh absolutely and that's the bit that I try and hang on to yeah whether that's me you know in my child good kind of blinkering the the bad stuff out I don't know but yeah that's good and and very real yes yeah I think so and I do try and pass that on to my clients and what you said you know earlier on I think is really really important that you know rather than criticising the decisions that we made at certain points in our life it's really important that we understand that that was the best that we could come up with at that time and it survived you know we we survived it and it worked well for us couldn't agree more I hope this this this podcast hasn't been too much in the woo-woo land but I think it's an interesting it's interesting things to think about in terms of what is real and what isn't real and the different competing realities and you know I think is an important concept for therapists yeah because if a therapist goes down the road of putting their reality as the only reality there is then honestly therapy will never happen no what I call authentic therapy anyway yeah yeah and it's a dance that we're doing in the therapy room a lot of the time you know we're for me I'm really feeling whatever it is that the clients bring in each time I've not got preconceived ideas of what they're gonna bring to me so it's it's a reacting in the moment to it yeah I spend most of my time clinical life trying to get away from assumptions not so easy no no yes I completely agree so so yes thank you for that Bob it's it's been another really interesting one I think that could have been a lot a lot longer and I like to have woo-woo conversations with the I'm not sure which podcast it was but a few ago where we were talking about existential questions and things like that it's really good to to get our mind thinking from a different perspective sometimes yeah I was talking about Irvin Yellen yes lots of wonderful books on you know working with groups working existentially lots of accessible tales from the psychotherapy room lots of interesting existential reflections and I like that yeah there's something that I'm really interested in and looking at you know from a personal point of view is you know the mind-bodied connection and how that works with with healing do you know to me and the conversations that go in us as a you know a human being yeah in a in a bodied way I agree yeah and a gut instinct and things like that there's there's a process to all of this it's not necessarily woo-woo there is scientific no no I mean what you're talking about here is intuition of course yes yeah Eric Byrne who was a creative transaction analysis wrote a lot on intuition and I think he's very very early books in 57 58 were on intuition yeah it's kind of yeah which is in the heart of the child ego state but it's we lose contact with it we rationalize everything or we try and logicalize everything yeah absolutely often socialized out though yes yeah yeah absolutely so and maybe that's a topic for another day what's the next topic come on Jackie let's see what we're going into 24 with the next topic is blind spots in therapy which I think follows on quite well from this blind spots and the red flags yes you see yes it certainly does because if we allow ourselves to develop our heightened sense of intuition or at least be in touch with it again we yes it's a wonderful podcast there we go then that's what we're doing until next time Bob yeah bye bye bye you've been listening to the therapy show behind closed doors podcast we hope you enjoyed the show don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review we'll be back next week with another episode