 Excellent. 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 next episode of The Therapy Show behind closed doors with a wonderful Mr Bob Cook and myself Jackie Jones and what we're going to be talking about in this episode, which is episode 123, is empowerment and self-agency important goals in the therapy process. Jackie, they're the most important goals in the therapy process that you will ever have. Yes, I agree. And let's take self-agency and what we mean by self-agency. So self-agency, if you looked it up in Wikipedia or from a psychological perspective, means the promotion of action. It means actually the movement of action. So in other words, you can feel yourself assertive in your head. But until you do an assertive action like standing up to your school teacher or standing up to your colleague or whatever, then it stays in your head. So self-agency is the ability to externalize actions. In other words, a client can come into therapy highly motivated. You can do lots of educative therapy about what I need to do to develop self-resilience, what I need to do to stand up to somebody who bullies me. But before you two actually do that, demands agency. And demands something to happen. Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that often doesn't happen. We learn how to do things. We learn how to be mindful. We learn how to do all this stuff, but then we don't actually do anything with it. That's right. And then we wonder why nothing changes. Our sense of agency is limited. Yeah. And I think it's so important to give permission or help a client in the era, in the arena of agency. Yeah. Because otherwise, they may use intellectualization or passivity as a major defense against anything happening. Yeah. So in that respect, do you set homework or goals? Okay. Here we go. Yeah. So according to what type of therapist you are, if I had a guess with you, Jackie, that you're somebody who probably does set, I don't particularly like the word homework, but I will stay with homework at the moment, things for them to do outside the psychotherapy session. Is that correct? Yes. Yeah. Even if it's just to get curious about the behavior. Yeah. And I think that's great, by the way. I like the idea of people practicing some of the things that they learned in psychotherapy in the real world. Yeah. Then coming back and talking about how they got on. Yeah. I really think that's a really positive part of people integrating new behaviors and coping mechanisms. In fact, without that bit that you just talking about there, therapy might not actually happen. In other words, it might just stay as an idea. Yeah. Or it may stay in the world of the therapy room. But nothing actually happens if that makes sense. Absolutely. See, I know I've mentioned this in the past, but the reason why I love the training that I did at MIP was because of that self agency. We were still in training, but practicing. So that's, we were kind of learning about it, but then doing it at the same time. Yeah. You were practicing how to do competencies. And then you've got a placement and you've got a client. Yeah. Practice the things that you learned actually with clients. And it's like an old, what I had in the 60s and 70s, apprentice style learning. Yeah. Absolutely. Do things on the job. Yeah. Yeah. I learned, I was a hairdresser. That was my first job. And I was an apprentice hairdresser. So I went to college one day a week. And the other four days I was in a salon. Wow. So yeah. I never knew that about you. Well, there you go. You learned something. I never learned. You said something to me on Facebook. Oh, off air or somewhere. That's another thing you learned about me. I can't remember what it was, but there's a thing I've learned about you. It's about horses. Oh yeah. Polo horses. Yeah. Polo horses. Yes. Never knew that. So yeah. I used to be a hairdresser. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. So get back. I think the last video, if I remember, was on integrative psychotherapy. Now in the, in the, in the psychotherapy sequence, you need to help people integrate new behaviors in the real world. Yeah. And then bring it back and discuss how they got on. Now in that process, not only will you promote integration, but you will promote active self-agency. Yeah. So I'm a great fan of that, what you just talked about. But the bit is that you talk about it afterwards. It doesn't get lost. You know, so I was used to say this when I trained psychotherapists, if you are going to be this type of therapist, it needs to be followed up. Yeah. So if you're going to set them things to do, you have to jot it down in your notebook or your memory or somewhere to check up the following week how they've got on. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. That's something I say to clients as well about, you know, a lot of people like journaling, they write things down. And I always say to them, do you ever go back and reflect on it? Because just writing stuff down and putting it in a book and putting it away isn't going to do anything. You need to go back and reflect on it and see if there's a pattern and, you know, that sort of stuff. Absolutely. I used to keep way back before these, laughing to myself, way before as a therapist, I don't know what age, I don't know, 26, 27. I used to keep Daris, these big Collins Daris. Yeah. You would have a huge, each of the Collins Daris had big pages. And I, so I, I remember finding 21 or 22 years of these Collins, Collins Daris. And I stopped doing them when I, I think when I met Stephanie, I've done a lot of therapy as well. So life was a lot better. I look back at these Daris and they were full of doom and glue and negativity. And I sort of knew that was my history. But with the therapy and surrounding myself with people who were more healthy, I sort of didn't recognise part of myself. Yeah. Well, that must have been really interesting. And moving. Yeah. Absolutely. I was thinking, as you were saying that, how you now as a therapist would have been with you then, if that makes sense, if both being a room together, how interesting. Yeah. Totally. And I got rid of quite a few Daris because they were so negative. Yeah. Though doom laden. That I couldn't bear to have that as part of my history anymore. Wow. I've probably only got two or three of those Daris left now or three or four. Yeah. So I think that if you are going to set homework or behaviours as new coping mechanisms or whatever it is, for clients to practice integrating in their life, you need to follow it up. Yeah. Because so many therapists, I know this through provision. They set homework, but then they don't follow it up. Yeah. And I say, well, do you think they did it? Yeah. Well, we never really followed up. Well, why didn't you follow it up? Oh, oh, other things came along, which is concentrated on. Yeah. Or if they were honest and might say, well, I forgot perhaps. Yeah. Something like that. But I think it's a great detriment if you don't follow it up. Yeah. It's a lost experience. It's a lost learning experience or whatever it is. Yeah, absolutely. I must admit, I do make it a note of it because my memory isn't the best. So I do make a note of it. Good. Good. But even if they come back with some burning thing that they want to do in that session at some point, I will just refer to it, even if it's, I know you don't want to talk about it this week, but we need to catch up on. Yeah. Whatever it was that you did. Yeah. I remember there are many, many groups by the way, Jackie, perhaps this is for another podcast around tales of psychotherapy. Perhaps I'll use this, but I'll briefly mention this here. I used to put it in the homework bracket if you like. With some clients who would have difficulties having healthy relationships. And they had so many red flags that they missed the red flags because of their history. So as we worked through all this and dealt with the red flags, I said, okay, we'll find a shopping list of the top qualities you would like for a healthy partner. Yeah. Day six. Yeah. And then usually they found that very hard. But when we got six healthy qualities, I said, okay, now go away and practice looking for this type of person. That's really interesting. In the next two weeks, how you've got on. Yeah. And amazingly, amazingly, because I did go back until it was time, they often reported, well, I've actually found somebody with these two of those three of those qualities. That's really good. Because sometimes, especially in the dating game, I've got quite a few clients or whatever that have been dating. And they just wandering around aimlessly. I mean, you know, now that it's all online, it's just a swiping thing. It's, well, you see, Jackie, two things. One, they don't know what they're looking for. Yeah. And B, they're often operating from an older script, which is based on red flags, basically. Yeah. So they, there's a lot of therapy before that homework, but it's a homework I get quite a lot. And I smile because I've had quite a few marriages. Oh, look at you. In the last 38 years, I'm sure. A bit of a cupid. It may or may not have come from that homework. So I'm a great believer in that work. Going back to the topic anyway, the self-agency. Oh, that's self-agency, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Putting it into practice. Yeah. Yeah. And empowerment comes with that. There's nothing more empowering than taking action positively. Yeah. I don't mean taking action negatively, which confirms a script. I mean taking action positively, which backs up a new script, a new script on the road. Nothing more empowering than that, is there? No. No. It comes together. Even doing it and it not working out, it's still self-agency. Do you know what I mean? It's pushing our comfort zone and doing something different. So it's not negative, even if it doesn't work out, if that makes sense. It makes complete sense. So if we take empowerment, now, you know, there's a continuum of empowerment, but how can I explain this? For people who come right at the beginning of therapy, who might be depressed, they may be withdrawn, they might be passive, they may have a very unhappy life, they may have XXX. So empowerment might be, right at the beginning, a new awareness. Yeah. That they hadn't actually been aware of before. Oh, actually, I hadn't realised that I could do this. Or I hadn't realised that it was okay for me to express feelings. That's empowerment in itself, I think, because what's starting to happen is you've got a germ of a new awareness that might lead to other things. So though we haven't perhaps got to what we just talked about a moment ago, which is the development of the self-agency with that, but I do think the awareness of new, like new sprouts coming along, the awareness of new parts of ourselves, or the awareness of new aspects of ourselves, or the awareness of, well, I didn't actually think about it that way. That in itself, I think, can be very empowering. Absolutely. Just that thought of possibility that it's possible for me to do this. Yeah. That hope actually exists. Now, is there anything more less empowering than the belief of hope? Yeah. Actually, we can change that. We don't have to stay in our own misery. We can actually change things. Yeah. Now, that's empowering, isn't it? Absolutely. Yeah. How you get there, how you get there for the place of believing that life is pointless, life is despairing, that you have no value, everybody's got how to get to you is another story. Yeah. Yeah. But the development of that idea, that possibility you've just said there, Jackie, and to grasp hold of it, even if it's just for the first time, is so empowering. Yeah. Yeah. And I think when you were talking then about the sprouts of something, instead of having that why me and woe is me attitude to having why not me in a positive way. You know, when we compare ourselves to others and they've got everything and I've got nothing and he's just having that one thought of, well, why not me? If they can do it, why can't I do it? Yeah. And that is so empowering and the client comes back and this has happened many, many, many times. They come back the next week and say, because I often have check-in in groups, particularly I'm thinking of here. Yeah. And I ask them for positive news and they come back. I just want to say that since last week, I've started to believe that things perhaps can change. Yeah. How empowering is that? Yeah. Even if that's the first step, that nothing else can happen unless there's that part of us that believes that change can happen. Because if we go into therapy thinking change can't happen, there's no point being in therapy really. Yeah. And the therapist needs to be a therapist, I believe, that promotes empowerment. Yeah. And promotes the possibility, and promotes explicitly the possibility of change. Yeah. Not reinforce the opposite somehow. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think at times, I don't want to say I've overstepped the mark, but I can be quite firm with my clients when they keep coming back with the same things, you know, to me. And it's kind of like, well, we can talk about the same things, but unless you go out and take action, nothing is going to change. That's right. So that is very common. We've passed the talking and we'll get on to the doing. Yeah. Yeah. What you just said there is probably the most common process in psychotherapy where you have been working with a client over the same thing, the same thing, the same thing, the same thing, and it seems nothing changes. Yeah. That's when a therapist needs to change tack. Yeah. Yeah. They need to look at what is underneath the process that the person is so stuck. Yeah. The therapist doesn't change tack. Nothing will happen. I think I may be changed tack by just bringing it into the room and saying something about it. Yeah. Well, that's the first. It's really familiar. I'm sure that we've discussed this before. Yeah. And are you sabotaging yourself by, or are we sabotaging ourselves? Are we doing that? By going over the same process and process again, perhaps what we need to look at is what is underneath the surface. Yeah. Stopping you, empowering yourself or taking action. Yeah. But unless the therapist thinks developmentally, by the way, then that might not happen. If you've got a therapist that just stays in here and now and doesn't think of developmental deficits and developmental traumas and fragmentation of the self as reason why the person is stuck. Yeah. Then we have another story, I think. Yeah. It's all very interesting. As always for me in the therapy room, it's different layers. Yes, always. Literally layers. Yeah. And the bit is, and the bit, Jackie, is where you stop, where both of you stop. In other words, if you're a long-term developmental relations psychotherapist and that's where the client wants to go, then there's a whole process which involves. If you're a short-term psychotherapist working with focused, shorter goals and outcomes of focus or whatever it is, then you have a different type of therapy. But I spent 39 years or 38 years working developmentally through the layers the way you're talking because that's the type of therapist. I was a contractor with the clients for that and I was trained for that. Yeah. That doesn't mean all therapy has to be like that. It can be short-term, you can stay on the surface, you can still do work. For me, it seems to be both. I'll see some clients on a short-term basis, but then in six months, 12 months time, they'll get back in touch with me and they want to come back and then kind of go down a bit deeper and then they'll go off and then they come back and every time it's like another layer, but they don't do it all in one go. No, you can never do all this in one go. Yeah. It's great they come back, shows a great sense of motivation and self-agency to take action to come back. Absolutely, yeah. So I think impairment and self-agency go together. Actually, they're part of the same process. And I'm so pleased that we've done this episode, Bob, because for me, it's a positive thing that we do in therapy. You know, sometimes therapy can feel quite heavy and all that sort of stuff, but empowering our clients and encouraging them to take action. For me, it's the really positive part of it. Absolutely. It's not all just sitting and talking about things. We do encourage them to... Give permission, validation, encouragement. All the really important parts of the world of psychotherapy. Absolutely, yeah. And that gives me a fire in my belly, that stuff. That's the part of my job that I love. Well, good for you and me as well. And when they're getting feedback from it, when they say, you know, what we did in that session last week has really encouraged me to go out and do this. It's like, yes. Yeah, and that's empowerment. And that's actually, you know, the development of self-agency as well. That's why I say they go together. Yeah. You know, there are some of the hallmarks of, you know, where psychotherapists are helping people go to take charge and to change things and to really take ownership and destiny of their own lives. Yeah. That's wonderful when that happens. So, Bob, thank you. And what we're going to be talking about next time is learning from clients in the therapy room. You kind of touched on tales from the therapy room. So we've given it a bit of a different slant. And I'm really looking forward to listening to some of your tales from the therapy room. Yeah. And also, I'm looking forward to you bringing some as well. I've got quite a few. I mean, they're all confidential. So they'll be wrapped up in ways. But I think that if we asked any therapist, they could all talk about their own learnings, I hopefully, from the psychotherapy room. One of the best writers for people listening just a moment is Yalam. Y-A-L-O-M. Irvin Yalam. He's about 93 now. He's still got a couple of clients. Wow. And he's written many, many books. I would think he's probably one of the finest, finest existential psychotherapists I know. His first book, and I think he's written many, was called Love's Executioner. And it was Tales from the Psychotherapy Room. And then he went on to write books like Staring to the Sun. I've probably got 10 or 11 here. But Yalam, please, anybody interested in existential psychotherapy or learnings from the therapy room, by his first book, which I think is really good, is Love's Executioner. And it will not be expensive, but you will love it. I'm going to go and have a look for that now. You must be able to write an encyclopedia on this, Bob. I felt very envious the other day, because one of my supervisees who's been a therapist for a very long time, and has been a supervisee of mine for many years, about how long has been a psychotherapist for a long time, so I was amazed when he said this. He says, oh, I've kept all notes from all my clients. I said, what do you mean? He said, oh, well, I always jot down a lot of notes, far more than me, by the way. And I said, well, where are they? This is sort of back 20 or 30 years of therapy. He said, in a box, I said, you'll be able to write your existential book, then one, and you're on learnings from the client or something like that. Mine, unfortunately, the nuances of what I'm talking about here are in my head. So I'd probably have to have a hypnotherapy session to start getting some of these out. Or another way to do it would be to talk with you for an hour offline or something before. So it triggers all these memories. I think what I'm going to have to do before this podcast is do a bit of meditating and to remember some of the learnings. I think remembering it is far better than looking through a book and the notes that you've took because that's more personable to me. Yes, that's a nice take on it. Sometimes I don't need the facts. I just need to get the feeling for what's going on and that feels better for me. So don't go and write it all down, Bob. Just meditate and let it come up. Anyway, I look forward to next week. Until next week, Bob. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Take care, bye. Bye.