Uncommon Therapy

"That’s where the next book comes in. It’s called Uncommon Therapy , and it’s written by one of the family therapy pioneers, Jay Haley. But it’s about another therapist named Milton Erickson. Erickson understood that if therapy is about change, not insight, then in some important way you’re not tethered to reality. The therapist is free to create new realities. “Who I am and who you are is pretty much a plaything of context and assumptions” This tremendously empowers the therapist, but it also changes our whole sense of what is to be a person. The notion that who I am is this stable entity gets exploded. In fact, and the evidence for this is overwhelming, who I am and who you are is pretty much a plaything of context and assumptions. Change the context, change the assumptions, and you change the self. Do that with people in a relationship, and you change the relationship. As with Whitaker, this book will give you the sense, wow, I never imagined that therapists could do this. It’s enormously exciting, but for those people who have a traditional view of the self, it’s also deeply challenging. Can people change? The answer is a clear yes and no. We can’t change the psychological stuff we’re made of. Anxiety is always going to be an issue for a basically anxious person. Stupid people never become smart. When I look now at all the people I went to school with so many years ago, I see profound continuities between who they were and who they are now. And yet. While people can’t change, they can learn. They can learn a lot. And what they learn can have huge implications for how well they function. The anxious person can learn tools for out-processing anxious thoughts that are so effective these thoughts stop bothering her or affecting her life. “While people can’t change, they can learn” In the same way, people can and do—all the time—learn enough about how to deal with their partners to turn a very troubled relationship into one that’s mostly good and fun and rewarding. It’s making this learning happen that’s the therapist’s job. This is the missing-tools approach to therapy, and it works beautifully. You just need to identify the missing tools, teach them, help the patient learn to use them, and suddenly everything is different."