The Hidden Answer

The Hidden Answer

By, Allison McFatter

One significant theme of therapy is recognizing and understanding a client’s ‘answer’, or how the client has adapted to a problem. In understanding what influenced the client to respond to a problem as he/she did, the therapist can better understand how the client has learned to cope with challenges, and why the coping technique makes sense to the client. In understanding the client’s perspective, therapy can then aim to find a positive solution to the original problem – the problem that led to the ‘answer’ in the first place.

Let’s say that someone comes to therapy to quit drinking. The drinking might be assumed to be the problem, but would quitting really be the end-all solution? What would happen when alcohol is taken away?

Drinking is often a coping method (the answer) to deal with an underlying problem. Taking alcohol away without addressing the original problem that led to the drinking will leave the client stranded in the same predicament, but now their learned coping method is forbidden.

Therapy that does not take into account the multi-layers in human behavior misses how drinking might play an adaptive role in the client’s life. The alcohol, while causing problems in itself, is being utilized as a tool to solve an underlying problem. If therapy focused on the underlying problem, the need for alcohol would dissolve once the original problem was no longer an issue.

Further thought: What do you think informs the creation of a person’s ‘answer’?

If you found this concept interesting, check out the following for more!

·                     Aesthetics of change by Keeney

·                     Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution by Watzlawick,        Weakland, & Fisch