One of my specialties is working with clients in individual therapy in combination with their experience in couples therapy. Oftentimes when two people engage in couples therapy, the work starts out on communication and relationship dynamics, but eventually we get to a point where we realize that the work that really needs to be done to improve the relationship is individual work. Once we identify that their relationship dynamic involves one partner or the other reacting a certain way, we want to explore why, and this why is often best explored individually.
This individual work often involves drilling down into what a client wants or doesn’t want, how they feel about certain aspects of their relationship, and why they react the way they do to their partner. In discussing these topics, I try to be especially aware of how to put the awareness we develop into words. Simple sentences made up of simple words. We work on developing a script, a way to express simply and clearly the feelings that up until now had been showing up in their relationship as vague and undefined. In a sense, we write a script.
There are certain aspects of my screenwriting career that continue to show up in my work as a therapist. One of these is the ability to figure out what a character wants, putting that into words that express this in the clearest way possible, and then tweaking it to make it sound like something the character would say. Much of the work of a screenwriter involves sitting around thinking about what a character wants, and then figuring out how to write that in an artful way. In my clinical work as a therapist, I am concerned less with the artful part of this and more with the clear part of it.
Refining Responses for Better Communication
This means asking my clients questions, and then working with them to shape their responses into a dialogue that we can agree makes sense. If a client struggles with anger at their partner, we would talk about this anger and what causes it, refining the answer so that the client will be able to go to their partner in couples therapy (or in their everyday life) and say, “When you do X, it makes me angry.” I know this doesn’t sound particularly incisive, but when the alternative is passive-aggressive behavior or an antagonistic vibe, it makes the alternative of saying a simple clear sentence seem pretty great.
But that’s not all. Why does their partner doing what they do make the client angry? That’s more work for us in individual therapy, where we explore this and talk about it until we get to the point where a client can say to their partner, “I get angry when you say X, because Y.” And the interesting thing about Y is that it usually has nothing to do with the partner. The anger that the client directs at their partner and blames them for causing is often a learned reaction to relationships that was taught to them through the example of observing their parents’ relationship. For instance, “I get angry when you micro-manage me in the kitchen, and it’s because I remember my parents getting into this same argument when I was a kid, so I guess I’m just programmed to react like that.” This is a simplification, of course, but it’s an example of the kind of dialogue we might write in therapy that a client can take into their real life and adapt for their own use.
One way this approach differs from screenwriting is that in screenwriting we aim to write things in a character’s voice. We figure out what they want and what they want to say, and then figure out how to say it in the way that this particular character would, which is different than how other characters would do it. However, in the context of therapy, I find that the scripts we write work best when anyone can say then. The voice is less about the client and more about the clear, objective statements of emotions we work on uncovering.
Evolving the Therapeutic Script
This can often feel awkward for someone not used to expressing their emotions clearly to others. So, I encourage clients to think about it as engaging in “therapist talk.” Don’t worry about sounding boring or clinical. And yes, it might feel awkward, like it isn’t in your own voice. But by learning to talk like this, conflict can be mitigated, fights avoided, all due to a better understanding of why we act and react the way we do. And this awareness is not only good for us, it’s amazing for our partner. When our partner learns that the reason we react with anger in a certain situation is not their fault, it can be a huge weight off their shoulders. This removal of feelings of guilt or responsibility on their part can open them up to then use some of that emotional capital to support us as we engage with feelings that were present and guiding our lives long before we even met our partner.
This kind of scripting of our emotions is just a first draft. As we learn to do it more and more, and see results that help create a happier, more supportive relationship, we eventually start to bring our own voice into it. It becomes less about me helping a client write their script and more about a client learning to write their own.
