This contrariness is one of the tools I use regularly. I not only consider an opposite position on stories and their interpretations, I usually present my contrary view. My clients are so used to me offering an alternative to their well-reasoned explanations that after they finish telling me what they think, they wait expectantly for me to contradict them. I do this somewhat in a spirit of fun and openness, even though the matter may be deadly serious. I’m not criticizing my clients; I’m playfully giving them my accustomed and often cherished alternative version.

The therapist is seeing the situation differently, and that itself may be helpful. When therapist and client are not in the same narrative, there is space for change.

Therapy is not all focused analysis. Once in a while I reach up to my bookshelf and read a quote or a poem that is relevant to what is being discussed. I may do this because I feel a constriction in our conversation. I feel we need a third voice to join us and allow us to look out further from our restricted space. It also models and teaches how good art and literature can be psychologically useful.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.

As a therapist, I often see my job not as providing options, but as educating the imagination so that solutions are visible.