Creative Hopelessness and PTSD: Giving the Struggle a Name

So, if the client is willing to consider that the struggle itself may be part of the problem, then it becomes important to move the discussion from the metaphorical into the personal.

The goal, at this point, is to have enough information to be able to identify a theme or a similarity among the majority of the strategies that the person has tried so far—that the therapist and client have now a shared understanding of what has been tried and what hasn’t worked. So, you might start this process by first asking the client to identify what are all the things they’ve been struggling with, just come up with a list. So it may be, you know, depression, problems in relationships, anxiety, traumatic memories, hypervigilance, things like that.

Batten, S. V. (2011). Essentials of acceptance and commitment therapy. SAGE Publications Ltd.

And once you have that list, then the next step is to say something like, “Well, it sounds like you’ve been struggling with these issues for a really long time and you’ve tried a variety of things to get them to change. So, what I don’t want us to do is to keep doing the things that haven’t worked. So I wonder if we can brainstorm a little bit and see if we can identify all the strategies that you’ve tried over the years to deal with these things that you’ve been struggling with.” And then you want to brainstorm with the client all the things they might try.

Batten, S. V. (2011). Essentials of acceptance and commitment therapy. SAGE Publications Ltd.