THE CLIENT WHO DIDN’T WANT TO GET BETTER…

“I don’t think I actually want to get better”

Imagine someone saying that after spending years desperately trying to change….

What would you hear??

Resistance?
Lack of motivation?
Self-sabotage?
A trauma response?

A therapist might recognise one thing

An addiction worker might recognise another

A psychiatrist might see something else entirely

Three professionals. Three explanations!

And perhaps not one of them has discovered what the person actually means

What if they’re exhausted from trying to become someone else?

What if they’ve spent years being told what’s wrong with them, why they’re suffering and what they need to do to recover?

What if they’ve followed the advice, attended the sessions, learned the language and understood every explanation?

And they’re still suffering

What if they don’t want to get better because they’re exhausted from a lifetime of believing they’re not good enough as they are?

Suddenly, “I don’t want to get better” might mean something entirely different

But we’d never discover that if we’d already decided what it meant

And here’s what troubles me about the helping professions

We can become so knowledgeable about human suffering that we stop being curious about the human being

We hear something and recognise a pattern

We recognise a pattern and reach for an explanation

We reach for an explanation and begin treating it

All before we’ve discovered whether our understanding was even correct

I’m not suggesting knowledge or clinical expertise has no value

I’m asking whether we’ve become so good at recognising what we’ve been trained to see that we’re missing what we haven’t

Because a person isn’t a diagnosis

They aren’t a trauma response

They aren’t an addiction

And they aren’t an example of our favourite psychological theory

They’re a human being whose experience we haven’t yet understood

Perhaps the most dangerous words in the helping professions aren’t “I don’t know”

They’re “I know exactly what’s going on here”

And perhaps the most important question isn’t

“How do we help this person get better?”

But

“What have we already decided about them that we might be completely wrong about?“