Psychotherapy is a Practice of Engagement
The answer to life’s problems is not in your head. It is just as difficult for psychotherapists to understand this as it is for clients. Thinking has its benefits, but it also has its limitations, and overthinking ultimately leads nowhere. People have to get out of their heads and get in touch with their feelings, because this is what leads to change. Experiencing feelings is the quickest way for a person to get out of their head and back into their life.
The ability to reason things out is one of, if not the defining characteristic of what it means to be human, but reason alone is not enough to make people change or sustain them throughout life. Building a business, creating a family, finding one’s calling, falling in love—these experiences frequently defy logic but they are the ones that people are most impacted by.
Even David Hume, a philosopher and a rational man if ever there was one, said reason was incapable of dispelling the clouds of his life. For that he turned to nature, or food, or the company of his friends. He turned towards life.
However far thinking can carry us, in the end engagement is the answer to life’s problems. There comes a point when a person must move past thinking, commit to a choice, and leap into action.
This is what psychotherapy is about—supporting the client as they explore their freedom and eventually decide how they want to exercise it. It is a relational process that includes engagement between the therapist and the client, the client and themselves, and the client and their world.
Both happiness and meaning, the primary goals for most people, are by-products of engagement. Neither comes as a result of sitting around and pondering all day long. They come from making the leap into living. Engagement with life makes it so that the questions don’t even matter, which paradoxically brings one closer to the answer. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, another philosopher, “the solution to the problem of life is to make the problem vanish.” It vanishes because it is subsumed by active living. Engagement with life provides structure and coherence. It gives shape to one’s existence.
The psychotherapist’s job is to engage the client to the greatest extent possible and in doing so, serve as a model for them. All clients have an innate ability and desire to engage with life, but they must be helped to reconnect with this desire and helped to remove the barriers to it.
The therapist’s primary tool for achieving this outcome is their willingness to engage the client authentically, along with their willingness to be fully engaged in their own life. The therapist’s ability to be present and not fall into the trap of being in their head too much is the strongest indicator of whether or not they can help others do the same.