How The ACT Matrix Primes Clients to Think Differently About Therapy
By focusing on what matters
One of my favorite things about the ACT Matrix is that it sets the stage for high quality act sessions and really primes clients for thinking about therapy in a different way.
The very first thing that we do with clients when in ACT matrix work is talk about who and what are important to them. And then we set their struggles as experience that is getting in the way of connecting with who and what are important to them. So the client is coming to us initially with “a problem” that they are focused on, and we are pointing out that struggling with that problem is actually obscuring other parts of their life.
Said in Steve Hayes’ words: when we begin work clients are coming in with the pain of presence (there is something in my life that I don’t want), and we are helping them reveal the pain of absence (there is something in my life that I desperately want but don’t have).
Why is it important to think about therapy as moving toward more life, rather than just getting away from pain, or fixing problems?
I can’t tell you how many times I have sat down with friends of mine who have been in therapy and they’re talking to me about their therapist, and they’ll say something like “Man I have no idea what I’m going to talk to my therapist about on Monday.”
So they’ll sit there and they’re basically going through the week hunting for negativity. And I think a lot of clients end up doing that. They spend the week basically on the alert for problems that are showing up in their life, and maybe only problems.
Whereas the matrix helps clients keep notice of that experience which isn’t working for them too well, but also experience of a different sort, things that are important to them and how they’re responding to those.
Understanding who walks into your office.
Remember that there are only three kinds of clients you’ll ever see:
Clients who have never been in therapy before, and therefore have no idea what to expect of the therapeutic process.
Clients who have never been in therapy before but have seen it done on TV and movies, so they have a skewed or flawed expectation of what therapy looks like.
And clients who have been in therapy before but with other therapists who don’t work the way you do.
So it’s really our responsibility to set the expectations really clearly, right up front of what is therapy about and what it looks like.
The ACT matrix helps you do that very easily by putting front and center who & what are important to us, and laying out a targeting system with the two lines and four squares.
That way if we are ever in session and perhaps don’t know what to talk about we can always go back to the matrix and say “I noticed over our past several sessions we’ve been talking a lot about this area over here [pointing to the matrix]. I’m really interested in what you’ve been noticing up here [pointing to a different spot on the matrix].”