Help Clients Cultivate Meaningful Lives

Using values to fuel connection, expand possibilities, and spark life-altering change

A letter from Name

August 10, 2021

There are moments in therapeutic work that expand our views of what is possible.

When the client who came in dejected, filled with regret and disillusioned with life itself finds a way to cultivate a new sense of purpose...

When the cancer patient who watched their life shrink to thoughts of "I'm going to die" connects with something transcendent...

Or when the person who's lost a decade to addiction finally breaks the cycle and starts to build something new.

As practitioners of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), we know that values are at the center of these transformations.

When clients connect with a deep sense of what's most important in life and what they want to stand for, all bets are off.

You feel the energy in the room shift. You hear it in your client's voice and see it in their eyes.

And from here, momentum builds.

Your client takes one step forward, and another. And before you know it, they've enriched their life in ways that previously seemed beyond imagining.

I believe this kind of outcome is possible for every client who comes to see us.

But, of course, that doesn't mean it's automatic or guaranteed when you do values work.

In fact, while most ACT clinicians have personal examples like the ones above, much more often they struggle to explore values in a way that facilitates depth and movement.

Navigating the Vulnerability in Values

Most people spend little time thinking about what is most important to them on a deep, personal level.

In many ways, it's easier to live according to who we think we should be, or according to other's expectations.

This might seem surprising. But there's a reason why it's so:

Beneath values lies immense vulnerability.

Beneath values lies immense vulnerability.

Touching what you most yearn for in life carries with it a huge amount of risk. In hoping for something more, you must accept that you might not get it, that you might even lose it, or that you might actually be better off where you are now.

In behaviorist terms, this is precisely how aversive control works. It says that known suffering is less risky than the unknown.

People have a host of strategies for insulating themselves against vulnerability. Some of these strategies might seem familiar to you:

For example, resistance to values work, chronic “stuckness," "I don't know," "nothing matters." or stories about why they can't reach for something more.

"nothing matters," or stories about why they can't reach for something more.

On the surface, these behaviors might look different...

... But functionally, they are the same.

They are protection in the form of fusion and avoidance.

Even if someone desperately wants to change, there is something safe about the way things are.

There is something known and comfortable in inertia – to the point where change feels dangerous and impossible.

When You Hit the Wall...

This protective behaviour is automatic, and it leads to many of the obstacles clinicians come across while doing this work.

Chief among those obstacles is when you hit an impasse with clients, which might look something like this:

• Continued conversation yields only surface-level content that you can't

seem to dig beneath.

• Each session brings a new crisis which must be managed before values

• Each session brings a new crisis which must be managed before values

work can proceed.

• Sessions are blocked up by "I don't knows" or insistences that nothing matters and nothing could matter.

• Or, even if a value is on the table, the client returns time and time again without having made the tiniest movement.

We've all come up against these walls as therapists.

After a time, you might decide it would just be best to move on and put values to the side.

You might even consider referring the client to another therapist. Because no matter what you try, you can't find any give in that wall.

But there's something important in those moments, when you're up against the wall, that is often overlooked.

The Surprising Opportunity in Stuckness

It's easy to feel like if we could only locate the right value, things would just burst open...

...That if only we could identify something big enough and deep enough, clarity and motivation would miraculously appear.

And so when things grind to a halt, we scramble for another worksheet, another exercise. We try to go around the stuckness.

another exercise. We try to go around the stuckness.

But there's another way to approach it:

As a process, we need to go through. As a stop along the road.

Insight is not the fuel of values work; it's the exhaust.

This work is not about divining the future, excavating the most important value, or weighing one value against another.

When we engage in that dynamic as clinicians, we often feed fusion and avoidance – even in ourselves.

Values work is about facilitating a liberated, creative approach to life that's disruptive of that entire mindset.

From that perspective, there is gold in the moments when you feel most stuck.

In that darkness, you can see a glimmer of something longed for. Something that might even be more powerful because it's so tightly bound and protected.

We can even use a client's protective strategy as an entrypoint to find our way to someone's heart.

We just need to know how.