Adlerian Lifestyle Counseling

Practice and Research

Warren R. Rule, Malachy Bishop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135928148
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A rare balance of both practical application and empirical research investigation, Adlerian Lifestyle Counseling provides mental health practitioners with an invaluable resource on the theories of counseling pioneer Alfred Adler. Warren R. Rule and Malachy Bishop, both reputed authorities on rehabilitation counseling and Adlerian theory, present useful practitioner consideration and applications, preparing the reader for a wide variety of counseling situations. Research studies also included in this volume - on topics scanning career choice, parental behavior, personal characteristics, and more - ground these practices in a basic theoretical framework. Adlerian theory is a popular and powerful approach that respects the uniqueness and creative potential of the individual. This comprehensive collection on the topic is a significant addition to the counseling research canon.

Practice

I

Dealing with Resistance

3

LIFESTYLE SELF-AWARENESS AND THE PRACTITIONER: UNDERSTANDING AND REFRAMING RESISTANCE USING ANGELS AND DEVILS AS METAPHOR

Warren R. Rule

Abstract

Counseling practitioners often face client resistance, hesitating attitudes, or impasses that can be difficult to understand and to work through. The author discusses the theoretical and practical implications of an aphorism from the poet Rilke. This metaphor uses ‘angels’ and ‘devils’ to crystallize the dilemma of change from the client’s perspective and relates to many significant Adlerian concepts in addition to the generic helping process.

Adlerian practitioners and others in the helping fields are committed to facilitating positive results in the lives of their clients. Regardless of the individual practitioner’s theoretical orientation, his or her therapeutic emphasis is most likely to be directed toward some overt or covert change on the client’s part. This change will presumably lead to the resolution of the expressed problem and to an increase in the feeling of general mental health. Regrettably, the facilitative process does not always proceed smoothly nor does it always achieve this ideal outcome.

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This chapter, “Lifestyle Self-Awareness and the Practitioner: Understanding and Reframing Resistance Using Angels and Devils as Metaphor,” from Warren R. Rule, The Journal of Individual Psychology 56:2, pp. 184-91. Copyright © 2000 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

Obstacles and puzzles, both identified and incomprehensible, seem to intrude during the unfolding of the therapeutic process. A frequently targeted phenomenon by therapists and counselors is labeled as “client resistance.” This phenomenon is often blamed for painfully slow progress in therapy as well as for its failure. However, in their eagerness to be a positive influence in clients’ lives, helpers may lose sight of the importance for clients to maintain an internal psychodynamic balance when confronted with the threat of change. This dynamic frequently contributes to the occurrence of “resistance,” that is, “a discrepancy between the goals of the therapist and those of the patient” (Dreikurs, 1967, p. 65). When resistance occurs, in terms of conscious or nonconscious therapeutic movement, the therapist’s goal to lead the client somewhere psychologically is not compatible with the client’s goal of maintaining or enhancing the self.

In the early 1900s, German poet and author Rainer Marie Rilke expressed a powerful metaphor regarding the enigma that pervades the conflict between confronting change and maintaining stability. In deciding not to begin psychoanalysis, he essentially concluded that: If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well (Freedman, 1996; Hull, 1947). This metaphor crystallizes powerful theoretical concepts for many major, contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches in general and especially for major concepts of Individual Psychology. This aphorism, which represents many symbiotic intrapsychic relationships, can be used by Adlerian psychotherapists to develop their understanding of client resistance to change as well as to facilitate their clients’ therapeutic processes.

A BROAD THEORETICAL BASE

From a broad perspective that cuts across theoretical models of psychotherapy, Ford and Urban (1998), in their recent comparative analysis, devoted considerable discussion to unifying themes in stability-maintaining and change-producing processes. They contended that, through evolution, humans have developed stability-maintaining processes that operate on a continual basis to maintain personal unity as a coping function against life’s differing challenges. They further stated that “processes that protect existing states are not pathological; they are both natural and essential. However, they protect functional and dysfunctional patterns alike” (p. 161). These patterns are purposive, and indeed they are performing some function regardless of how they are judged by an outside observer. Even conflicting motivational patterns, with accompanying unwanted suffering, continue because these are the best resolution that the individual’s psyche has been able to devise. Efforts by another “to alter those patterns will activate stability-maintaining processes that will defend them against change” (p. 166).

ADLERIAN APPLICATIONS

Generally and expressed in terms of the above concepts, the tasks of most therapists are (1) to respect the function and power of the stability-maintaining processes of the client and (2) to facilitate some sort of change that satisfies, circumvents, or overcomes those stability-maintaining processes. In attempting to accomplish these tasks, the broad field of counseling and psychotherapy could profit from the traditional Adlerian interest in metaphoric one-liners that insightfully express complex psychological phenomena. Adler himself used short metaphors for reframing client problems and self-responsibility. Selected brief metaphors, such as the example by Rilke, avoid the negative associations of extended psychobabble. Additionally, metaphors can be enticing yet mysterious and vague enough that clients can, upon hearing them, project their own personal meanings into their comprehension in a manner that benefits the facilitative process.

The therapeutic awareness of Rilke’s potent metaphor can serve various functions, depending on the unique overriding purpose of the clinician. Sometimes it may be used by the therapist conceptually to increase his or her own understanding or as a framework to intervene strategically in other ways with the client. Frequently the metaphor itself may be introduced as a therapeutic intervention or as a prelude to a planned stage in the facilitation process. Discussed below are applications of Rilke’s metaphor to some major and fundamental concepts of Individual Psychology.

Lifestyle and the Holistic Cognitive Map

Forgus and Shulman (1979) concluded that “all human motives are cognitively directed because they are filtered or mediated through the perceptual system, which directs both the structure and dynamics of personality” (p. 347). They further noted that the striving for cognitive consistency (i.e., avoiding cognitive dissonance) is the basis for resistance to change. The Adlerian concept of lifestyle, the cognitive blueprint, seeks its own confirmation, making it “difficult for us to change our points of view; our subjective bias directs how we search for reality” (p. 348). Further complicating this dilemma is that when conflict arises, one choice may preclude another: “It is not so much that we fear to eat the cake as that we want to have it and eat it too” (p. 111).

In this universal human dilemma, therefore, the unwanted devils are whatever the person consciously claims to want to get rid of within his or her perceptual field at the moment. Yet, in wishing this, the individual intuits at a deeper level of awareness that the protective angels (i.e., some of the components that contribute to the holistic nature of the self-system) would be forced to leave as well, thereby destroying the entire organizational system.

Lifestyle and the Usefulness of Symptoms

Adlerian practitioners are ever mindful of a symptom’s nonconscious function to safeguard the client’s self-esteem. When the “devil,” discouraging behavior, is expressed by the client in the form of a symptom, the Adlerian clinician usually would view the expression as a functional attempt by the client to cope with some form of threat to his or her self-esteem. In other words, the encouraging component of the symptom is that the “angel” is the stability, predictability, and comfort that the symptom allows the client to experience while attempting to face and deal with the necessary growth required during the therapeutic process. Furthermore, Kopp and Kivel (1990) described the creativity of this relationship:

While the client suffers from the symptom, he or she has a non-conscious investment in maintaining the symptom for the protection it affords the self-esteem and lifestyle. This threat to the self-esteem generates a fear of change. Thus, the interest in maintaining the symptoms and the lifestyle is a basic characteristic of resistance in therapy. (p. 140)

Within this conceptual framework, the protective angel is the non-conscious investment in maintaining the presence of the symptomatic devil. Because, as Adler (as cited in Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956) contended, a person must struggle against a symptom in order to maintain it, the very useful and quite historical struggle continues between the angels and the devils.

Lifestyle and Noble Striving

Not only is a well-intentioned angel invested, as discussed above, in maintaining the struggle with the symptom, but an angel is protectively committed to operating especially at a nonconscious level as well. Because the symptom is experienced as very unpleasant, the client regards it as a devil that must be eliminated, yet the angelic and protective process of the psyche prevents the full awareness of the broader lifestyle goal. If the angel were to take flight, the client would, as Adlerian practitioners know, be forced to look at the purpose of the symptom from the perspective of conscious common sense. At this point the client is thereby confronted with his or her own responsibility and vanity issues.

By maintaining the conflict, that is, allowing the devil-and-angel conflict to continue, the client can have the best of both worlds. In doing so, the client can also pat himself or herself on the back as a heroic angel for struggling to expel the nasty devil of a problem. If the problem really left, an opportunity to view oneself as noble would leave as well. Interpersonal gains are virtually always involved in these conflicts. Examples of the usefulness to the lifestyle of creating and maintaining these struggles can be found in Mosak (1977), Mosak and Maniacci (1998), and Shulman and Mosak (1967).

Lifestyle and the Nature of Goals

The setting and pursuit of goals themselves, regardless of whether conscious or nonconscious, have an elusive devil-and-angel dilemma inherent in their natures. As Beecher and Beecher (1966) observed:

Every goal we set restricts us. It limits, selects, and determines the means it uses to accomplish its own ends. Any goal sets its own built-in price. What it excludes may be worth more that what it achieves. (p. 217)

The price paid for choosing to aim for a particular goal is that other possibilities are excluded. Choices are excluded by attempting to attain a selected fixed consequence of any sort. Yet, if the devil of having to be goal-directed—and thereby missing all the rest of life’s bounties—were to be banished, then the protective angel of the goal-directed lifestyle pattern would take flight as well. This loss would deprive the individual of directionality in seeking a place of unique, secure significance among others. Here the metaphor enables the therapist to illustrate to the client the advantages and disadvantages of wearing blinders to get through the heavy traffic of life.

Lifestyle and Goal-Directed Movement

A chosen and valued lifestyle goal not only has a price attached because of its being an exclusory, generic goal, but it also virtually always has a severe price that is paid because of the “shadow” side of whatever goal that is chosen. In the previous section, the disadvantage pertained to what was not selected because of its being outside of the goal. Here the downside is inherent within the breadth of usefulness of the goal itself. Although the lifestyle functions as a unified whole, the implementation of the lifestyle in differing environmental contexts can yield contrasting degrees of satisfaction or worthwhile interpersonal benefits. This “duality” of usefulness is an evaluation of outcome rather than a function of individual process of movement. Thus, the individual lifestyle has an inherent duality of use for most people, and probably the best a person can hope for is to minimize—through awareness—the shadowlike or negative side. The lifestyle that works to a person’s advantage in one context also works to his or her disadvantage in another context. The same lifestyle that provides the individual’s greatest strengths also provides the greatest weaknesses. The chosen lifestyle that is responsible for the person’s best successes is also responsible for the person’s worst failures (Rule, 1982, 1984). This flip-side of a lifestyle goal often operates at a more vague level of awareness than the side that pursues the desired outcomes.

The usefulness of the goal tends to be a function of context and vanity. It is almost as if the real goal purposely does not have an identifiable label in the individual psyche: When the pursuit of it brings what is desired, the individual is proud of it and gives it positive identification. When it does not work out so well, the person labels it as a negative characteristic (or makes an excuse or does not become completely aware of it at all) and wishes to be rid of it. However, the ambiguity of the major lifestyle goal is useful: Ambiguity is a protective angel because, if one allowed the entire goal “to leave,” the truly advantageous uses of the goal would “take flight” as well. Thus, it is quite useful for this goal to remain not understood or nonconscious (Dreikurs, 1967).

All behavior and goals are useful within the schema of an individual’s lifestyle perceptions, including those implemented within a socially constructive context. This positive choice results from the implementation of the advantageous side of the lifestyle goals. This usage is often more self-actualizing, and it tends to be more deeply satisfying to the person in the long run. However, a cruel irony exists when the individual is confronted with a crisis situation. The person uses disadvantageously (in terms of outcome) the lifestyle goal with increasing intensity and frequency in a desperate attempt to cope. This effort is often precisely the same disadvantageous use of the lifestyle goal that brought on the crisis situation to begin with. Sadly, the person nonconsciously clings tenaciously to the self-defeating patterns (i.e., the devils) to keep the good uses of the same patterns (i.e., the angels) from taking flight as well. Thus, what appears as a false dichotomy to the external observer is, from the subjective perspective of the individual, quite consistent and holistic.

Lifestyles and Tasks of Life

This patterned, goal-directed movement is used unilaterally by the individual to address the life tasks: the occupational task, the social task, and the sexual task (Adler, 1931/1998). A patterned, goal-directed movement of any sort is likely to bring differing results in different contexts. Expressed another way, the implementation of a lifestyle goal, with its inherent disadvantageous blind-side, cannot be expected to yield equally satisfying results in addressing the problems of life. In therapy, the devil-angel metaphor can be used to illustrate the tradeoffs of using a given lifestyle to solve differing life tasks. Consequently, discussion of this dilemma with the client can highlight the importance of developing newer and more flexible approaches to dealing with life’s challenges.

The unenlightened individual seems to sense, at a vague level of appreciation, that keeping this broad lifestyle goal, including its devilish downside, is the best chance of creating a place of secure significance at least somewhere. So, if one were to focus on its disadvantageous use in some of the life tasks, the awareness might cause the whole goal “to take flight.” The client is unlikely to find it useful to become consciously aware of the patterned down-side of his or her chosen movement until a trusting, respectful relationship is established. This occurrence enables the client to explore and accept the “whole” self.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In makin...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Authors
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowlegments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Practice
• Research
• Conclusion
• Index