As with all posts, any description of people I see in therapy is materially changed for reasons of confidentiality
One of my favorite jokes is when I ask a person to ask me ..."what's the key to good comedy?"j Before they finish the sentence, I interrupt them with the answer "timing." It's a great joke and I was reminded of it recently.
It started as a mess but resulted in a great step forward with a couple I've worked with for many years. Theirs is a complicated history, well beyond the scope of this posting. One problem is that they have a tendency to fight. Hard. Ugly. In front of the kids. You can use your imagination as to how hurtful it becomes. It's a toxic habit they've just not been able to break despite all they know and despite all of my strategies and interventions.
Coming to see me recently they had another fight, this one in the car. They walked in the door, sat down calmly and noted that often the only time they have to communicate with one another (given the demands of work and kids) is when they're coming to or leaving my office. (The sardonic humorist in me speculated that the answer might be to discontinue coming to see me to reduce the fighting.) As they discussed it he said, gently, that he just wasn't prepared to continue the discussion at that moment. The heat was still too high and he was still too hurt by the vitriol she had spewed (see above re: ugly and hard - you can use your imagination.) She agreed that it wasn't the time. And that was that. The anger dissipated. They still had things to work on, but now just wasn't the time. For this couple it was a major step forward. Fighting when angry is so often just destructive, whether in marriage or between parent and child.
Which got me to thinking about "proactive" intervention, discussed at length in Ross Greene's "Collaborative and Proactive Solutions" model outlined in his book The Explosive Child. I'm thinking about his model a lot (if you've read any of the recent posts) in my work with kids, and, it works out, with adults.
Being proactive means that the intervention being used is one that is done at a calm time, but that is targeted to a known problem that is certain to recur. "Emotional Focused Couples Therapy" recommends the same technique when working with couples that Greene recommends in CPS. We know what problems are coming down the road. Thus we need to focus on them before they reach us and not when they are upon us. It's a common sense approach, but one that requires planning. In the ADHD world we live in where "distractability" is the norm, being proactive is difficult to accomplish. I'd also pose that "reactivity" isn't such a great approach. Think for a moment - how well is being reactive working as compare to those times that you take the time to proactively discuss a problem and come up with a solution. Being proactive invites collaboration - there's a lot less emotional heat, a lot less ego in the discussion, less pride, all of which allows for a much better solution.
Whether in marriage, with kids, at work, doesn't being proactive make more sense? It just requires doing something a bit different. We're all used to doing things differently, we know change is a constant in life. This is one thing that when changed, changes a lot.
