WHY YOU NEED TO READ META-THERAPY

Therapy is weird. What’s truly strange, weird, and unique is that the therapist cannot directly effect the learning and change that the client wants and needs. The therapist cannot step into the client’s life and straighten out the messes, correct the mistakes, demonstrate the needed skills, and be the person that the client needs to be. Nor can the therapist make any guarantee regarding what the therapy will accomplish. She cannot predict what the client will do and/or what will happen in the client’s world. In this, the therapist is not in a very powerful role. Strange.

Actually all of the power belongs to the client. The client is the one who is totally in charge of his life. He has the power to change his mind, his beliefs, his understandings, decisions, values, etc. She has the power to put into action the required changes. The client has to do it all and yet, mostly, the client doesn’t realize this and typically comes to therapy to get the therapist to fix things in her life. Stranger yet.

Given that the power to change is actually in the hands of the client, this relegates the therapist to be a facilitator. The therapist is a guide. But what does she facilitate? Where does he provide guidance? As a guide, therapy is the process for taking a client inside to his inner world. There she will detect her mental maps which are somehow not leading her to where she wants to go. Therapy is the process of enabling the client to grow and develop as a person so he can be the person he needs to be to handle life’s challenges. Therapy is the process of equipping and empowering a person to develop the knowledge, the skills, and the motivation which will unleash her highest potentials and become self-determining.

Here’s another weird thing about therapy: If the goal of therapy is for the client to become self- determining, then the objective is to stop going to therapy. The therapist seeks to put herself out of business so that the client no longer needs her. Ideally, therapy is to be a short-term job.

There’s something else weird about therapy. While there’s a lot of talk in therapy about problems and solving problems, strange enough, it is not the problems which drive people to therapy. It is not about stress, anxiety, fear, anger, depression, sadness, demotivation, suicidal thoughts, personality disorders, etc. No. Those “problems” are actually only symptoms of the real problem.

The real problem does not exist outside in the external world of the client or in the painful symptoms that alerts the client to the fact that something is wrong. The real problem is inside. Strange also is that when the client arrives for the therapy session, he has brought the real problem with him even though he generally does not know that.

Now the test for whether the therapy has succeeded occurs back in the real world situations and contexts of the client’s life. That’s where we will find out if the therapeutic conversations have made a significant enough change so it is “the difference that makes a difference.” Yet that is the test of the therapy. It is not the therapy itself.

Where therapy actually occurs is inside the client in the meta place. This is also weird. The change is not merely in what the person thinks or feels, or what the person says or does. While these four fundamental powers of a person—as resources—come from the meta place, they are not the meta place. They make up the surface expression of a person’s conscious state. And while therapy will certainly touch, influence, effect, refine, and renew the client’s immediate thinking, feeling, speaking, and behaving, genuine therapy is much deep—or as I should say, much higher.

Effective, long-lasting, and sustainable therapy which rejuvenates a life is a meta phenomenon. It occurs meta to a client’s thinking, feeling, speaking, and behaving. It occurs in the meta place—which is what makes this book unique in the field of therapy.

Now while there are lots and lots of books on therapy—thousands upon thousands, and a great many of them are excellent books on therapy, this one is unique. There are books on how to do therapy, the variables which are “necessary and sufficient” to be successful, the philosophy of therapy, the language, etc. There are also hundreds of books and articles on the meta-analysis of therapy. There are even some books which address the meta-levels of therapy. But, as far as I know, there are no books which focus exclusively on meta-therapy. Therefore to fill in that gap I have written this one.

From the Back Cover

Psychotherapy occurs in a very special place inside of people—in the meta place. Here you find the dynamic meta-structures which comprise a person’s background knowledge, beliefs, values, understandings, reference points, meanings, assumptions, prohibitions, memories, imaginations, etc. Meanings which define a person’s sense of reality and well-being.

Here meta structures function inside us as if they were instincts— automatic, unconscious programs for thinking, feeling, acting, and relating. Yet they differ from instincts in that you have access to them so you can manage and control them. You can do your own ‘programming’ for healing, well- being, health, effectiveness, productivity, resilience and much more.

Meta-Therapy will take you on a journey to the inside meta place giving you an understanding of how human life is inevitably lived inside–out. You will learn how to access the meta place, how to use observation, questions, metaphors, etc. to introduce transformative change. You will learn how to negotiate ‘problem definitions’ and solutions in the meta place. How to use presuppositional questions and comments to implicitly set new frames of meaning to enrich and empower a person.

Without a rich understanding of the dynamic meta system within a client, a therapist’s interventions will be superficial and deal mostly with symptoms, rather than the overarching causes. Discover how the meta place is organized in yourself and your clients. As Meta-Therapy repeatedly emphasizes “the person is never the problem, if there’s a problem, the frame is the problem,” it frees you to look for and transform those frames.