Are There Any Exercises For That?

I am “lurking” on Slack watching messages exchanged between other therapists.

Most are uninteresting details of sessions rebooked or reassigned but the thread which catches my eye is about the fixation clients sometimes have with being given written exercises to do in order to identify what’s wrong, or help them recover.

“What is this fascination with exercises?” someone asks.

The answer seems obvious.

If writing something down, drawing it, or answering some questions can help you understand why you feel the way that you do, why on earth not?

Reading further it becomes clear that the root of my colleagues’ frustration is the desire for exercises in place of doing “the work of therapy”. A “silver bullet” that removes the need for talking or at least shortcuts the whole process.

This too seems quite reasonable. When you have struggled for a long time the thing you want most of all is to stop struggling.

I can remember sitting in sessions of therapy just wondering why my therapist wouldn’t just give me the answers and save us both time and energy.

I lapped up the written work believing that it would unlock some hitherto inaccessible room or offer a lightbulb moment of stunning clarity but neither ever happened. If anything they were like a stick twirled in muddy water making the chances of seeing the bottom harder than ever.

It was only exploration into my findings that enabled me to eventually see through the water.

In part, I blame the growing popularity of “single-session therapy”.

It’s not that it doesn’t have a place, it’s just that clients use it indiscriminately, not understanding that long-term social anxiety or an inability to express emotion cannot be solved in fifty minutes however good your written exercises might be.

In supervision recently I brought up the subject of exercises.

“That one about the roots of shame you gave me. I find that hard to use and I don’t really know why,” I tell her.

We talk around it for a while and eventually, she says to me,

“Perhaps you’re expecting the exercise to give you or your client answers rather than allowing it to pose more questions.”

“The other thing that puzzles me is how I go through phases of using certain exercises constantly and then lose faith in their usefulness.”

Even as the words come tumbling out of my mouth I realise that what I’m describing is an expectation of the same “silver bullet” that clients often expect.

I’ve also been guilty of using them when therapy gets “stuck” and I’m unsure about where to go next. If I really think about it I still can’t decide whether this is a good use for them or not.

Perhaps worst of all though is when an exercise offers nothing more than distraction and leads to nowhere other than itself.

For some reason this notion makes me think about my dad who used to complete the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword every day.

Unable to make head nor tail of it myself I once asked him, “Why do you spend so much time doing that?”

“It exercises my brain,” he told me.

When I think about it now it makes me feel melancholic because, as far as I could see, in retirement, he didn’t much use his brain for anything as he steadily declined towards death.

Walking to work yesterday I saw that a bench he used to sit on to complete the crossword or occasionally eat an ice cream has been removed.

I couldn’t work out if my sadness was because it reminded me of a life no longer lived or because it reminded me of a smart, funny and troubled mind well exercised but never used to create a life of balance and contentment.