How to Unlock Hidden Motivation for Change

Desire for relief from emotional suffering is the engine of psychotherapy treatment. However, our clients often cannot identify clearly how they are hurting, and their hopes for therapy may remain vague or unrealistic. A sense of unworthiness and repetitive disappointment often stand in the way of wanting anything attainable for oneself. Withering glances, harsh words, or indifference may have crushed the impulses to reach for something better in our lives.

Crippled hopes for therapy often lead to dormant motivation. The best way to deal with anything impeding the therapy process is to bring it to awareness.

I asked a man how we could best help him today, and he looked at me blankly. He brought up a few things, but the session was drifting. As I asked him for greater specificity about what troubled him, like a recent example, he persisted with generalities.

When I expressed compassion for his difficulty connecting to himself and helped him to see how this vagueness could hinder his progress, he surprised me. He said he wanted to move and retire to the Pacific Northwest but expected conflict with his wife and saw no solution but an eventual divorce! Yet he and his wife had been making progress in couple’s therapy with another therapist, and there was no indication she would be rigid about finding a solution to this issue. Instead, he assumed relationships would fail and never mentioned his needs or the severity of his suffering to his wife or me.

Had I not focused on his vagueness about what he wanted in our session, this client would not have identified his source of pain nor his desire for relief. Had I become overactive in trying to make sense of his generalities, we would have gone nowhere.  

Awareness of the therapist’s compassion and sadness for this man’s lost connection to his inner world activated compassion toward himself (a concept I refer to as the ‘Therapeutic Transfer of Compassion for Self’), leading to the disclosure of his internal torment. This revelation led to an exploration of achievable goals for therapy. Would he want to work on his assumptions that his wife would not care about his needs? Did he want to address his resignation to growing old alone, and consider how this might link to his lonely childhood as a latchkey kid who raised himself? Did he wish to stop perpetuating his trauma?

Hidden motivation for change becomes an active force once a person can define desires, feel these yearnings in the body, and see a path to manifest their hopes by allowing the therapist to be a caring partner.

Some signs that the motivation for change is mobilising:
 

1. The client can identify a clear and reachable internal goal. Such a goal is not solely an idea but a living, intense yearning that might be felt in the chest or heart or pulsating throughout the body. We may help clients to declare what they want by asking questions like, “You say you ‘sort of want’ this. Could we see if this is something you do want?” “You say ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’. How sad for your desires to be in such limbo and never taken seriously.”
    
2. The client agrees to join the therapist in noticing and valuing feelings, desires, and other aspects of internal experience as a path to healing. We will know soon enough if we have an active partner.
    
3. The client allows the therapist to help raise awareness of barriers to emotional closeness, e.g., shame, anxiety, and distancing behaviours. Of course, we can expect resistance and avoidance of this process, but often people express gratitude for this opportunity to grow.
    

We want to coax motivation out of hiding, so its transformative power can be set free! The motivation or ‘will’ to disclose our true selves and release those parts that put us in prison or barricade our path can do things neither the client nor therapist can foresee. So often, I have been stunned by the power of unconscious healing forces to take people to places that had seemed unimaginable.