Choosing And Making Decisions Is Not The Same Thing

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

You and I are accustomed to thinking that choice is a process of preference for one of the alternatives over the other. As a rule, the choice is preceded by a more or less careful assessment of alternatives from different positions - ethical, pragmatic, value, etc. Accepting one of the alternatives, a person bears full responsibility for it. However, this approach is only possible when we are in the paradigm of individualism. With the transition to the field paradigm, on which the dialogue model of therapy is based, the picture changes beyond recognition

If I am a manifestation of the field, then the question arises - who makes the choice? And who is evaluating the alternatives? And are they evaluated at all?

I will try to answer these questions. First, from the point of view of dialogue-phenomenological psychotherapy, choice is an elementary mental act. It is essentially groundless. In other words, there is no preliminary assessment if I choose. Here I would like to separate two processes - decision making and choice. If the first presupposes the need for a preliminary assessment of alternatives, then the second relies only on the freedom that is inherent in its nature. In other words, I choose because I choose. In my opinion, only at this moment a place of responsibility appears. In making a decision, the responsibility is assigned to the means by which the alternatives are assessed - the basic psychotherapeutic concept, advice or recommendation of others, for example, a supervisor, ideas about certain types of personalities, etc. And only in the choice am I alone and totally responsible.

Secondly, and this is the most unusual thing, the choice, just like the personality, belongs to the field. In other words, the described approach forces us to get rid of the illusion of power - it is not you and I who make the choice, but the choice makes us. In a sense, we can say that our Life lives on us.

What, then, is our role with you in this case?

I suppose everything is the same - in the statement of this or that choice. We Live to the extent that we retain our sensitivity to how our life is changing. And again, opponents here, perhaps, may have a question about responsibility:

"Does your approach lead to a cult of irresponsibility?"

Not at all - it seems to me that a person needs a fair amount of courage to face his life in the field with the innovations and choices that the field offers. Most of us strive to live with our eyes wide shut, trying not to notice that Life has already changed. Well, or to look at her squinting, from time to time pulling out from his bosom this or that explanatory concept.

In psychotherapy, we are more often accustomed to making decisions based on a particular concept, thereby sharing responsibility with it, rather than making choices, looking into the eyes of a changing reality.

The foregoing is of fundamental importance for the practice of psychotherapy. Anticipating the conversation about the construction of therapeutic interventions, I will say that psychotherapy is determined not by the content of the intervention, but by its motive.

The only effective motive from the point of view of dialogue-phenomenological psychotherapy is the free act of its choice. It is he who has the transforming property for therapeutic contact, and, accordingly, for the life of the client and the therapist.