Robert B. Moran, Creativity+Performance Coach

About a month ago I needed to make a decision about my income. It brought me face to face with my track record of decisions about jobs, projects, business starts, investments over the course of my adult life.

In a nutshell the track record was not pretty.

It occurred to me that maybe my plans hadn’t been very good, and perhaps it would have been helpful to me if someone had confronted me about them at the time. Next I wondered if there was a particular type of therapy that made use of confrontations.

I found out that several types use it and to my surprise that, “Confrontation is one of the basic counseling interventions counselors use to promote the wellness of the client.”

What?!!!

That has not been my experience in therapy AT ALL. If my therapists saw any problems with my plans as told to them, they never said so. (That was endlessly disappointing, bordering on infuriating). Then I heard the dictum that “therapists aren’t supposed to offer solutions, that would be robbing the client of the experience of solving their own problem.”

As I was pondering that conundrum it occurred to me that, “Wait. I’m aware of my inner family. Maybe I can learn to confront myself. Time to learn what makes for a good, healthy, recovered confrontation.”

What I learned was that making the confrontation is about telling the person the two conflicting observations and ASKING the person to explain how they see them fitting together.

In other words a confrontation is NOT, “Hey! You are doing this and it’s not good for you, knock it off! Do THIS instead.” It is, “I heard you say A and B, they seem to contradict each other. I’m curious, how do YOU see it? I’d like to know.” Then the person sees the contradiction for themselves as they try to explain how they aren’t a contradiction. And at some point a lightbulb goes off for them and they see in what ways they ARE contradicting. Then they can resolve it themselves, or ask for help in doing so.