When the Intervention Is Right but the Client Isn’t Ready to Receive It

You can have a gallon of perfectly good water, exactly what someone needs.

And still make a mess if the only thing they have to receive it with is a 4-ounce cup.

I keep thinking about that image when therapists ask me:

“I know which movement my client needs. So how do I give it to them?”

Because sometimes you don’t.

At least not yet.

Maybe you can see very clearly that this person needs more push, more reach, or the ability to yield.

But seeing the missing movement and having the capacity to receive that movement are two completely different things.

Sometimes the next part of treatment is actually helping the client become a bigger cup.

That might mean education, attachment work, working with skeptical parts, grief, or building more safety inside the therapeutic relationship.

It might mean helping the client understand what you’re beginning to see so that six weeks from now, or three months from now, the intervention actually has somewhere to land.

That’s what makes this work so much more interesting than:

“She needs push. Let’s practice pushing.”

And it’s the layer I couldn’t possibly teach in full during the first Movement Vocabulary workshop, even after our planned 90 minutes turned into roughly two and a half hours.

Because once you learn to see the movements, another set of questions opens up:

When?

How?

With which part?

What comes first?

And what has to become possible before the thing you eventually want to do will actually be useful?

That’s what we’re going into in the Movement Vocabulary Implementation Workshop.

The first workshop gave you more water.

This one is about knowing how much the client can actually hold.

Because sometimes the best treatment plan isn’t about finding a better intervention. It’s about figuring out what would allow the intervention you already have in mind to finally land.

That’s one of the things we map together last Thursday, August 27 at 12:00 PM Eastern.

If you can’t be there live, the recording is included.

The recording will be available separately for $147.

Join us here:

https://integrativepsych.teachable.com/l/pdp/somatic-embodiment-movement-vocabulary

Esther