ABSTRACT
Our work as therapists entails making choices. There are always costs and benefits to all the decisions we take and the experienced therapist will entertain a range of foreseeable implications of the options available. This case reflects something of this psychotherapeutic inevitability, as the author intentionally validates the client’s reality, in the understanding that such an intervention may be seen as antithetical and contraindicated by alternative conceptualisations of the problem. The author’s account is illustrative of the therapeutic axiom, ‘everything our clients do, they do for good reason’. Counsellors do well to remember this proposition as it implores the discovery of cause, rather than the deft elimination of the troublesome aspects of the client’s cognitive, emotional and behavioural repertoire.
