ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters, paradoxical interventions were introduced and it was demonstrated how they can be used to neutralize and tranquilize client behavior. However, many times, clients demonstrate complacency, pessimism, or overt discouragement regarding their circumstances. They find it difficult to make efforts to participate fully in treatment and are often categorized as “resistant.” Energizers represent a class of nonlinear paradoxical interventions strategically designed to encourage, stimulate, and mobilize clients who, as a result of their experience of ambivalence (i.e., dilemma), have either become immobilized or are endlessly vacillating. The central strategy behind energizers is to prompt new behaviors that are contrary to the more rigid and maladaptive perceptual and behavioral entrapments of what they have been doing (i.e., “more of the same”). By proposing an energizing paradoxical intervention, the therapist is tactically trying to “disturb” clients’ defensive and rigid perception of the situation and their behavior in it, in order to mobilize resources that a client has simply been unable to access, either because of faulty and appraisal processes (e.g., deletions and distortions) and very skewed schema dynamics that prevent action or because of feelings of ambivalence.
