ABSTRACT
This chapter contains two Clinical Pearls (CP), aphorisms that the author has used during his career as a psychotherapist and a supervisor to advance the therapeutic process. One CP deals with a challenging verbal style, namely vagueness. Vagueness, a derivative of camouflage, protects a person from accessing an inner world of dangerous feelings. Mitigating a sense of danger will increase the chances of connecting with such a patient for whom a stern authority figure was often prominent in childhood. The chapter describes how paradoxically the CP “Could you be a little more vague” helps mitigate such danger.
The second CP—“Why is it that I get deprived of 50% of your feelings? It doesn’t seem fair” employs irony to help patients invested in presenting only the “best” parts of themselves to reveal the less attractive parts of their personality. The therapist who welcomes these negative feelings challenges the patient’s belief, often well founded, that constraints on the expression of negative feelings come only from the outside. The patient is helped to realize that some of the constraints are coming from the inside. A similar goal can be achieved through the use of Harry Stack Sullivan’s counterprojective technique, the dynamics of which are discussed.
