ABSTRACT
The crucial component is creativity and the term ‘creative hopelessness’ is used to identify new ways in which the client can approach the problem. Because the control agenda is normally very prominent at the start of therapy, the practitioner needs methods to navigate around this issue. The dilemma for the practitioner is how to validate the client’s need to reduce their distress, without unhelpfully reinforcing the very behaviours that are supporting high levels of anxiety. The answer is in highlighting the futility of control, but in such a way as to pique curiosity for new ways of responding. Control strategies are so appealing because they often work, at least in the short term. Each strategy needs to be functionally clustered as another form of digging to the point it is clear that something genuinely new and creative is needed, not just hopelessly more of the same.
