Contracting: a true partnership with our clients.
Reflecting back, I remember my first NeuroAffective Relational Model™ (NARM®) therapy session where I was asked, “What is it that you want most for yourself from our time together today?” I felt a sense of pressure and curiosity at the same time. In all the years of my own therapy work, I don’t think I had ever been asked that. As I settled into this idea that our work together was more about a partnership and less about being analyzed and told what to change, I felt a sense of ownership and control that was new to me.
In NARM®, this process is called Contracting. Contracting allows us to keep the client in the driver’s seat and enables them to stay grounded in the work that is most important to them. For example, as a therapist I might see my client needing to shift the way they show up with their family. Without the Contracting process, I could direct our sessions in that way when my client might actually want to focus on finding more connection with themselves first.
Too often, well-intended, helping professionals come to sessions with their clients with an agenda for what the client will work on that day. This sets up our clients to adapt to our needs and use their maladaptive strategies to stay in relationship with us, just as they did with their attachment figures. It’s possible that what we see as their work is not the work they desire. Maladaptive strategies such as people-pleasing, avoidance, isolation, and power/control is often what brings them to therapy in the first place. If we don’t let go of our own agenda and contract with our clients, we have the potential to push them back into the very thing that brought them to us.
“What is it that you want most for yourself from our time together today?”
The Contracting Process is often THE catalyst for healing.
Sitting side by side with our clients while they discover what it is they actually want for themselves could be the first time anyone has given them that space. They don’t need to rely on their maladaptive strategies to navigate the relationship with us. This in itself is the process of healing.
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Kami Black
Founder & Executive Director
ROOTs Transition
