Partners for Collaborative Solutions
CLIENT EXUBERANT LIFE EXPERIENCES: BRINGING BACK THE BEST FROM THE PAST TO CO-CREATE COMPELLING FUTURE REALITIES
One client resource area most therapists rarely inquire with their clients about is their significant life experiences that triggered in them exuberant feelings. These are life experiences where clients were experiencing a high level of enthusiasm, joy, passion, awe, a strong sense of wellbeing, inspiration, and feeling like being on top of the world. These exuberant experiences can occur in the company of intimate partners, family members or friends, or alone out in nature, in some special place in the world, or having been deeply engaged in a life-changing meaningful activity that had benefitted others. For a great read on this topic, I highly recommend Kay Redfield Jamison’s excellent book Exuberance: The Passion for Life, which provides a scholarly discussion on this topic and many great examples of famous peoples’ exuberant life experiences. When we inquire with clients about their exuberant life experiences, they often smile and are delighted to share these special life experiences with us. After accessing these meaningful memories and discussing them, it triggers both positive emotion and instills hope for them that there is a better reality out there minus their problems, and they have lived it before.
Utilization of Client Exuberant Experiences
Once we have gained access to clients’ exuberant life experiences material, we can use important elements of these experiences to co-construct solutions to their presenting difficulties in the here-and-now with them. Two therapeutic experiments we like to use with clients that incorporate the key elements of their exuberant experiences are: visualizing a movie of your most meaningful exuberant life experience and the imaginary time machine.
When using the visualizing a movie of your most meaningful exuberant life experience experiment, we have the client first get comfortable in his or her chair or on the couch, close his or her eyes, and imagine being in the local movie theater looking up at the blank movie screen in front of the room. Once the client can capture this image with his or her mind’s eye, we have him or her use all of his her senses, including color and motion and project on to the movie screen a movie of his or her most meaningful exuberant life experience. This includes in great detail where they are, who they are with, what they are doing, what they are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, what they are thinking and feeling, and so forth. We can usually tell that clients have literally in mind and in spirit transported them selves back in time because they are smiling and often in a very relaxed state with their eyes closed. We have clients do this visualization for 10-12 minutes and then they are to practice it daily 1-2 times per day. This therapeutic experiment can be quite effective at neutralizing negative emotions, elevating hope and optimism levels, disrupting self-defeating thoughts, and as a great relapse prevention tool for clients trying not to cave into their former self-destructive behaviors and help them to stay on track.
In a similar fashion, the imaginary time machine can be used with couples or families to go back in time and relive their most meaningful exuberant life experiences in session and together we can explore which pieces they wish to reinstate in the here-in-now that they think could benefit them individually and in their relationships in a positive way. If the couple partners or family members did not share the exuberant life experiences in each other’s presence, we have them take the best elements of each of their separate exuberant life experiences and combine them. This can take the following forms: a couple partner or family members engaging in a highly meaningful activity or going somewhere special together that had emotionally moved the other partner or family member in a powerful and uplifting way. After the partners or family members have decided what elements of the exuberant experiences they wish to experiment with, we will have them hop into our trusty imaginary time machine and take it into the future after they have already infused into their relationships exuberance, describing how it is making a difference and what sparkling moments they will be eager to share with us that had occurred prior to our next sessions with them.