The Situation is Hopeless but Not Serious: The Pursuit of Unhappiness

Paul Watzlawick
Paper 4 of the Training to become a Certified Contextual Coach with Dr. P. Warschawski
Joshua Gonsher
May 4, 2015

I have been administering therapy for the past seven months, but I have often felt
that most of what I was doing was attending to my clients instead of helping them
overcome hurdles to reach their goals and feel better. My supervisor continues to tell me
that "being there and hearing their stories" is therapeutic, and, indeed, the research shows
that it is. However, how long does a patient need to wait to experience less pain? What is
sufficient "presence" that will decrease psychic distress? I do not know the duration or
intensity one need suffer before feeling better. So Paul Watzlawick's book has come at a
perfect time since it shows that people themselves are responsible for making their lives
miserable, and I am there to intervene. He has given me a shot in the arm and directed me
back on the path, one which actually decreases suffering quickly.
Chapter two, about playing games with the past, presents the first discovery I made
whilst reading The Situation. Perhaps half (or more) of the intervention classes in my PsyD
program have discussed ad nauseum the importance of delving into one's past and coming
to terms with events and people therein. As Watzlawick says, "Theadvantage of a deep
involvement with the past is that it does not leave much time to face the present." Clients
who do this do not feel better and do not change. Nor, as contextual coaches or therapists
would argue, does this leave much physical time to help clients or patients achieve the goal
for which they have come into the office. Focusing on the past often allows individuals to
avoid answering questions, difficult or otherwise, or narrow down an objective which they
would like to reach. Further, it opens room to place blamemaking someone else wrong and
frequently adding fuel to a conflict though rule number four is to be willing to give up
fightingand justify how patients currently behave, shifting accountability away from the
individual. In my therapy experience, several clients present as feeling hopeless about
themselves, the world, and their future, and they attribute this to decisions they have made
in the past or actions that were visited upon them. They cannot find a suitable partner, they
never succeed at work, they always worry about finances. These patternsthey claimare
due to mistakes made in the past, with no awareness as to who really can change them.
This self-induced victimization appears easier than taking responsibility to effect change and
improve one's situation, and it is no wonder, therefore, that a yardstick of what makes a
good therapist is how well they merely attend to patients' suffering. However, what price
does one pay in preventing success and achievement? Is their agony ever greater, more
enjoyable than peace? Even in the short term?
Should patients wish to improve their present conditions, they would have to actively
interrupt these cycles they feel are results of past causes and implement some kind of

change. Why sit in therapy for months if not years, waiting for insight into the past, when
at that pointthey would still have to conduct themselves differently? Instead, accept that
awful/wonderful/painful/heinous/etc. things happened, things are the way they are, and
decide immediately where to go and what to do next. The point of this book, and this
chapter specifically, is to demonstrate that we decide how we want our lives to go since the
future does not depend on the past but on our decision at any moment. Too many people
choose to let their pasts dictate their futures when technically all they would need to do is
make other decisions.
This is where a contextual therapist becomes even more important since changing
one's assumptions is certainly easier said than done. That most likely every psychology,
counseling, and social work school trains new practitioners to discuss past relationships,
activities, and wrongs indicates a need for short-term, earth-shaking, assumptionquestioning therapy. The reason I got into this profession in the first place was to help
people feel better mentally and emotionally, and if I am planning on doing that, I want to
make sure it is effective and elegant and excellent.
Dr. Warschawksi has stated that a coach and a therapist must have a love of
humanity to practice in this field efficiently. Those to whom I have explained contextual
coaching and therapy do not fully grasp how remaining indifferent, employing irreverence,
or challenging deeply held beliefs demonstrates love, and that is an area where I would like
to grow. Humorous sarcasm can be an effective interventional strategy, but, like an
acupuncturist, I need to know where I can insert the needle. Conversely, I sometimes feel
my patients need me to be nice by not shaking their assumptions enough or by letting
clients tell too many long-winded stories. What if they perceive me as being rude or
presumptuous or sarcastic? I plan on getting further help to strike the happy medium
between these extremes in my personal practice.
The second discovery found in the pages of Watzlawick's guide is in chapter six,
which speaks about taking risks. Though the first discovery was tinged with sadness at my
not being as successful as I would like, this one actually gets to be colored with
braggadocio. Several of my clients enter the office, scared to do something outside their
comfort zone. They are afraid to tell their partners they are unhappy or break up with them,
afraid of failing when or if they change jobs, afraid to share the burden of their suffering
with those who may want to help, or even afraid of succeeding. They, therefore, avoid that
feared situation, which seems like a perfectly good method to avoid its transpiring. However,
this is a sure-fire way to perpetuate the problem. Any firmly held, nurtured, and cultivated

belief, Watzlawick says, "will eventually create its own reality," so when clients believe that a
divorce is guaranteed to end catastrophically or that quitting their job will promise failure,
there is no way they would risk even chancing an iota of that. It is better to remain in the
pain they know than the one they do not.
Contextual therapy challenges the belief that staying in their current scenarios is
actually safer than not. The painful realities they have created do ensure order and offer a
sense of security, but the therapist helps the clients find holes in that structure or
foundation, allowing them to realize that nothing is actually safe.
A client with whom I have recently terminated has broken up with her uncaring
boyfriend, gotten a job after being unemployed for months, moved to a happier location in
California, and started a new life. The question to which I can attribute most of her success
is, "Which is riskier?" Based on this book, the Seminars, and common sense, I know that
mere living has risks associated with it. Planes crash, trains derail, cars explode, horses
rear, houses have radon, basements have asbestos, the ground has earthquakes, etc. ad
infinitum. When choosing between two options, which, then, has less risk? Is my client
going to be all right with not breaking up with her boyfriend? Or is the pain therein greater
than the heartbreak of becoming newly single? Is living off the comforts and generosity of
her sister better than paying her own rent? Or do freedom and autonomyat whatever
financial costtaste sweeter than being beholden to others? Simply asking this question has
effected great change. Often mere awareness that both sides to the coin offer risk is enough
to push the client to take the proverbial leap. As I have been employing this intervention
since I began providing therapy, and as I have seen great results, I plan to continue this
technique but perhaps with the refinements of which I spoke earlier.
My third discovery is tertium non datur, a Latin phrase Watzlawick uses in the book,
which means "no third possibility is given." While this concept has been known since
Romans roamed the earth, and I could have found this phrase by searching through my
philosophy or logic textbooks from college, it was apropos because of the kind of therapy I
was dispensing and because of a class I was taking while I was reading this book.
I subscribe to the theoretical approach of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which
believes that one's thoughts influence how one feels and subsequently how one behaves,
similar to George Kelly's theory of personality as well. One of the hazardsthe cognitive
trapsinto which individuals often fall is dichotomous thinking. Simply put, this means that
a suffering client cannot think of any way out of his predicament; every choice is fatal. A
patient with depression contemplates suicide as a viable option since he feels it is better

than living with the mental anguish of being down all the timetertium non datur. Clients
who do not receive an A on a research paper feel they have failed the class. Individuals who
do not close a sale on a car feel they are no good at sales. To illustrate further, a patient
who disclosed early on that he is transgenderedhe is not the daughter who was born to his
mother; he is a male in female formhad been holding on to this secret for months,
resulting in depression and anxiety. (I understand that symptoms are solutions and that his
depression and anxiety were "created" so he would not have to deal with telling his mother
and others that he was not female, but he still suffered from themed. note) He could not
see a way to live with the secret and began planning to kill himself. Even when presented
with alternative thoughts or choices, "Max" was so married to this cognitive dichotomy, this
black-and-white thinking, he could not see a way out, the point of this discovery.
An addition to this section: Since I wanted to help him feel better, I then brought the
risk question back. My client felt that the pain of keeping this inside was greater than the
potential pain of his mother's not accepting him, so he decided to "come out" to her, come
what may. When Max finally told his mother, his depression and anxiety nearly went away.
He still has residual anxiety about being a boy in an all-girls school, and he sometimes still
feels overwhelmed at his schoolwork, but these symptoms seem to be filling another void,
that his therapist is leaving in two months, and that he will soon be on his own in the cruel
world.
The importance of this discovery in the contextual realm is that the job of the coach
or therapist is to allow the client to see that there is a third option. In fact, severalperhaps
infinitechoices abound in attempting to reach one's goal. If one does not work, try another
in the continuous experiment. I have presented this concept to clients by asking what they
would do if they had tickets to a dream performance, but they could not get there by taking
the highway since construction shut it down. Not one would merely turn the car around and
go home. Since attending the show was such a desired entity, roadblocks or traffic or even a
blizzard would not prevent their attending it. They have responded creatively with how they
might achieve their goals, and then we have used this creativity in other avenues.
I plan on keeping this Latin phrase axiomatically in front of me at all times. Knowing
that tertium datur (with apologies to Cicero and other Roman orators) or even quattuor,
quinque, or centum datur helps keep my creative juices flowing in session. Often I feel my
wheels are spinning, but I am not getting anywhere, so simply remembering that several
possibilities exist for change may help me grab hold and climb out of this pit.

I am thankful that this book and paper came when they did, at the culmination of the
academic component of my program and the commencement of a serious practicum,
because they reminded me what will be important for my life after school. I am eager to
implement these techniques and strategies in next year's externship without fear of school
repercussions; the test to see if I have "studied psychology" will be over, and I will be even
closer to becoming Dr. Gonsher and practicing what and how I want.