Your story reminds me of what my supervisor once said to me, more then twenty years ago: When you know too much about the causal determinants of your client’s behavior, you have no room to maneuver as a therapist. If you would know all your clients knows about his or her problems, you would be as paralyzed as they are. Another experience that comes to mind: some fifteen years ago, I was treating an employee of a launderette, the owner of the launderette and the upstairs neighbor of the employee all at the same time, without knowing that they knew each other. The neighbor, who suffered from depression and had restricted her social activities. One of her goals for therapy was to rebuild her social support network, so she began to entertain people at home late at night, making a lot of noise. One of the goals of therapy for the employee of the launderette was to learn to stand up for her rights, so she tried to be assertive with the neighbor. Her boss, the owner of the launderette had as a goal for therapy to develop social skills to deal with her employees who were not respecting her leadership in the business. And this was quite a challenge with the employee who was learning to be assertive. If I had known earlier that the three clients were directly involved in each other’s daily life problems, I would probably have tried to coordinate the efforts and got paralyzed in the process. As I only found out when it was too late, the three therapies turned out quite successfully. Of cause, when one client improved, this constituted a challenge for the other. But such challenges are also real-life opportunities for trying out new behavior. Of cause, from a FAP perspective, you must pay attention to what happens between you and your client, instead of trying to directly change the contingencies in his or her daily life. I think the answer of your problem is that you need to work with each client’s individual goals for therapy, and use what you know about the others only as background information.

Hope this gives you some inspiration,

 

Luc