What is Connected Therapy?

This one is as much for my fellow social workers as it is for people who are interested in entering therapy. Bear with me, because I'm about to keep it real and use a lot of words. You have been warned.

Connected Therapy is just a term I cobbled together one night, because I got tired of saying "all forms of therapy that use an authentic client-therapist connection as the foundation for everything else".

That's really all there is to Connected Therapy.

And I should note: This is not something I came up with in my education in social work, or from the perspective of a mental health practitioner. This is something I learned as a client, sitting on a lot of other people's couches, wondering why in the hell it was so hard to find the right therapist.

There are many therapists in the world who are technique or intervention focused. CBT. DBT. EMDR. IFS. Somatic therapy. The list goes on almost endlessly. All of these tools can be wonderful, especially when applied in the right way, to the right situation. I think the problem I want to shine a light on is best illustrated by the old saying "When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail".

A whole lot of therapists get really focused on mastering specific therapeutic tools, and then they naturally look for situations where those tools are well applied. And in theory, once you accumulate enough tools, you end up with a very versatile toolkit that helps you succeed in a ton of situations. This is awesome if you are a contractor, or an engineer. Contractors and engineers often get to choose what jobs they work on, or they eventually specialize (like many therapists) in a specific niche where a set of very specific tools almost always solves the problem.

But people…people are endlessly complex. The human heart is one of the most interesting and complicated landscapes you can possibly explore. We have been doing it for thousands of years and like the ocean, we still have only explored a tiny fraction of it. Add in the fact that we are controlled by organic super computers connected to vast nervous systems that science is only starting to understand…and you can see why it's so hard to find the right therapist.

So, Connected Therapy is not about abandoning tools. It's not about ignoring intervention styles and how they map to lots of common situations in human growth. It's about starting with a basic premise: It doesn't matter what you know, or what tools you have, if you aren't able to cultivate a meaningful connection that is rooted in both the client and therapist being their authentic selves…you will be perpetually trying to grab smoke.

This means we need to do a few things. Clients need to experience true psychological safety and radical acceptance, or they simply won't show up as their true selves. And therapists need to start bringing their authentic selves to the office, so that clients actually understand who they are working with and why this person deserves to see the stuff that scares the hell out of them. This absolutely doesn't mean that we need to be spending entire sessions as therapists, telling clients our life stories…but it does mean we need to fearlessly and radically show up as ourselves, warts and all.

It also means that your therapist should probably have a therapist too. It keeps us honest, and it keeps us from forgetting what it's like to sit on that couch and be vulnerable for an entire hour at a time.

Connection is a funny thing. If we aren't able to connect to ourselves, we face an extremely hard time making any meaningful connections to others. So, to that end, the first challenge in therapy is to create an environment where the client can show up as their authentic self, even and especially when they don't fully know who the hell that even is. It's a paradox for the ages.

The good news is that before structured tools, and before interventions, and before diagnoses…there is a powerful human phenomenon just waiting to be embraced: Sit with someone in uncertainty. Don't try to know everything. Don't try to figure out if this person would benefit from CBT or DBT or EMDR. Just hold space for the emotions that they can't even hold themselves, sit in the uncertainty together, explore it courageously, and watch what happens.

If any of this spoke to you, then you are in the right place.

If getting to know yourself better sounds like something you would be willing to do, even if it scares the hell out of you…then therapy is absolutely for you.

Welcome.