What is Connected Therapy?

This page is mostly for people either looking to start therapy for the first time, or people who have tried therapy and never felt like they got much out of it. I was one of you for a long time, and Connected Therapy is my attempt to help you sort this out and land with a therapist who really works for you. Bear with me, because I'm about to keep it real and use a lot of words. You have been warned.

So what is Connected Therapy?

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.

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 good 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 approach 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 particular 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 therapists need to be spending entire sessions telling clients their life stories…but it does mean they need to fearlessly and radically show up as themselves, warts and all.

It also means:

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.

This doesn't mean that I think I have it all figured out. A huge part of being a social worker is continuously learning, and being really comfortable and curious when you don't necessarily know exactly whats going on.

What it really means is that as a client, I found the approach taken by a lot of therapists to be confusing: They would often not really volunteer much about who they really are, and before we had built any real trust, they would start asking questions about my childhood, or my symptoms, and I was still trying to figure out if I trusted them enough to share those things. This led me (and a lot of other clients in general) to bringing an abridged version of myself into therapy. I showed these therapists a version of me that I felt safe showing, instead of my authentic self. People do this instinctually, and then when therapy isn't super effective for them, they decide that therapy in general isn't going to help them. This is such a huge missed opportunity, and life is too short to waste months or years doing therapy half way:

It felt to me like we were doing the whole process backwards: Share first, trust blindly, and maybe in a year or so you will have formed some vague clue about who your therapist really is.

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. 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.

I guess the point of this long explanation is really just this: If you are in therapy and don't feel like you are connecting with your therapist, or if you are looking to start therapy…you do not have to just show up and start talking. Interview your therapist. Ask questions about who they are and why they are sitting across from you. If you don't connect to the answers you get, or they just refuse to talk about themselves below surface depth, just move on and try someone else. Sometimes picking a therapist is like dating, and you need to go out there and get to know a bunch of people before you figure out what works for you. That's ok.

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.