How a client tells her story says a lot

In her clinical practice as a relational psychotherapist, Patricia DeYoung has heard a lot of stories. One of the things she has learned about listening to stories is how differently clients tell them. In her book Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame (2015) she talks about how clients reveal their attachment styles through different ways of telling their stories. This is important because different expressions of attachment styles call for different responses from therapists as listeners.

Secure attachment

DeYoung describes how adults with a history of secure attachment tell their stories in a coherent, believable way. “They have processed their childhood traumas, they present a realistic, balanced picture of their parents, and they can put their feelings into words,” she says.

Insecure attachment

However, incoherent narratives can reflect an incoherent sense of self. And an incoherent sense of self can stem from different types of insecure attachment that call for different strategies for listening.

Avoidant/dismissing

For example, avoidant/dismissing clients, she says, need to hear their own stories. And to hear their stories they need invitations and coaxing to get them out. As a listener, it helps to be more interested in their story than they are. Where stories are thin, DeYoung says, ask for more details; where stories are flat, wonder about and explore their complexities.

Ambivalent/preoccupied

And ambivalent/preoccupied clients don’t need any drawing out from listeners at all. Instead, “stories spill out from them in many directions, with the pressure of disorganized conflictual emotions behind them,” DeYoung says.

They come in fragments, with affect that doesn’t match the fragments. Nothing really fits and we feel disoriented just listening. Here our first mode of listening is just to contain what we hear. But now we’re holding in order to “make safe,” not yet to “make sense.”

What matters most

What matters most, DeYoung says, is not which type of insecure attachment might best identify narratives and selves. Rather, “what does matter, is that we are listening to our clients in a way that’s different from the particular kind of non-listening that created the incoherence in the first place.”

In other words, “what matters more than the story is the storyteller who experiences a more conscious, integrated sense of self while speaking to someone who listens deeply.”

DeYoung says that clients find new ways to tell their stories in response to the quality of listening they receive—listening that for DeYoung is grounded in “right-brain empathic attunement and non-verbal connections.”

Integration

Empathic listening helps facilitate the integration of narratives and of selves, particularly in DeYoung’s relational/neurobiological approach to understanding and treating clients suffering from chronic shame.

Autobiographical sense of self is a sign of right-brain integration. This felt coherence, grounded in visceral emotion, is not to be confused with a self-history created by left-brain logical and linguistic processes. Relational/emotional narratives integrate right-brain neural networks because such stories can be felt as part of self, even while words facilitate the feelings and reflections.

Authentic connection

In conclusion, the therapeutic potential of empathic listening is based in authentic connection. And authentic connection, DeYoung says, “is sharing emotion within ‘I-see-you-seeing-me’ intersubjective space: I will tell you what I feel because we each hear and care about how the other feels.”

DeYoung, P. (2015). Understanding and treating chronic shame: A relational/neurobiological approach. New York and London: Routledge.