“Don’t Call Me Junior” A Message from Indiana Jones

It is the client, not the therapist, who knows where the client wants to go.

Various circumstances often put the therapist into the inappropriate role of leader. In truth, to be useful, therapy must be “co-directed” by both the therapist and the client.

I like to use the analogy of explorer and guide to describe how I think the counseling relationship should be shaped. Perhaps you’ve seen movies where a “famous jungle explorer” hires a guide to reach a particular destination. Usually, the explorer is an expert in his or her field who has already determined the destination and hires the guide to help get there. The explorer, for example, may wish to find a “Lost City of Gold.”

Before even hiring the guide, the explorer has many ideas about where the Lost City is, what it is worth to the explorer (and the world), what it looks like, and even how best to find it. Still, the explorer needs a guide.

The guide’s job is to explain to the explorer the terrain they will be traveling. The guide also shares any knowledge and opinions that the explorer asks for. The guide also will feel somewhat obligated to offer knowledge and opinions about safe travel, expedient routes, and survival strategies along the way. Each member of the team becomes responsible for protecting self and teammate. However, the explorer has ultimate decision-making power, because the explorer has determined the goal, and will be the one to benefit most from attaining the goal.

In therapy, it is much the same way. Before hiring a therapist, the client has lived a life of intentional or accidental research on the topic of “What is my life goal.” That is the client’s Lost City of Gold. The client has developed some vision of a life goal, is the foremost expert on that life goal, and has many ideas on how best to realize that goal.

Like the guide, the therapist’s job is to share knowledge of the emotional terrain the client is traveling, the therapist is willing to teach skills and offer opinions when appropriate. He or she often feels compelled to make the client aware of safe and useful ways of working toward goal realization.

The counselor is working to forward the client’s purpose, but that does not mean that the therapist’s needs as a human and professional guide can be discarded. The survival and safety of the therapist, emotional and otherwise, is just as important as that of the client. However, it is the client’s life aspirations that both are working toward, and the client has ultimate decision-making power over his or her own life, because the client is the one who must live with the results.

It would be silly not to hire a guide on a particularly challenging journey. But a therapist is not like the travel guides who work for tourists—with the destinations and gift shops all mapped out ahead of time. Neither the therapist nor the client know for sure what they will find, but they agree to share the client’s quest.