Confusion about the roles of
Past/Present/Future thinking in
therapeutic intervention.
It is easy for most therapists to understand the problems
experienced by their clients when those clients dwell on the past or
worry about the future. More often than not, the therapist will try
to convey the futility of past/future thinking and will encourage the
client to focus on the present. While this is an invaluable skill, this
skill like other skills, ultimately provides clients with an increased
range of options, not a fixed alternative or mandate.
All we must do is think about it for a moment. Are there
advantages to thinking about the past or future? Certainly. We
learn from the past. We plan for the future. It is our unrealistic
expectations that “brooding” will help us change the past, or that
worrying alone will help us change the future, which causes us
irreconcilable emotional discomfort.
Focusing on the present can also be done in effective and less-
than-effective ways. Consider someone with poor impulse control
or a need for immediate gratification. Consider someone with
poor short-term memory. For these people, our therapeutic
interventions would in fact, entail teaching them to learn from the
past and to plan for the future.
In that each of these portions of our “time experience” can be
useful or not so useful, it seems as if there might be an advantage
to training our minds to consider not one of these over the others,
but all of these in an optimal fashion. Consider the regard for
another person. In the moment, we see a person. They look a
certain way. They have a certain facial expression. They are
wearing certain clothes. We may have a moment’s regard for
them and in that moment, we may pass judgment on them. In that
moment we may determine if they are of interest to us or not. We
may decide whether they may provide us some service or we may
determine whether they represent a threat. If they are of interest to
us, we may continue to observe them and to continue to assess
them, the word “continue” implying that we observe them over
time. When we observe someone over time, we create a past,
present and future for that person in our regard for them.
Whether we do this in the moment, a past, present, and future
exists for that person nonetheless. The person you observe has
been someplace, they are someplace, and they are going
someplace. This is true whether we stop to think about it or not
and it represents dimensions of that person, which if given regard,
would give us a fuller picture of who or what that person is. Surely
we have experience with the expansion of our sense of a person
which takes place when there are job interviews going on, or a
person’s criminal history is being considered. Teachers and
parents are given to looking at a child’s present and trying to
extrapolate a future, all of this toward the design of intervention.
In our casual encounters with people, it may be to our advantage
to see them as a person who is never stuck in time, but always
moving and changing across time. Imagine seeing a young woman
getting off a bus and instead of just seeing this young woman and
making generalizations about her “young-womaness”, we saw a
little girl, an older girl, a young woman, an older woman, and an
elderly woman moving through time.
It may not be so much that REBT-style thinking errors are about
choosing the wrong part of the time continuum to focus on, but that
our sense of the past, present, and future as discrete and concrete
“parts” of time is in error.
Christian Wolff, MA, Licensed Psychologist Associate
Copyright, 2006
Past/Present/Future thinking in
therapeutic intervention.
It is easy for most therapists to understand the problems
experienced by their clients when those clients dwell on the past or
worry about the future. More often than not, the therapist will try
to convey the futility of past/future thinking and will encourage the
client to focus on the present. While this is an invaluable skill, this
skill like other skills, ultimately provides clients with an increased
range of options, not a fixed alternative or mandate.
All we must do is think about it for a moment. Are there
advantages to thinking about the past or future? Certainly. We
learn from the past. We plan for the future. It is our unrealistic
expectations that “brooding” will help us change the past, or that
worrying alone will help us change the future, which causes us
irreconcilable emotional discomfort.
Focusing on the present can also be done in effective and less-
than-effective ways. Consider someone with poor impulse control
or a need for immediate gratification. Consider someone with
poor short-term memory. For these people, our therapeutic
interventions would in fact, entail teaching them to learn from the
past and to plan for the future.
In that each of these portions of our “time experience” can be
useful or not so useful, it seems as if there might be an advantage
to training our minds to consider not one of these over the others,
but all of these in an optimal fashion. Consider the regard for
another person. In the moment, we see a person. They look a
certain way. They have a certain facial expression. They are
wearing certain clothes. We may have a moment’s regard for
them and in that moment, we may pass judgment on them. In that
moment we may determine if they are of interest to us or not. We
may decide whether they may provide us some service or we may
determine whether they represent a threat. If they are of interest to
us, we may continue to observe them and to continue to assess
them, the word “continue” implying that we observe them over
time. When we observe someone over time, we create a past,
present and future for that person in our regard for them.
Whether we do this in the moment, a past, present, and future
exists for that person nonetheless. The person you observe has
been someplace, they are someplace, and they are going
someplace. This is true whether we stop to think about it or not
and it represents dimensions of that person, which if given regard,
would give us a fuller picture of who or what that person is. Surely
we have experience with the expansion of our sense of a person
which takes place when there are job interviews going on, or a
person’s criminal history is being considered. Teachers and
parents are given to looking at a child’s present and trying to
extrapolate a future, all of this toward the design of intervention.
In our casual encounters with people, it may be to our advantage
to see them as a person who is never stuck in time, but always
moving and changing across time. Imagine seeing a young woman
getting off a bus and instead of just seeing this young woman and
making generalizations about her “young-womaness”, we saw a
little girl, an older girl, a young woman, an older woman, and an
elderly woman moving through time.
It may not be so much that REBT-style thinking errors are about
choosing the wrong part of the time continuum to focus on, but that
our sense of the past, present, and future as discrete and concrete
“parts” of time is in error.
Christian Wolff, MA, Licensed Psychologist Associate
Copyright, 2006
