Agency in Therapy: Creating Choice Inside an Activated Nervous System
When I look for growth and change in my clients, I am often thinking about agency.
Agency is the restoration of choice inside an activated nervous system. It is the ability to relate to your reaction rather than be completely organized by it. It is the movement from automaticity to awareness to choice.
Agency is not the absence of automatic reactions. It is the moment you notice the automatic reaction and realize it is not the only possible future.
A lot of suffering comes from mistaking an old protective pattern for the only available truth. Therapy restores agency by helping people see the pattern while they are inside it, and then creating enough space for them to decide what they want to do.
People often think about therapy in terms of needing to change. I don’t necessarily assume that. I want the systems that are at play to become clear. I want us to understand what is happening so that a person is not simply reacting automatically or reacting against an old pattern, but is actually making a choice. They can listen to their feelings without having to obey them. Agency becomes the experience of knowing: This is what is happening in me, and I still get to decide what I do.
I think about a client who is racked by guilt. But her guilt is rooted in overresponsibility. It is not healthy guilt arising from something she has done wrong. But an overarching expectation that she is responsible for other people’s happiness. As we loosen the belief that she must be responsible for everyone else, the guilt loosens too. She has more room to ask what she actually wants, rather than being guided by a responsibility that was never really hers.
Helpful questions:
Can we slow this down enough that the reaction becomes visible?
Can we separate what is happening now from what is being replayed?
Can we notice the story the body is treating as fact?
Can we find the small moment before the old move takes over?
Can we create enough space that another move becomes available?
