The Second Session: Continuing the Work
“I did it!”
One of the most amazing things about ACT Matrix work is how foolproof it is for both therapist and client. If the initial session has been established successfully clients leave the therapy room excited to get started and hopeful about the future (some for the first time in a very long time). Feeling hopeful after therapy is not uncommon no matter the therapeutic modality, but when it comes to the matrix the homework assigned after the first session of tracking toward and away moves is something that any client can handle and inherently adds to the impact of the initial session. Simply noticing your behavior is an act of power, and thinking functionally about it is an added layer that many people go through their lives without doing purposefully.
As you begin matrix work I encourage you to pay particular attention to the body language, facial expression, and overall attitude and affect of your client as they return for the second session. Often you will notice that there has already been a change as compared to session one. Clients who take to the matrix work readily will sit down in your office on that second session and practically exclaim “I did it!” as they recount their toward and away moves from the previous week. Homework that’s exciting for clients? That’s reason enough to engage in matrix work as far as I’m concerned. Be sure to encourage and praise their effort.
The ease of tracking function of behavior in terms of toward and away is the first step in the rest of the work, as it helps clients see that they are capable of doing the work necessary in therapy. It also reinforces that they themselves are active participants in their therapy. This type of work is not simply sitting on a couch and hearing feedback from a therapist.
If you check in with clients about how they feel about this therapeutic process you may be surprised at how many discuss prior attempts at therapy where they felt as though clear goals were not established, or that “It felt like we weren’t actually doing anything.” The majority of the clients that I have worked with over the years openly say that they desire a more active approach to therapy rather than “just talking” about their problems. As far as I’m concerned the ACT Matrix creates an ideal context of balance between active skill-building, client participation, self-reflection, and week to week goal-setting. The client feels as though they are going to therapy to do real work as opposed to having work done to them by their therapist.
Starting the Session
The second session begins with a short recap of the first session and a check-in on the homework assignment. I tend to briefly say something like:
Last week when we met we talked about what brings you to therapy, the people and things in your life that are important to you, the kinds of stuff that gets in the way, and the patterns you’ve been noticing. We set up that toward and away system, and I asked you to see if you could notice yourself making toward and away moves over the past week. Were you able to do that, and if so what did you notice?
In my work with hundreds of clients, only a handful have stated that they were unable to track their toward and away moves (and I take this inability to do so as my fault, as these were the situations where I rushed through or failed to properly take time with the client during the initial session). The vast majority of clients do have something to report, which you can ask them to recount to you in any way that works for you. Most of the time I simply have them report what they noticed in any way they choose. Other times I’ll ask for one toward move they noticed and one away move at a time, processing each one before moving to another.
As clients recount their experience listen intently, probing only for the function of what they noticed, as well as how the act of noticing itself worked for them. What was it like to pay this level of attention to their own life? Did it feel different? Did it allow them to do things differently in any way?
It’s common for clients to state that just by tracking their behavior they were able to intervene and disrupt unworkable patterns from occurring. Your job is to highlight this process occurring and to point at the workability that can arise from being more consciously aware of behavior and thinking functionally.
If a client was unable to notice their toward and away moves ask them what showed up to get in the way. It may be some of the same familiar stuff they originally put into their matrix. If something from their original matrix did show up to get in the way of their homework process out the event by asking them to “sort out” their experience onto the matrix by pointing at which quadrant parts of their past week fall into. Also, probe for how they categorize their actions in terms of toward and away here in the present moment as they look back at their past.
Analyzing Function of Behavior
As clients recount their toward and away moves noticed from the previous week as well as anything else they noticed it’s time to begin digging into the function of behavior and helping clients analyze how their experience affects their life across several dimensions.
The primary target of analysis is how actions work for clients. This is commonly called “workability”. A workable action is one that functions well in the context of the behavior. An unworkable action is one that does not function well in context.
What is functioning? Well, that depends on the context. Take for example a person on a diet that restricts sugar. This person may choose to not eat a slice of cake at a work meeting in favor of staying true to their dietary goals. This choice may be considered a Toward Move, as well as workable in the context. The cake in the break room at the office is for all employees, but it is not mandatory to eat. Now let’s say that a month later this same person is at the 104th birthday party of their great grandmother, and she has baked her famous German Chocolate cake. At her advanced age, the family is realistic that this may be her last birthday party. In this situation, eating a slice of this chocolate cake would be inconsistent with a nutritional diet that restricts sugar, and at the same time, it would be consistent with other important ways of being with family. Eating some chocolate cake in this context could just as readily be called a Toward Move as not eating a chocolate cake a month ago in the office. Two actions are on the surface opposite, yet both can be Toward Moves in the language of the matrix. Chocolate cake exists in both contexts, but you could say that though it’s the same animal, it’s a different beast entirely.
This concept of functional contextualism is the philosophy of science of ACT. We are fundamentally interested not in what is “right or wrong”, or “true or false”, but rather how the lives of our clients work for them based on the context of the current moment, and the overarching values they freely choose.
Exploring the function of a client’s toward and away moves can be done through conversation or in writing. If the client has their matrix from the first session they can update it with any new content noticed from the previous week. As they discuss their toward and away moves probe for analytical thought with questions like:
“What makes this an away move?”
“What does this action move you toward?”
“How can you tell that it’s an away move?”
“What is this moving you away from?”
“What does it feel like to move toward this?”
“What else do you notice as you make this away move?”
Probing for coherence related to toward and away moves in this way is important because even as clients are tracking their behavior they can still be misconstruing the meaning of toward and away as “moving toward or away from what’s important to me.” At this point it is natural to have this misunderstanding, and rather than correcting clients outright, we simply roll it into a further level of analysis. Matrix work is about training a different way of viewing life and it’ll take a healthy amount of time to get in the rhythm of it.
Analyzing Function Across Three Domains
There are three useful domains with which you and your client can work together to examine the content they brought in from the homework assignment.
1. Short term functioning
2. Long term functioning
3. Toward what matters?
Short term functioning refers to how an action works immediately or soon after it is performed. Long term functioning is how an action works sometime in the future. There’s no exact rule about what is short term and what is long term (this is one of those things that depend on context again). Here’s a quick example, drinking a big glass of water helps with taking my morning medicine in the short term, in the long term it makes me have to pee during my first meeting at work.
The third domain of analysis is “Does this actually move me toward what matters?” This is close to that other kind of toward and away we discussed earlier, e.g. is this action moving me closer to what matters to me or farther away?
Both toward and away moves in the matrix can have various levels of functioning. Away moves typically do work in the short term, that’s often why they continue to be done. Since they tend to work in the short term they can reinforce themselves and become those sticky loops. Away moves typically do not work too well in the long term, or in terms of moving toward what matters.
A lot of toward moves don’t have immediate short term benefits on the surface but do tend to have long term workability. Exercising is a perfect example of this, there’s even a common phrase that you might have heard, “Short term pain, long term gain.” The short term discomfort of exercising can be highly aversive and a reason that a lot of people don’t exercise regularly, as such an entire industry exists to make exercising more appetitive by reducing or neutralizing the short term aversiveness and increasing connection with values over the long term.
Both toward and away moves can be assessed in terms of how well (or not) it moves you toward what matters. Some toward moves that appear on the upper right-hand side of the matrix are only baby steps toward a valued life, others are giant leaps. On the other side, certain away moves can also move you toward a life that matters, while some simply serve to sustain the loop. Noticing signs that a panic attack may be incoming while at work could lead a person to preemptively take a short break to utilize some calming skills. This action would serve to move away from the anxiety, and toward their values of what kind of employee they want to be. Remember that we’re not trying to turn our clients into perfect toward move machines. Our work with them is balanced across the entire matrix.
"It looks like you're right in that this action moves you away from what's important to you, but it seems like that's the side-effect of the action. Can you think of what this action was originally 'designed' to move you away from?"
Through dialogues like these and continued actual practice we refine our clients' noticing and discrimination ability, honing it down from simple toward and away to a more complex analysis of their behavior.
Tracking Without Judgment
Once the language of toward and away is developed you can use this consistently with clients as a metaphor and cue for tracking by pausing clients and asking whether what they are describing is a toward or away move. What you’re really asking here is for the client to stop and analyze the function of their behavior.
Some clinicians beginning work with the matrix have concerns that asking whether a move is toward or away can be a form of judging clients or asking clients to judge themselves. We don’t want to demean clients by wagging our finger and asking “Now is that a toward move or an away move, hmm?” Much of this can be avoided by our tone of voice and the ways we word our questions. In addition, taking care to properly define the concept of toward and away during the initial set-up as neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, etc., as well as reminding clients of this from time to time is essential. As the work progresses, we are constantly reminding clients that both away moves and toward moves can be workable or not workable and that a rabbit can move away from a predator and toward a carrot at the same time. Validating and normalizing this framework as something that all animals and every person engages in can also ease that concern.
Ultimately, simply staying genuinely curious about the experience of your clients buffers against coming across as judgmental. If you think you know in advance what a client needs and what they should be doing then you are more likely to appear judgmental. Remain open and curious to what your clients are recounting. Many clients have similar concerns, similar patterns of behavior, and similar wants and needs, yet each client has unique lives and contexts.
Here are some examples of how you can probe and ask about toward and away moves without judgment:
"What does it move you away from?"
"What does it move you toward?"
"And what do you notice happens next?"
"Have you been able to track how that works for you?”
"Any pattern you're seeing?"
"Is this a familiar loop?"
"When/Where else has this shown up in your life?"
“You’re doing a wonderful job noticing all of this stuff. How has just being more intentionally aware been changing things for you?”
The Rest of the Session
Processing toward and away moves and assessing workability may take the entirety of the session. If it does, be sure to reserve time in the last few minutes to complete another matrix designed to capture the current day. In the lower right-hand quadrant ask them who and what are important today, what kind of person they want to be today, or what deeply matters to them for the rest of the day.
Move to the lower left quadrant and ask what might show up to get in the way today. Here we are using the matrix to think about the future. In the upper left quadrant ask them what their typical responses might be to that stuff down in the lower left. Again we’re asking them to project into the future and relate to their experience from an I-Here-Now point of view to a Me-There-Then point of view.
In the top right ask them what moves they could make to move toward what matters to them today. Help clients brainstorm SMART objectives.
SMART stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable/Action-oriented
Relevant (to what matters to them)
Time-sensitive
Much of the time these toward moves are relevant to the content that was discussed during the session. For example, a client who has been having difficulty with their relationship to their mother may have noticed several toward and away moves related to that relationship during the past week which were processed in this session. What’s important to them today may be continuing to work on their actions in terms of that relationship. If you and the client are able to create specific and actionable toward moves the client then has their homework for the week cut out for them. Encourage the client to attempt the toward moves brainstormed in session and to continue to track their toward and away moves more generally, as well as to think in terms of functionality.
[SMART goals have been around since the 1980s, and as far as I can tell the earliest known use was by George T. Doran, though if you search for SMART goals on the internet you’ll get a ton of resources for helping you formulate these types of goals with clients. Doran, G. T. (1981). There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives. Management Review. 70 (11): 35–36]
A Note on Self-Care
Keep an eye out for clients who primarily think of “surface-level” self-care actions for their toward moves. Things like “take a bubble bath”, “spend time for myself”, “read a book”. There’s nothing wrong with these actions per se but we want to be sure our toward moves are highly relevant to who and what is important to us in our lives, otherwise they may just be away moves disguised as toward moves.
Many clients are very good at engaging in these surface level self-care actions while still being completely stuck in a loop. They’ve become so good at identifying hints of unwanted and uncomfortable inner experience that they instantly “dump a pile of self-care” on top of the experience in an effort to avoid it. Even though these actions are at first sight healthy and adaptive, they are pure away moves and do little to actually ease suffering or increase valued living. In a sense, we can become self-care machines rather than living breathing individuals open to the rich complexity and beauty of life.
Do your best to not overly encourage these hidden away moves while still validating that they serve some function in the short term. Running these moves through the filters of short term, long term, and toward or away, can be helpful to tease out how well these actions are working. The good news is that almost all of these surface-level self-care actions can be easily turned into workable toward moves through some minor tweaks and brainstorming with your client. Matrix work is about vital living rather than just getting by.
Second Session Outline
Step 1: Summarize previous session
Step 2: Review homework of noticing toward and away moves
Step 3: Introduce concept of workability and review toward and away moves in terms of short term, long term, and how well they actually move you toward what matters
Step 4: Apply concepts to any content that comes up during the session
Step 5: End session by creating a new matrix specific to the current day
Step 6: Brainstorm SMART toward moves and assign homework
Homework: Attempt SMART toward moves; continue to track toward and away moves generally; apply filters of workability
Today Specific Matrix
I encourage you to walk yourself through this matrix and see how it feels to think about your own experience of the day in this manner.