Intention Is Not the Same as Action
A supervisee recently asked whether a client acknowledging he has a problem means he has broken through denial. Underneath that question is another one: is denial black and white, gray, or something else? The answer is all of the above. Breaking through denial is not one event. It is a series of steps, like going down a staircase.
The Gym Membership Test
Here’s the analogy I use. You want to lose weight, so you join a gym. How many people join in January and never go? A lot. How many go for two weeks and quit? A lot. How many make it a month and quit? Also a lot. So when a client says he’s going to get in shape, that statement alone doesn’t tell us much. I’m not saying he’s lying. He has an intention to change, and intention is not the same as willingness to act. This is where many clients are when they enter therapy, for addiction and for other issues.
What We’re Actually Hearing
It’s easy to treat a client’s words as fact when what we’re actually hearing is intent. “I intend to get healthy.” “I intend to get sober.” In that moment, he can mean it one hundred percent. Five minutes later, he may not give it another thought. That doesn’t mean he lied. Intention and consistent action are different phases of the same process, and most people live in the gap between them.
This shows up everywhere, not just in recovery. I tell my partner, “I’ll help pick up the house before dinner,” and I mean it. Then I see a text, take a phone call, or start playing with the kids. I said I’d pick up, and I didn’t. That doesn’t make me a liar. It means intention, planning, action, and consistent action are four different things, and most of us are stronger in some than others.
The Real Clinical Question
So the clinical question is not “Was my client honest when he said he wants to get sober?” Of course he meant it. The better question is: how do we help him move from intention to consistent action outside the therapy room? That is the real work.
Early in my career, I got frustrated with clients because I thought they were lying and didn’t want real recovery. I was naive. They wanted recovery. They came to me for help moving from intention to planning to action to consistent action. Our role as therapists is to help clients build the structure that leads to follow-through and real life change.
Rethinking Relapse
This reframe also changes how we read relapse. Say a client announces “I’m done with my addiction!” and relapses two weeks later. The instinct is to treat that statement as false, or as proof he wasn’t trying hard enough. Often that’s my own frustration showing up as countertransference. It’s more useful, and more accurate, to ask:
- “Where did things go wrong?”
- “When did you stop moving toward health and turn back toward addiction?”
- “When did the addict thinking take over?”
We look past the behavior to the emotional experience underneath. Did the intention collapse? Did the planning never turn into execution? Did healthy action start and then stop being consistent? Those are three different clinical problems with three different fixes. None of them requires deciding whether our client is dishonest.
Denial Is Not a Switch
Change is not a single decision made once and held forever. It is intention, then planning, then action, then the much harder work of making that action consistent. People move back and forth across those stages more than any of us would like. We meet them where they are, without questioning their intention, their commitment to therapy, or our ability as therapists.
Intention gets a client into our office. Our work is helping them move from intention to consistent action.