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The more we push for change, the less acceptance a client may feel.

The more allowance we provide, the more stressed clients may become about not getting better quickly enough.

Mindfulness practice can help us develop a more neutral relationship with our own experience.

When a client treats therapy as a task and getting emotionally better as a mission, everything can become stressful.

Yet the difficulty is that different clients may need very different things. Some may need more permission, allowance, and acceptance. Others may need more practice tolerating distress without immediately retreating or giving up. And some may need both.

These needs are often interwoven.

The more we push for change, the less acceptance a client may feel. Yet the more allowance and reassurance we provide, the more stressed they may become about not getting better quickly enough.

For some clients, it can feel as though they are allowed to be only one way or the other, and that the two positions are mutually exclusive.

How the Perfectionistic Overcontroller Mode Turns Self-Improvement Into Self-Criticism

In Schema Therapy, one way of understanding this is through the Perfectionistic Overcontroller mode. This mode tries to help a client “self-improve” all the time. If they do not improve, they may criticise or punish themselves internally.

For many people, this is how they learned to show up in the world: being........

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