The best therapy, like any other form of personal growth, involves moving from poor to adequate to exemplary behavior. A person may not ever reach an ideal state of being (is there such a thing?) but the very definition of positive change is the ability to move from a lower to higher level of functioning. So it may come as a surprise to learn that I advocate and even advise my clients to "mess up" from time to time.
There are two main reason why I encourage clients to risk failure. The first is to learn to make it not such a big deal. It's pretty well accepted that we avoid what we fear, and that avoidance tends to make the object of our fear so much greater. Think of times in your life you've taken a risk that you had avoided for a long time and then said "that wasn't so bad -- I wish I had done that long ago." That's a pretty significant victory. Of course, it's foolish to expect every thing you try to work out the way you hoped every time, so a healthy tolerance for failure is an excellent characteristic of a healthy individual. Trying new things is a wonderful way to widen your experience, your resilience and your perspective. A little failure is a modest invest for such growth.
The second opportunity for creative failure comes near the end of the successful therapy experience. A classic example I often implement is when I am working with a couple who has experienced dramatic improvement in communication and harmony through hard therapeutic effort. It's one of my great joys as a therapist to observe two people successfully negotiate a situation that would have previously ended in bitterness and misery. Sometimes such improvement can be like going from the bottom of a pit to the top of a mountain in a relatively short period of time: once they've reached the heights it's anxiety-provoking for a couple to contemplate experiencing the inevitable decline in harmony that can often occur in the ebb and flow of relationships.
So when things are going very well I sometimes suggest that the couple may want to allow a situation to revert back a little toward the old unhealthy ways for a brief period as an experiment to prove that each person has the skills to bring the relationship back on course. I may encourage either person to bring up a topic that has been avoided because of the risk it represents. If it was possible to measure blood pressure in a session, I'm sure this very suggestion has often initially resulted in a sharp spike upward.
Here's an analogy I sometime use to demonstrate my purpose in proposing this counter-intuitive instruction. When a person learns to fly an airplane, he or she always has an instructor in the cockpit to give guidance and instruction. Near the end of training, the student flies the plane with no instruction and the teacher just observes, ready to step in only if needed. This is the role of the therapist working with a couple learning to "fly" their new-and-improved relationship ("More powerful engine! More maneuverable! Quieter! Better gas mileage! More leg room!")
A really shrewd instructor may lean over and shut off the engine to send the plane into an initial nosedive in order for the student pilot to gain the confidence to take the correct actions to bring the situation back to normal and flying straight again. It's better for this to happen with the instructor in the next seat rather than two weeks after the lessons are over!
For this same reason I want my clients to experience the initial feeling of an emotional nosedive so they don't freak out and panic when it happens for real. It's very comforting to know that a regression doesn't have to spell disaster. The fact is that we are all going to mess up from time to time, and we need successful protocols for getting back on track as soon as we can. Learning how to successfully fail is one of the great and essential paradoxes of life.
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