On the latest Got Therapy?, I asked Dr. Dan Rose a question I suspect plenty of our clients are asking too: when voice after voice says the same thing in the same words, "Am I being influenced or am I being hijacked?"
His answer deserves to be argued for, in the therapy room and outside it.
Here is the position: the ability to decline a binary, to say neither yes nor no but "why this?", is a clinical skill we should be teaching on purpose.
Dan borrowed the phrase from Žižek, by way of Bartleby, the Scrivener: "It's a yes or a no. Both of those may keep you embedded in an ideological system. I prefer not to." A yes and a no both accept the question as it was handed to you. Declining opens a third move, which Dan put plainly: "Not I want it or I don't want it, but why this? What is this?"
That isn't evasion. It's what we already ask of clients who are caught in splitting, where the other person is all good or all bad and the choice is black or white. Dan described the step beyond that as the negation of negation: "well, why does it have to be a color, right?" The question stays open, but now it tells us something it didn't before.
The capacity underneath is one we already cultivate: metacognition, the participant-observer stance, feeling what you feel while staying curious about it with "a loving curiosity," at just the right distance. A client who can do that with anxiety can do it with a feed.
There's also a reason to make it explicit. Dan pointed out that what drives the rush to an answer is often a desperate need for certainty, and that a healthier stance is "hey, there are a lot of things I'm never going to know." The pressure to pick a side fast is real, and the fear of becoming an outcast in your own group is real too. Clients need permission and practice to stand in the middle long enough to think.
I'll add the caveat Dan gave me. Too naive a view of choice is its own trap, and nobody thinks from nowhere. But that's an argument for practicing the skill, not for giving it up.
Our job isn't to tell people what to conclude. It's to help them earn the right to say I prefer not to, and then to change their minds when they learn more.
Got Therapy? is hosted by Michael Baltimore Ph.D. and Dan Rose Psy.D.