How to Clarify Values

How often do you meet a client who can’t name their values?

Heck, there have been times when I wasn’t sure what I wanted from life.

When the years have felt like a struggle, or you’re so desperate to please others, knowing what you care about can be one of life’s great mysteries.

What do you do when your client is too distressed to know their values?

Many ACT practitioners I’ve spoken to have said that when clients are distressed, they’re not ready to do values work. It can appear that values drives need to be put off to a later date until after you’ve spent time helping them learn to regulate their emotions. Although an understandable evaluation, my experiences tell me otherwise.

Mindfulness exercises like Dropping Anchor and Awareness through the Five Senses often give you a way to turn down the agitation and panic. They teach the client to notice stimuli flexibly, i.e. while having fearful thoughts, shifting your focus to other dimensions of experience will help settle your emotions.

However, when you delay values clarification work, you risk jeopardising their progress. You see, when you focus on awareness and defusion skills without linking them to values, the client is highly likely to use them as additional control strategies.

Values clarification gives the client an alternative purpose; instead of reaching for more control, they consider what they want deep down in their heart.

Jim Lucas

Take the example of Jay. He reports recurring chest pain and fears that he will have a heart attack. When you see him, he presents in an agitated way, desperately wanting your help to make the problem go away. Recognising his panic, you may naturally invite him to start practising mindfulness.

To do so would not be wrong because such a skill has the potential to help. The problem lies with what Jay would use the exercise to achieve. Unless he acknowledges that further control will only worsen his suffering, then he’s highly likely to apply any mindfulness exercise in a controlling way.

What’s on the other side of your distress?

To avoid this trap, it’s essential that you explore what he wants from life, i.e. what’s on the other side of being panic-free? You could ask him:

• If you were to be free of these sensations and fears, what would you do that seems impossible at the moment?
• Is there a time in your past when you were the real you, doing what you wanted without the burden of this distress? What did that ‘Jay’ love about life?
• If you imagine the face of the person you love most, what would they say they miss most about you?

These three example questions demonstrate how you can begin to explore what a person cares about gently. You may notice how I’ve utilised flexible perspective-taking to construct the essential ingredients missing from the person’s life.

Perspective-taking questions allow you to unearth what’s essential. They can be an effective and efficient way of clarifying values. The first of these questions use a conditional relational frame through an “if and then” perception.

The second question utilises a temporal frame (“is there a time in your past”) as well as Self-As-Context (“real you”). In RFT, you can say we’re using the deictic frame because we’re making a distinction between the ‘you-here-now’ and the ‘you-there-then’. By tapping into the past ‘Self’, the client can connect with what’s important.

The third question takes advantage of an interpersonal perspective shift. When your clients have children, they’re often missing out in some way because of how the client has managed their pain. When you invite them to conceive of the cost to a loved one, it can engage a compassionate motivation to do something different that benefits their family and social circle.

What are the most common values clarification exercises?

You’ve probably heard of these before, but just in case, here are some of the more common methods:

• Values Questionnaires
• Values Sorting Cards
• Gravestone Exercise
• 80th Birthday Party
• Meaningful Memories
• The Sweet spot

Many practitioners have their favourite methods. The purpose of these tools is to help a person reconnect with what they hold precious. Valuing is a behavioural pattern whereby a person observes the choices they want to make.

One can define values as freely chosen verbally constructed dynamic and intrinsically motivated purposes. In other words, you do stuff, and the experience of doing it tells you whether it matters. It’s not a case of doing what other people think you should do, but connecting with how you want to be as a person during your only go at life.

It requires mindful action or awareness of experience, which allows you to track the level of fulfilment and meaning. Different contexts may invite other choices about who and how you want to operate, which is fascinating about knowing your values.

Life is for the taking

Values clarification work needn’t be a long-drawn-out exercise that takes up an entire session. You can gently enquire with curiosity as to what’s missing from your client’s life. Therapy goals can be life goals too, and it helps to expect that many clients will be locked into a ‘control agenda’ when they start therapy. The same is true of coaching contexts, too; resistance to behaviour change works in similar ways. By getting out in front of a person’s experiential avoidance, you can steer them towards something bigger and more ambitious than ‘more control’.

Life is for the taking, and on average, we only have 29,000 days (if we’re lucky) to seize all that it has to offer. In the words of Andy Dufrene from Shawshank Redemption: “get busy living or get busy dying”. Put that on a ‘Choice Point’ and smoke it!

Take care and keep going.

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