The Art of the Therapeutic Compliment: Praising Strategically Not Generically

A strategic compliment is a clinical maneuver designed to alter the power structure of the therapeutic encounter. We use this tool to validate a client’s behavior while simultaneously defining that behavior as a voluntary action. You must understand that a strategic compliment differs from general praise. General praise is a social habit. A strategic compliment is a specific directive. I once worked with a forty year old man who arrived for every session ten minutes late. He would offer a brief apology and then spend the first fifteen minutes of the hour explaining why his lateness was inevitable. I avoided telling him to arrive on time. I focused on his agency. I waited until he finished his explanation and then complimented his ability to maintain such a consistent schedule despite the chaos of his life. I told him that his ability to arrive exactly ten minutes late every week required a high level of coordination. This compliment forced him to acknowledge his lateness as a deliberate choice rather than a series of accidents. By the sixth session, he arrived five minutes early to prove he could vary his timing.

We look for the skill required to maintain a dysfunction. Every symptom is a performance that requires effort, attention, and consistency. When you praise the skill instead of criticizing the symptom, you join the client’s position. I recall a woman who refused to participate in any task I suggested for three weeks. She sat in the chair with her arms crossed and stared at the clock. At the beginning of our fourth meeting, I complimented her on her unwavering commitment to her own autonomy. I told her that many people are too easily influenced by experts and that her ability to protect her own thoughts was a sign of intellectual strength. I praised her for her skepticism. This move changed the hierarchy of our relationship. Because I had praised her for not following my leads, her continued refusal would have been an act of compliance with my compliment. She began to speak three minutes later because speaking was the only way she could remain independent of my praise.

You must deliver these compliments with absolute sincerity of tone and posture. If the client detects sarcasm, the intervention fails. Your voice should remain level. Your body should be still. We observe that the most effective compliments target the very things the client expects us to judge. If a client describes a violent outburst, you do not condone the violence. You compliment the physiological energy the client is able to summon. I once told a husband who was prone to shouting matches that his vocal projection was impressive. I noted that he had the physical stamina of an opera singer. This observation redirected his attention from the content of the argument to the mechanics of his behavior. He became self-conscious about his volume. The next time he felt angry, he found himself thinking about his vocal technique instead of his grievances.

Strategic therapy requires you to be comfortable with the absurdity of the symptom. When a client presents a problem that seems insurmountable, we look for the utility of that problem within their social system. Jay Haley emphasized that symptoms often serve a function in a marriage or a family. I worked with a couple where the wife suffered from a compulsive need to check the locks on the doors for two hours every night. The husband would sit on the sofa and wait for her to finish. I complimented the wife on her dedication to the safety of the household. I told the husband he was a model of patience for supporting his wife’s security measures. By praising the behavior as a joint security project, I moved the symptom from the category of a mental illness to the category of a shared hobby. This description made the behavior appear ridiculous to the couple without me ever having to say it was wrong. They stopped the checking behavior within two weeks because they no longer wanted to share that particular hobby.

You should use the strategic compliment to reinforce the client’s resistance when that resistance is the only thing they have to offer. We call this encouraging the relapse or prescribing the symptom. If a client tells you they are depressed and cannot get out of bed, you compliment their ability to rest so deeply. You tell them that most people are too busy and lack the capacity to be still. I once told a young woman that her depression was a sophisticated form of protest against a demanding environment. I complimented her on her refusal to participate in a life that she found unappealing. This compliment gave her the power of the strike. Once she saw her bed rest as a strike, she began to wonder what her demands were. She returned to work four days later because she decided the strike had been successful.

The timing of your compliment is as important as the content. You should wait for the moment of maximum tension. When the client has finished describing a failure and is waiting for your critique, you deliver the praise. This creates a state of confusion that makes the client more open to a new perspective. I worked with a corporate executive who was known for being a micromanager. He told me a long story about how he had rewritten a report for one of his subordinates. He expected me to tell him to delegate more. I complimented his eye for detail and his refusal to settle for mediocrity. I told him that his department was lucky to have a leader who was willing to do the work of three people. I then suggested that he should take on even more of the subordinates’ work to ensure perfection. He looked at me with great surprise. Two days later, he began to delegate tasks because he realized the physical impossibility of the task I had praised.

We observe that families often have a designated symptom bearer who is actually protecting the others. In these situations, you compliment the symptom bearer for their sacrifice. If a teenager is failing school to keep his divorcing parents focused on him rather than their lawyers, you compliment the teenager on his loyalty. I once told a fourteen year old boy that he was doing a great job of keeping his parents in the same room. I told the parents that they should be proud to have a son who was willing to sacrifice his education to keep the family together. This compliment exposed the function of the failure. The parents were forced to address their own conflict because they could no longer ignore the price their son was paying. The boy began to study again because his secret mission had been revealed and validated.

You must avoid using the word but after a strategic compliment. If you say you have a great eye for detail but you should delegate more, you have canceled the intervention. The compliment must stand alone as a definitive statement of fact. You are a person who values perfection. This is the statement. You let the client sit with the implications of that fact. I have found that the more specific the compliment, the more potent it becomes. Do not tell a client they are strong. Tell them they have a remarkable ability to tolerate discomfort in their left shoulder while they are speaking about their mother. This precision shows the client that you are paying close attention. It also suggests that their physical symptoms are things they are doing rather than things that are happening to them. When a client realizes they are doing a symptom, they realize they can stop doing it.

We use the follow-up session to see how the client has handled the compliment. If they return and tell you that they disagreed with your praise, you compliment their honesty. If they tell you they followed your suggestion and it worked, you compliment their wisdom. You are always looking for a way to put the client in the position of being the expert on their own change. I once had a client tell me that my compliment about his anger was the most insulting thing he had ever heard. I told him that I admired his willingness to stand up to me. I told him that his ability to identify an insult so quickly was a vital survival skill. He smiled for the first time in six months. He realized that even his anger toward me was a skill I could utilize. The use of the strategic compliment is about finding the logic in the illogical. Every person who walks into your office is doing the best they can with the tools they have. Your job is to show them that their tools are even more powerful than they realized. You do this by naming those tools with a compliment. A man who drinks to forget is a man with a powerful capacity for selective memory. A woman who cannot leave her house is a woman with a profound respect for the sanctity of the home. You use these descriptions to change the meaning of the behavior. Once the meaning has changed, the behavior must change to match it. A strategic compliment is the fastest way to rewrite the client’s internal script. You are not being kind. You are being effective. You are looking at the client and seeing a person who is already successful at being who they are. You simply give them a new way to use that success. We find that when you treat a symptom as a talent, the client no longer needs to use it as a weapon. They can use that talent for something else. A client who is excellent at being depressed is often a person who has a high capacity for quiet contemplation. You suggest they use that capacity to observe the world around them for one hour a day. This is how we move from the problem to the solution without ever fighting the client. You must trust the strategy and you must trust the client’s ability to respond to it. The strategic compliment is the pivot on which the entire case can turn. We see this happen every day in the room. A single sentence can replace a year of struggle. You must be prepared to be the one who says that sentence with total conviction. The client’s life depends on your ability to see the strength in their greatest weakness. This is the art of the strategic compliment. This is how we practice. This is how we produce change in a world that often feels stuck. Every client has a secret strength. You must find it and you must name it.

Identifying the strength requires you to look past the presenting problem to the labor required to maintain it. We understand that a symptom is not a passive occurrence. It is an active production. You must treat the symptom as a feat of endurance or a display of specialized skill. If a client arrives twenty minutes late to every session, you do not lecture them on the importance of time management. You observe that they must have a very crowded and demanding life to manage such a complex schedule. You say that you are impressed by their ability to keep so many plates spinning at once, even when it means they only get forty minutes of your time instead of sixty. This compliment places the responsibility for the lost time back on the client without a single word of criticism. It frames the lateness as a choice they are making to prioritize other demands.

We use this reframe to pull the client out of a victimized position. When a person describes themselves as a victim of their habits, they are claiming they have no agency. Your compliment restores that agency by force. I once worked with a man who described his chronic procrastination as a character flaw that ruined his career. I told him that I did not see a man who was lazy. I saw a man who had a remarkable appetite for risk. I pointed out that waiting until three hours before a deadline to start a twenty-page report required the steady nerves of a high-stakes gambler. I told him that most people are too cowardly to test their own limits in that way, but he did it every single week. This intervention changed the nature of our conversation. He could no longer complain about being weak. He had to decide if he wanted to continue being a gambler or if he wanted to try a less stressful way of working.

You must deliver these compliments with a voice that is flat and objective. We call this the dispassionate report. If you sound like a cheerleader, the client will suspect a trick or feel patronized. You speak as if you are reading a weather report. You might say that the way they managed to avoid paying their taxes for three years shows a remarkable ability to navigate complex bureaucratic systems. You lean back in your chair. You do not smile. You wait for them to process the fact that you are not judging them. This creates a vacuum that the client must fill. Usually, they fill it by explaining the downside of their behavior, which is the very change you want them to initiate. By praising the skill, you make the client the one who argues for change.

The strategic compliment is especially effective when you are dealing with a hostile or provocative client. We often see practitioners get defensive when a client attacks their competence. You must do the opposite. You praise the client for their discernment. If a client tells you that this session is a waste of money and that you have no idea what you are doing, you agree. You tell them that you admire their high standards. You say that it is refreshing to work with someone who refuses to settle for mediocre professional help. You might even thank them for keeping you on your toes. This move is a classic maneuver from the Jay Haley tradition. You have taken their ammunition and used it to build a pedestal for their own ego. Now, if they continue to attack you, they are attacking the very person they just admitted has high standards.

I recall a case involving a couple where the wife was relentlessly critical of her husband. Every time he spoke, she interrupted to correct his facts or his tone. The husband would then withdraw into a sullen silence. I did not ask the wife to be more supportive. Instead, I turned to her and praised her for her vigilance. I told her that her husband was fortunate to have a personal editor who was so committed to the truth that she would not let a single inaccuracy pass. I told the husband that his wife was doing the hard labor of maintaining the integrity of their family history. This compliment completely restructured the hierarchy of the room. The wife was no longer a nag: she was a tireless worker. The husband was no longer a victim: he was a man being provided with a service. The wife became self-conscious about her interruptions because I had labeled them as a deliberate, exhausting job. She began to stay silent just to get some rest from that labor.

We must also apply this logic to the person who refuses to improve. We call this the compliment for the sacrifice. When a client stays stuck in a miserable situation, we search for the person who benefits from that misery. There is always a beneficiary in a social system. If a grown daughter remains at home, unemployed and depressed, her presence may be the only thing keeping her parents from getting a divorce. You do not push her to get a job. You praise her for her loyalty. You tell her that it takes a very special kind of daughter to give up her own youth and her own career to ensure her parents stay together. You say that her depression is a small price to pay for the stability of her family. When you name the sacrifice, you make the hidden contract visible. The daughter must then decide if she is willing to continue paying that price.

Timing is the most sensitive variable in this equation. You do not offer the compliment when things are going well. You wait for the moment of maximum resistance. When the client is digged in, when they are insisting that they cannot change, that is when you strike. I once worked with a woman who insisted she was the most anxious person in the city. She brought in a notebook where she had recorded every panic attack she had experienced in the last five years. I spent ten minutes looking through the notebook. I then told her that I had never seen such a disciplined record of physiological data. I told her that she had the mind of a research scientist. I said that most people are too overwhelmed by their feelings to observe them, but she had the incredible detachment required to document her own suffering. I then assigned her the task of adding even more categories to her notebook, such as heart rate and ambient temperature. Because I had praised her discipline, she felt compelled to be even more disciplined, which eventually led to the detachment she needed to stop the panic.

You must avoid the word but. We see many practitioners ruin a perfectly good strategic compliment by adding a qualifier. They say, you are very good at standing your ground, but you should listen more. The word but cancels the praise and sounds like a lecture. You must let the compliment stand alone. You say, you are very good at standing your ground. Then you stop talking. You allow the client to sit with the implication of that strength. If they are good at standing their ground, then their refusal to compromise is a choice, not a symptom. You are giving them back the steering wheel of their own life.

We look for the talent in the trouble. Every symptom requires a certain amount of effort to maintain. If a person is chronically angry, they must have a high level of cardiovascular energy. If a person is chronically confused, they must have a very creative imagination to keep all those facts disorganized. You praise the energy or the imagination. You treat the symptom as a resource that is simply being used for one specific purpose. Once the client accepts that they have the resource, you can then discuss how else that resource might be spent. We do not ask people to develop new traits. We ask them to take the traits they already have and apply them to a different task. This is the essence of the strategic tradition. You are not a mechanic fixing a broken machine. You are a director showing an actor how to play a different role using the same voice and the same body.

The therapeutic compliment is not about making the client feel good. It is about making the client feel responsible. We use praise to lock the client into a position where their behavior is seen as a voluntary act of will. If a man is a master of sarcasm, you praise his wit and his timing. You tell him that his ability to find the weakest point in an opponent’s argument is a rare gift. You then ask him if he is willing to use that gift to help his wife find the flaws in her own self-doubt. You have taken a weapon he used against his wife and reframed it as a tool he can use for her. He can no longer claim he just has a mean streak. He now has a specialized skill that he must choose to use for good or for ill. Responsibility is the inevitable result of being told you are talented. We use that weight to move the client toward the goal of the session. A man who is told he is a skilled marksman can no longer claim that his gun went off by accident. He must acknowledge that he aimed it. You are the one who points out that he never misses. Every sentence you speak should reinforce the idea that the client is the master of their own behavior. You are simply the one who noticed how much work they are doing to keep things exactly as they are. This realization is the beginning of every meaningful change in the strategic tradition. You do not demand a new behavior. You describe the old behavior until the client can no longer stand the description. The compliment is the frame that makes the picture impossible to ignore. Every client has a secret strength. You must find it and you must name it.

We recognize that every symptom exists within a social hierarchy. When you praise a client for their successful depression, you change their status relative to the people in their life. For example, I once saw a teenage girl who refused to eat. Instead of expressing concern about her health, I praised her for her incredible willpower. I told her that many adults struggle for decades to achieve the level of physical discipline she demonstrated in a single week. By framing her starvation as a feat of athletic discipline, I took the problem away from the parents and placed it firmly in her hands as a skill. This forced her to choose between being a disciplined athlete or an obedient daughter. We understand that the symptom is a communication, and by praising the communication, you make its previous form unnecessary.

You must look for the utility of the symptom for others. If a husband is chronically depressed, we look at how his depression allows his wife to be the strong, competent one. You might say to him: I am impressed by your willingness to occupy the lower position so that your wife can feel like the savior of this family. This is a profound sacrifice. This makes the husband’s passivity a deliberate, noble act. It changes the dynamic from a situation where he is broken to a situation where he is generous. I once used this exact phrasing with a man who had not worked in three years. He became so uncomfortable with the idea that his failure was a gift to his wife that he found a job within two weeks to prove me wrong. You allow the client to change by giving them a version of themselves that they can no longer tolerate.

You can amplify the effect of a strategic compliment by delivering it to a third party while the client listens. We call this the overheard praise. If you are working with a couple, you might turn to the wife and say: Your husband has a remarkable ability to remain silent during your most intense criticisms. I have rarely seen such a high level of emotional containment. By saying this to the wife, you are not just praising the husband. You are defining the husband’s silence as a strength to the very person who previously viewed it as a weakness. This forces the wife to respond to his strength rather than his absence. We use this technique to restructure the power in the room without engaging in a direct argument with either party.

When a client rejects your praise, you must treat that rejection as another skill to be admired. If you compliment a man on his punctuality and he insists he is only on time because he is anxious, you praise his anxiety. You tell him: Your anxiety is an excellent internal clock. It ensures you never disrespect the time of others. I wish more people had an anxiety that functioned with such precision. This maneuver prevents the client from defeating you by disagreeing. You have already incorporated his disagreement into your next compliment. I have found that the more a client tries to stay miserable, the more material they provide for your praise. You are simply reporting on the efficiency of their system.

Milton Erickson often used a double bind within his praise. You give the client two options, both of which involve acknowledging their skill. For instance, you might say: I do not know if you will decide to use your talent for stubbornness to ignore my suggestions today, or if you will use that same stubbornness to ensure you finish your task before our next meeting. Either way, that stubbornness will serve you. This puts the client in a position where they must use their symptom to succeed or use their symptom to resist you. In both cases, they are using the symptom consciously. We know that once a symptom becomes a conscious choice, it loses its power as an involuntary affliction.

I worked with a manager who complained that his staff members were incompetent. Instead of teaching him delegation, I praised his ability to create a dependency so profound that the company could not breathe without him. I told him: You have achieved the ultimate level of job security. You have trained an entire floor of people to be incapable of making a decision without your input. That is a masterpiece of control. He was horrified by the realization that he was the cause of his own exhaustion. By praising his control, I made his exhaustion a choice. He began to delegate not because he wanted to be a better leader, but because he wanted to stop being the sole person responsible for every minor error.

The timing of a compliment is as important as the content. You should deliver the most difficult compliments when the client is most certain that you will criticize them. If a client comes into the room and admits they have failed to do their homework, we do not express disappointment. We praise their consistency. You might say: It is impressive how you have maintained your current lifestyle despite all the pressure to change. Most people would have given in by now, but you have stayed true to your habits. This creates a vacuum where the client expected a lecture. In that vacuum, the client must face the reality of their own persistence. I once waited forty minutes into a session of constant complaining before I told a woman that her ability to find the flaw in every solution was a high-level editorial skill. She stopped talking for three full minutes.

We must also consider the intergenerational compliment. Often, a client’s symptom is a way of staying loyal to a parent. If a man is failing in his career just as his father did, you can praise his loyalty. You say: You are a very devoted son. You are willing to sacrifice your own success just so your father does not have to feel alone in his failure. This is a beautiful tribute. This makes the failure an act of love, which is much harder to maintain than an act of bad luck. I have seen clients start to succeed almost immediately after their failures were defined as a form of family loyalty. You are not asking them to stop being loyal. You are simply pointing out the cost of that loyalty.

You should use the strategic compliment to define the end of a relationship. In the final session, we do not praise the client for being a good patient. We praise them for their ability to take what they needed and leave the rest behind. You might say: I am impressed by how quickly you decided that you no longer needed my help. That shows a strong sense of timing. This ensures that the client views their departure as an act of strength rather than a loss of support. I always tell my clients that their success is a result of their own stubborn refusal to stay stuck. This leaves the power in their hands as they walk out the door.

Every word you speak in the room is a directive. When you praise a symptom, you are directing the client to view themselves as a person with agency. We are not interested in the history of the problem. We are interested in the mechanics of how the problem is maintained today. A compliment is a tool that interrupts those mechanics. If a client is hostile toward you, praise their honesty. Tell them: I appreciate your willingness to be direct with me. It saves us a lot of time that other people waste on being polite. This turns their hostility into a collaborative asset. You are never fighting the client. You are always using their momentum to move the system toward a new configuration.

A compliment delivered with a smirk is a sarcasm. A compliment delivered with a flat, clinical tone is a diagnostic fact. You must master the flat delivery. I once spent an entire hour praising a man for his ability to alienate his children. I did it without a hint of irony. I listed the specific ways he used his tone of voice and his criticisms to ensure they stayed at a distance. I told him he was a master of solitude. He began to cry because he realized for the first time that he was doing it on purpose. The diagnostic fact of his skill was more powerful than any emotional plea. We use the strategic compliment to strip away the excuse of the accident.

Your posture must match your words. If you are praising a client for their dominance in a relationship, you must sit as if you are talking to a person of high status. You do not look down at them. You look at them as a colleague in the art of social maneuver. This reinforces the idea that their behavior is a conscious tactic. When you treat the symptom as a tactic, you make the client the tactician. A tactician can always choose a different move. An addict or a victim cannot. We use praise to promote the client from victim to tactician in their own life.

The most effective compliment is the one the client tries to argue against. If you tell a woman she is a genius at making her husband feel guilty, and she says she is not, you simply agree that she is also a genius at being modest. You never lose an argument when you are the one giving the praise. You are simply adding more layers to their skill set. I find that when I am most stuck with a client, it is because I have stopped looking for what they are doing well. As soon as I find the skill behind the struggle, the session begins to move again. We do not look for the cause of the pain. We look for the talent required to endure it.

You must be careful not to use praise to make yourself feel better. We do not praise to be liked. We praise to create an ordeal of self-recognition for the client. If the client leaves the session feeling good about themselves in a generic way, you have likely failed. They should leave the session feeling that they have been seen so clearly that they can no longer hide behind their symptoms. I once told a man that his chronic indecision was a brilliant way to ensure he never had to take responsibility for a mistake. He left the room angry, but he made three major life decisions before I saw him again. The anger was the result of a compliment that was too accurate to ignore.

A strategic compliment is a way of prescribing the symptom without the client knowing they have been prescribed. If you tell a person who procrastinates that they have a remarkable ability to work under extreme pressure at the last minute, you are encouraging them to keep doing it. However, because you have praised it as a skill, the next time they procrastinate, they will feel the weight of that skill. They will see themselves doing it. We know that the moment a person sees themselves performing a habit, the habit begins to dissolve. You are giving them a mirror, but the mirror is framed in gold.

The final test of a compliment is whether it changes the hierarchy in the room. If the practitioner is the one who knows everything and the client is the one who is broken, the hierarchy is fixed. When you praise the client’s symptom, you elevate them. You make them the expert on their own behavior. I often tell clients that I could never maintain a symptom as long as they have. I tell them I lack their stamina and their dedication to a single point of view. This puts the client in the superior position. From that superior position, they often decide they can afford to be generous and change. We use our own perceived weakness to amplify the client’s perceived strength. This is the essence of the strategic tradition.

We do not aim for insight. We aim for a change in the social sequence. A compliment is the fastest way to change a sequence because it requires the other person to respond to a new definition of the situation. If you define a child’s temper tantrum as a demonstration of leadership potential, the parents can no longer just be angry. They must now deal with a leader. This changes the sequence from scream and punish to scream and negotiate. You have used a single observation to move the family into a new mode of interaction. I once saw a family where the son’s rebellion was praised as his way of teaching his parents how to be more flexible. The rebellion stopped because it was no longer a rebellion. It was a teaching tool, and the parents were fast learners.

You will find that the most difficult clients are those who have been praised generically all their lives. They are immune to kindness. They are not, however, immune to the strategic compliment. They are not prepared for a practitioner who admires their defenses. I once told an extremely guarded man that his silence was like a fortress that no one could breach. I told him I felt very safe in the room because I knew he would never say anything he didn’t mean. He started talking ten minutes later because the fortress was no longer necessary if I was already inside it with him. We use praise to join the client in their world so that we can then lead them out of it.

The strategic compliment is a surgical instrument. You use it to cut through the client’s story and get to the underlying structure of their behavior. We do not care if the client likes the compliment. We care if the compliment is true in a way that the client cannot deny. I once worked with a woman who was obsessed with her health. I praised her for her medical knowledge. I told her she was more thorough than most doctors I knew. I asked her to keep a detailed log of every heart palpitation for a week so that we could study the data together. By praising her expertise, I turned her anxiety into a job. She grew tired of the job after three days.

We must always remember that the client is doing the best they can with the tools they have. Our job is not to give them new tools. Our job is to show them that the tools they are already using are more powerful than they realized. When you praise a symptom, you are validating the client’s effort. You are saying that their life, even in its most painful moments, is a product of their own making. This is the ultimate form of respect. I have found that clients will forgive you for many things, but they will never forget the moment you saw the strength in their greatest weakness.

The practitioner must remain a neutral observer of the client’s success. We do not take credit for the change. If the client changes because of a compliment, we praise them for their ability to take a small observation and turn it into a major life improvement. This ensures that the client owns the change completely. I often tell my clients that I am surprised by how quickly they moved. I tell them I expected it to take much longer. This forces them to argue for their own competence. We know that when a client argues for their own competence, the treatment is over.

A strategic compliment is the most efficient way to handle a person who is trying to be a failure. If they succeed at failing, you praise their success. If they fail at failing, they are getting better. You have created a situation where they cannot lose, and you cannot be defeated. I once told a man who was failing out of college that he was doing a wonderful job of retiring early. I told him that most people have to wait until they are sixty-five to stop working, but he had managed it at twenty. He was back in class the next morning. You must be willing to be the person who speaks the uncomfortable truth under the guise of admiration.

The goal is to make the symptom a burden that the client can no longer afford to carry. By praising the symptom, you increase the cost of maintaining it. It is one thing to be a victim of a habit. It is another thing to be a person who is working very hard to maintain a habit that everyone else has seen through. We use praise to shine a light on the labor of the symptom. When the labor becomes visible, it becomes heavy. I have seen clients drop symptoms that they have had for years simply because they were tired of being praised for them.

You must maintain your clinical distance even when giving a warm compliment. The warmth is a tool, not an emotion. We use warmth to lower the client’s guard so that the strategic maneuver can take hold. If you are too cold, the client will suspect you. If you are too warm, the client will try to please you. You must be just warm enough to be believable and just cold enough to be authoritative. I once told a woman she had the most organized way of being miserable I had ever seen. She took it as a compliment to her intellect, which was exactly what I intended. She then used that intellect to organize her recovery.

We are not looking for the truth in a philosophical sense. We are looking for the truth that works. A strategic compliment is a functional truth. It is a way of describing the client that makes change possible. If you tell a man he is a coward, he will fight you. If you tell him he is a master of caution, he will agree with you. Once he agrees he is a master of caution, you can ask him when he will decide to be less cautious. You have given him the power to choose. This is the difference between a practitioner who judges and a practitioner who directs.

I once worked with a couple who had been fighting for forty years. I told them that their marriage was a testament to the power of conflict. I praised them for their stamina. I told them that most couples would have given up after ten years of such intense engagement. I asked them how they managed to keep the fire of their anger burning so brightly for so long. They looked at each other and laughed. The fight was broken because the fight had been named as a deliberate achievement. They could no longer pretend it was something that just happened to them. We use the strategic compliment to turn the passive into the active.

The final observation we must make is that a compliment is only as good as the practitioner’s willingness to follow through. If you praise a client’s resistance, you must be prepared for them to resist you even more. You must be ready to praise that resistance as well. You are building a chain of compliments that leads the client exactly where they need to go. You are the director of the drama, and the compliments are the script. When the client finally changes, you should look as if you knew it would happen all along. You should look as if you are simply observing the natural result of their many talents. We understand that the most powerful thing you can do for a client is to see them as the person they are trying so hard to hide. Every symptom is a mask for a skill, and every skill is a way to survive. The practitioner who can see the survival in the symptom is the one who can change the world. Your client’s behavior is always a solution to a problem you do not yet understand.