How to Design a Directive for a Client Stuck in a Life Decision

A client who cannot make a decision is a client who is currently using their indecision to maintain a specific position within their social system. We understand that this state of being stuck is not a lack of information or a lack of willpower. It is a functional behavior. When a woman tells you she cannot decide whether to divorce her husband, she is often keeping the husband in a state of suspense where he must perform or change to influence her choice. If she makes the decision, the game ends. If she remains undecided, she retains a specific type of power over the marriage. Your task is not to help her weigh the pros and cons. We know that if a list of advantages and disadvantages could solve the problem, the client would have solved it long before they reached your office. You must instead change the sequence of the client’s behavior so that the indecision becomes more difficult to maintain than the choice itself.

We observe that most practitioners make the mistake of becoming the person who argues for one side of the decision. If you suggest that the client should stay in their job, the client will immediately provide all the reasons why they should quit. If you agree that they should quit, they will tell you about the benefits of their current salary. They use you to play out the internal conflict, which allows them to remain exactly where they are. You must refuse this role. We remain neutral not out of a lack of opinion, but as a strategic necessity to force the client back onto their own feet.

I once worked with a thirty-five-year-old man who had spent two years deciding whether to move across the country for a promotion or stay in his current city to be near his aging parents. He presented the problem as a moral dilemma. He spent our first twenty minutes describing the guilt he would feel if he moved and the resentment he would feel if he stayed. I did not ask him how he felt about his parents or his career. I noticed that while he spoke, he looked at his watch every three minutes. I told him that his indecision was clearly a full-time job and that he was currently working overtime without getting paid. I assigned him a directive to spend exactly one hour every morning, from six until seven, sitting in a hard wooden chair in his kitchen. During this hour, he was forbidden from drinking coffee, looking at his phone, or speaking. He was required to do nothing but debate the move. If a thought about anything else entered his mind, he had to stand up, turn around three times, and sit back down to resume the debate.

By the fourth day, this man found the internal debate so tedious that he began to loathe the topic itself. The directive changed the function of the indecision. It was no longer a profound moral struggle but a chore that required him to wake up early and sit in discomfort. We use this type of task to exhaust the client’s interest in the conflict. When the client returns and tells you they finally made the choice just to avoid the morning sessions, you do not congratulate them on their breakthrough. You treat it as a practical matter of time management.

You must design directives that require the client to gather information in a way that forces action. If a client is stuck between two options, we often assign an information-gathering task that is actually a trial period in disguise. You do not tell the client to choose. You tell the client that for the next seven days, they must act as if they have already made Choice A. I tell the client that they are not making a final decision, but rather conducting a social experiment.

I had a client who was undecided about whether to confront her business partner about a financial discrepancy. She was terrified of the conflict but also terrified of being cheated. I told her that for the next five days, she was to behave in every meeting as if she had already decided to dissolve the partnership. She was not allowed to tell the partner. She was simply to observe the business through the eyes of someone who was already leaving. She had to take notes on how she would divide the assets and how she would tell the staff. By the third day, the reality of the dissolution became so concrete that the fear of the confrontation vanished. The decision was no longer an abstract possibility. It was a lived experience. She realized that the work of leaving was more exhausting than the work of speaking up.

We often use the coin toss as a diagnostic tool rather than a way to let chance rule. This is a technique that requires precise timing. You wait until the client has circled the same two arguments for several minutes. You reach into your pocket and produce a coin. You must be authoritative. You tell the client that you are going to settle this right now. You assign one option to heads and the other to tails. You ask the client if they agree to the terms. Most will say yes because they think it is a game or a metaphor. You then flip the coin and catch it on your wrist. You cover it with your hand. Before you reveal the result, you ask the client what they are hoping to see.

The answer to that question is the true decision. The moment the coin is in the air, the client’s pretense of indecision usually collapses into a clear preference. If the client says they do not know, you reveal the coin. If it shows heads and the client’s shoulders drop or they look away, you have your answer. You do not point this out with a complex interpretation. You simply observe that they seem disappointed with the result. You then give them a directive to go home and spend the evening acting as if the coin was right, while paying close attention to the physical sensation of their resistance.

You must remember that a decision is a move in a hierarchy. When a teenager cannot decide which college to attend, they are often keeping their parents in a state of anxious helpfulness. As long as the teenager is stuck, the parents are focused on them. We see this as a way for the child to keep the parents together or to keep the focus away from the parents’ own marital problems. To solve this, you must change the parents’ behavior. You might tell the parents that they are forbidden from mentioning college for two weeks. If the teenager brings it up, the parents must tell them that they have full confidence in the teenager’s ability to figure it out and then they must change the subject to their own plans for a vacation. This removes the secondary gain of the indecision. The teenager is suddenly alone with the choice, and without an audience, the drama of the stuckness becomes boring.

The timing of your intervention is more important than the content of the directive. You must wait for the client to express a high level of frustration with their own inability to move. When they say they are sick of their own voice, that is when you provide the directive. You do not offer it as a suggestion. You offer it as a clinical requirement. You might say that you cannot continue the sessions until the task is completed because talking has clearly failed them. This creates a new conflict. The client must now choose between doing the task or failing in the therapy. Most will do the task to prove you wrong, and in doing the task, they make the move they were avoiding. A client who completes a difficult directive has already demonstrated that they are capable of action. The decision becomes a byproduct of that action. Clinical success is measured by the change in the client’s social sequence rather than their reported feelings.

You must understand that the ordeal functions by making the maintenance of the symptom more difficult than its abandonment. We do not design an ordeal to be meaningful in a symbolic sense, though it may occasionally be so. We design it to be cumbersome. If your client spends hours debating whether to quit a job, the debate itself provides a certain stimulation that replaces action. You interrupt this stimulation by attaching a requirement that is both boring and taxing. I once worked with a woman who had been unable to decide whether to divorce her husband for three years. She had spent a great deal of money on various professionals to discuss her feelings. I told her that she was prohibited from mentioning her marriage in our sessions until she had spent one hour every morning, beginning at five o’clock, sitting in a hard wooden chair in her basement with the lights off. During this hour, she was to do nothing but think about the divorce. She was not allowed to pray, listen to music, or drink coffee. By the fourth day, she found the basement so unpleasant that she decided to stay in the marriage just to avoid the morning sessions in the dark. The ordeal moved the problem from an abstract intellectual debate to a physical reality that she had to manage.

We know that a directive is only as strong as your delivery. If you offer a directive as a suggestion, the client will treat it as one more option to weigh in their internal debate. You must present the task as a requirement for the next stage of your work together. I often tell a client that I cannot see them for another appointment until they have completed the task and can provide proof of its completion. This creates a clear hierarchy where you direct the movement of the case. If the client returns without having done the task, you do not explore the reasons why they failed. You simply end the session and tell them to return when the task is done. We call this maintaining the integrity of the directive. This refusal to engage in excuses forces the client to realize that the social contract of the therapy has changed. They can no longer use the session as a space to rehearse their indecision.

When you design these directives, you must pay attention to the client’s social hierarchy. We often find that a client uses indecision to keep a superior or a peer in a state of constant helpfulness. If a son cannot decide on a college major, he keeps his parents involved in his daily life as advisors. To break this, you must change the parental response. I instructed a set of parents to respond to every one of their son’s questions about his future with a single, pre-rehearsed sentence: That is a difficult problem, and we have total confidence in your ability to solve it. They were forbidden from offering any other feedback. Without the parental audience to react to his confusion, the son made a choice within two weeks because being confused had lost its social utility. We see this often in corporate environments where a manager remains stuck on a decision to fire an underperforming employee. The manager uses the indecision to solicit sympathy from HR or other directors. You must instruct the manager to stop discussing the employee with anyone for one week while performing a daily task, such as arriving at the office one hour early to sit in the employee’s empty chair and contemplate the vacancy.

Metaphorical directives are useful when the client’s decision feels too heavy to approach directly. You create a task that mimics the structure of the decision but in a different area of the client’s life. I once had a client who was stuck between staying in a comfortable city and moving to a new one for a promotion. He described the move as a leap into the dark. I instructed him to walk through his own house at night with all the lights off and his eyes closed for thirty minutes every evening. He had to learn the layout of his familiar space in the dark before he could consider a new space. This directive linked the physical sensation of the dark to his domestic environment. After three nights, he reported that the dark was not as dangerous as he had imagined, and he accepted the promotion. We use these tasks to bypass the client’s conscious resistance. If you tell a client to be brave, they will argue. If you tell them to walk in the dark, they will simply walk.

You can also use the paradoxical prohibition. This involves forbidding the client from making a decision. You tell the client that they are currently too unstable or too uninformed to make a choice and that any decision made in the next thirty days would be a disaster. This instruction often triggers a rebellious clarity. When we tell a client they cannot decide, we take the pressure off the outcome. I worked with a man who could not decide between two romantic partners. I told him he was forbidden from seeing either woman for three weeks and that he must spend that time cleaning his garage and cataloging every tool he owned. By the end of the first week, he had called one of the women to end the relationship. The prohibition against deciding made him realize which connection he was unwilling to lose. He chose to break my rule to solve his problem, which is a common and successful outcome of a strategic directive.

We must also consider the use of the pretend choice. You instruct the client to live for a set period, such as forty-eight hours, as if they have already made one of the choices. They must tell no one. They simply behave in their own mind as if the decision is final. Then, they spend the following forty-eight hours living as if the other choice is final. I used this with a professional who was deciding whether to quit his firm to start his own practice. For two days, he went to work and acted as if he would be there for the next twenty years. He looked at his desk, his colleagues, and his retirement plan through the lens of permanent commitment. For the next two days, he acted as if he had already turned in his resignation. He spent his lunch break looking at office rentals and drafting his new business cards. By the end of the four days, the contrast in his physical tension between the two states told him everything he needed to know. You are not asking the client to analyze their feelings: you are asking them to test the reality of the decision in their daily life.

The timing of the directive is as important as the task itself. You wait until the client has reached a point of high frustration with their own lack of movement. When they are exhausted by their own circular logic, they are most open to a directive that offers a way out, even a strange one. We do not offer these tasks in the first ten minutes of a first meeting. We wait until the social system of the therapy has been established and the client recognizes that their old ways of talking about the problem are no longer working. I wait until the tension in the room is at its peak before I deliver the instruction. I speak slowly and use a tone that brooks no argument. You do not ask if they think the task will help. You state that the task is what they must do.

Resistance to a directive is not a sign of failure but a part of the clinical process. If a client refuses a task, we do not become defensive. We acknowledge that the task is difficult and then we offer an even more difficult one as an alternative. This is a standard strategic maneuver. You provide two options, both of which lead to the desired change. I once had a client refuse to wake up at four in the morning to write a letter of apology he was avoiding. I told him that if he could not wake up at four, he must instead stay awake for an entire night once a week until the letter was written. He chose the four o’clock wake-up call because it was the lesser of two ordeals. We maintain the position that the problem must be solved through action. The client is free to choose which action they take, but they are no longer free to choose inaction. This clinical pressure is the mechanism that forces a shift in the client’s social and internal sequence. A directive is a tool for changing the organization of a person’s life.

You must evaluate the outcome of a directive based on the client’s actual movement, not their verbal reports of feeling better. When you meet for the first follow-up session after prescribing a task, you do not ask the client how they feel about the decision they have made. You ask for a report on the execution of the directive itself. If you told a man to flip a coin to decide between two houses and live as if the result were final for seventy-two hours, you ask him to describe the physical sensations of walking through the rooms of the chosen house during that time. We know that the client will often try to pull us back into a debate about the pros and cons of the other house. You must refuse to enter that debate. You tell the client that the time for debate has passed and that the current task is the only topic of conversation. This maintains the hierarchy and keeps the pressure on the action rather than the contemplation.

I once worked with a client who could not decide whether to retire or continue working in a stressful legal practice. I gave him the directive to spend his entire weekend sitting in his office with the lights off, doing nothing but thinking about the work he would have to do on Monday. If he decided to retire, he was to spend the weekend at a local park, sitting on a bench for eight hours each day, observing people who were already retired. When he returned to the office, he tried to tell me that the park was boring and the office was depressing. I did not sympathize with his boredom. I told him that since he found both options unpleasant, he clearly had not spent enough time in either one. I directed him to repeat the park bench observation for three consecutive weekends. By the second weekend, he called to say he had filed his retirement papers. He chose the park because it was less demanding than the task I had set for him.

We observe that a client will frequently attempt to fail at a directive to see if you will back down. If the client returns and says they forgot to do the task or that it was too difficult, you must not show disappointment or anger. You simply state that the therapy cannot proceed until the task is finished. You might say: Since you were unable to complete the assignment, we have nothing new to discuss today. We will meet again when you have done what was required. You then end the session immediately. This is not a punishment. This is a structural necessity. If you allow the client to ignore your directives and still receive the benefit of your time and attention, you have lost your leverage. You have become just another person in the client’s life who listens to them talk without requiring them to change.

I had a woman in my practice who was stuck between staying in a stagnant marriage and moving out on her own. I instructed her to spend every evening for a week packing one box of her belongings and then unpacking it the next morning. She came to the next session and said she had been too busy with work to pack any boxes. I stood up, opened the door, and told her that our time was over for the week. I told her that her busy schedule was her way of choosing her husband by default, and that I would see her only after she had packed and unpacked for seven days straight. She returned two weeks later, having completed the task for ten days. She had decided to move out because the repetitive nature of the task had made her current living situation feel like a physical cage.

We use the period following a major decision to stabilize the client’s social system. A decision does not exist in a vacuum. It changes the lives of everyone in the client’s immediate circle. If a client decides to stop supporting a grown child financially, that child will almost certainly create a crisis to regain the lost income. You must prepare the client for this response by giving them a directive on how to handle the child’s reaction. You might instruct the client to respond to every plea for money with a standard, scripted sentence, such as: I understand this is a change, and I am confident you will find a way to manage it. You tell the client they must say this sentence exactly as written, with no variations, no matter how much the child cries or yells. This turns the client’s response into a mechanical requirement, which reduces the emotional burden of the confrontation.

I once saw a couple where the wife had decided to return to school, but the husband was subtly sabotaging her by forgetting to pick up the children from their activities. I did not ask the husband why he was being forgetful. I gave the wife a directive to hire a professional car service and send the bill to her husband’s office every time he forgot. I also told her that she was not allowed to mention the bill to him. This changed the sequence of their interaction. The husband’s forgetfulness no longer resulted in his wife’s distress or her staying home. It resulted in a financial cost that he had to address. He stopped forgetting within two weeks because the consequence was more bothersome than the change in his wife’s status.

You must also be prepared for the client to experience a sudden urge to reverse their decision. This usually happens when the initial excitement wears off and the reality of the new situation begins. We call this a secondary resistance. When this occurs, you do not provide encouragement or list the reasons why the decision was a good one. Instead, you prescribe the relapse. You tell the client that they have probably moved too fast and that they should spend the next three days acting as if they have changed their mind and are going back to the old way. This puts the client in a double bind. If they follow your instruction and go back, they are following your directive, which keeps you in control. If they resist your instruction and stick with their decision, they are making a firm choice to move forward.

I worked with a professional who decided to leave a partnership to start his own firm. A month later, he became terrified and wanted to ask for his old job back. I told him that he was clearly not ready for independence and that he should spend the next forty-eight hours writing a long, apologetic letter to his former partners, explaining why he was a failure. He found the idea of writing such a letter so repulsive that he went out the next day and signed a two year lease on a new office space. He chose the struggle of a new business over the humiliation of the task I had given him.

We finish a case by ensuring that the client takes full credit for the change. While the directive was your invention, the action was theirs. You do not explain the strategy behind the directive. You do not tell them why you made them scrub floors or write letters. You simply observe that they seem to have solved the problem they came in with. You might say: You have made your decision and you are acting on it, so there is no longer a reason for us to meet. You leave the client with the impression that their own exhaustion or their own sudden realization was the cause of the change. This prevents the client from becoming dependent on you for future decisions.

I once ended a session with a man who had finally decided to propose to his girlfriend after two years of stalling. He thanked me for the complicated tasks I had given him. I told him that I was surprised he had actually done them and that most people would have found them too difficult. By framing it this way, I reinforced his sense of competence. He left the office not as a man who had been manipulated into a decision, but as a man who had overcome a series of challenges. This is the goal of every strategic intervention. You create a situation where the only way for the client to maintain their dignity is to change their behavior. A client who has mastered a difficult directive has already demonstrated that they have the capacity to manage their own life.

You should always watch for the moment when the client begins to argue with you about the necessity of the tasks. When they tell you that they no longer need to perform the directive because they have already figured things out, you know that your work is almost done. You do not concede immediately. You push back and insist that they must complete the task for one more week. This final bit of resistance from the client is the sign that they have changed from being a victim of their indecision to being an agent of their own will. They are now choosing to rebel against you, which is far healthier than the passive state of being stuck.

We recognize that the end of therapy is just another strategic move. You do not wait for the client to feel perfectly happy or entirely confident. You wait for the client to be in motion. Once the social and behavioral sequence has changed, the internal state will eventually align with the new reality. If a man has left a toxic job and started a new one, the fact that he still feels nervous is irrelevant to the success of the case. The success is that he is at the new desk every morning at nine o’clock. You dismiss the client when the new sequence is established and the old sequence is no longer possible to maintain without a total loss of face. The finality of your ending reinforces the finality of their decision.

Your task as a practitioner is to remain a technician of behavior. You do not need the client to understand why they were stuck, and you do not need them to understand how you moved them. You only need to ensure that the cost of staying still was higher than the cost of moving. When a client leaves your office for the last time, they should feel that they have narrowly escaped a very difficult situation by taking a decisive action. This feeling of escape is the most powerful motivation for them to keep moving forward in their new direction.

I worked with a woman who had been unable to decide whether to sell her childhood home for five years. After we finished the directive involving her cleaning the attic for six hours a day for two weeks, she sold the house. In our last meeting, she said that the house had simply become too much work for her to keep. I agreed with her and did not mention that it was only too much work because I had made it so. She moved into a small apartment and never looked back at the large, empty house that had occupied her for half a decade. We see this often in our work. A person who is no longer trapped in a decision is a person who has reclaimed their energy for the practical demands of their existence. You measure your success by the quiet of the telephone and the absence of the client from your schedule. The resolution of the problem is the only valid termination of the clinical relationship. When the client is busy living the consequences of their decision, they no longer have the time or the need to talk to you about it.