The ‘Goldilocks Paradigm’ of Psychotherapy?
Not too much, not too little...
In my former life as a musician, I imagined psychotherapy as a space for supported self-reflection—but, perhaps more importantly, as a psycho-emotional process of education.
I assumed there were scientifically-proven best-practices for skills like communication, work-life balance, dealing with loss and disappointment, and navigating life changes.
Psychology is a science, after all!
Yet the deeper I go into the work of a therapist, the more I recognize that, while psychology has its scientific elements, it feels far more like an art. There are few universal, one-size-fits-all best-practices when it comes to the deep questions of how an individual chooses to live and engage with the world on a moment-to-moment basis. I once thought I was leaving an art (music) to enter a science (psychology), only to find myself continually drawn back to the lessons that engagement with art teaches.
I often return to Elliot Eisner’s Ten Lessons the Arts Teach (2002):
The arts promote discernment about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum, where rules and correct answers dominate, the arts value discernment over rules.
The arts teach that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
The arts celebrate multiple perspectives, showing there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
The arts teach that in complex problem-solving, goals are fluid and evolve with circumstance and opportunity.
The arts make vivid the fact that words and numbers do not exhaust what we can know; the limits of language are not the limits of cognition.
The arts teach that small differences can have large effects, emphasizing subtlety.
The arts encourage thinking through and within materials, transforming images into tangible realities.
The arts help people articulate the inexpressible, inviting poetic or metaphoric capacities to find words for feelings.
The arts enable experiences unavailable through other means, revealing the range of what we can feel and discover.
The presence of the arts in organizations symbolizes the values considered most important.
If one were to replace ‘the arts’ with ‘psychotherapy’, these principles would still hold. Psychotherapy does involve education, but not in the mechanistic sense of learning rules or obediantly adopting ‘best-practices’. Instead, it cultivates discernment, responsiveness, a tolerance for ambiguity, a detector for Self-BS-ing, and a pathway to emotional maturity—an ongoing process that requires deep, often uncomfortable work on the part of the client.
This is the distinction I want to highlight: the difference between Pop-Psychology and The Work—the rigorous, introspective process of therapy.
Pop-Psychology can be seductively simple:
Never go to Bed Angry.
Men are from Mars, Women from Venus.
Life should be an Exponential Arc of Continuous Self-Improvement.
Gratitude Journals will solve your Negativity Bias.
Classical Music makes Babies Smarter.
The Psyche is a Mixing Board—you just need to tweak the Right Sliders.
There’s Always a Right Way and a Wrong Way.
While such simplifications aren’t inherently bad and may offer helpful guideposts, they are fundamentally reductive. And reductive clarity can be deeply appealing, especially when one is drowning in overwhelming emotions and uncertainty. But these simplifications should not be mistaken for the process of therapy itself.
Therapy intertwines clarifying insight (aha!) with a tolerance for ambiguity (two seemingly opposing things can be true). It engages reason and problem-solving, drawing on the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, while also giving space for the deeply emotional, primitive parts of the psyche. Words matter in therapy, but often it is the unspoken elements—the undertones, the therapeutic space itself—that carry the most weight. Therapy unearths the assumptions we hold about who we are, how we should be, what is good or bad, what is tolerable or intolerable. Therapy’s miracle is that it develops clarity / a sense of The Known AND a curiosity for complexity, ambiguity, and a love for unknowable pasts, presents, and potentials. One looks at the elements of a life, and looks again, the narratives and sense of understanding changing with each iteration.
Lessons with Peter Serkin
This brings me back to lessons I learned years ago — not in a psychology textbook, but at the piano.
Peter Serkin and me at Tanglewood, 1998
I had the deep privilege of studying with Peter Serkin from 1997 to 1999. During our lessons in his apartment on West End Avenue in New York, I often found myself exasperated by what I came to think of as the Serkin-Goldilocks-Pattern:
PS (face buried in the score): "Heather, there’s a dot there, do you see it?"
HO’D: "Yes…, so, you think I should play this note shorter?"
PS (thoughtfully): "Yessss…[thinking…] but not toooooo much…."
Lesson after lesson, we followed this same pattern:
PS: “XYZ is there, do you see it?”
HO’D: “Yes, so this note needs more… XYZ.”
PS: “Yessss… but not toooooooooo much…”
His approach was exasperatingly granular and subtle, with an overriding respect for sensing out the composer’s intentions. But at the time, I wanted clearer guidance—more definitive answers. What I failed to appreciate then was that he was teaching me something far more profound: the ability to sit with nuance, to refine my sensitivity to small shifts, to cultivate an awareness that is both awake and responsive.
Is a Goldilocks-Balance at the heart of it all?
Balance is a recurring theme in psychological counseling—clients want to know how to find balance between work and family. How to navigate between being open and having protective boundaries. It’s tempting to think that balance means finding a safe, moderate path between extremes—not too hard-working, not too lazy; not too aggressive, not too passive. That’s a safe path, but a little dull… and I don’t really think it’s the Middle Way that Buddhists speak of:
“The Middle Way describes the middle ground between attachment and aversion, between being and non-being, between form and emptiness, between free will and determinism. The more we delve into the middle way the more deeply we come to rest between the play of opposites.”
Jack Kornfield
This concept has a vibrant tone that contradicts what could be a somewhat drab and overly-careful approach to life. There are so many times when a ‘Straight-Down-The-Middle’ approach isn’t appropriate. Sometimes, the middle is not habitable, there are certain things we do not want to find a middle ground for—abuse, for example. It would be absurd to suggest a “reasonable” level of abuse (not too much, not too little). And yet, people sometimes believe that tolerance means accepting views or behaviours that cause harm. But standing up for or against something, using a strong voice, and taking a firm stance does not contradict the Middle Way.
A felt sense of the Middle Way could be vibrant, complex, thorny, multifaceted, confusing, engaging. A ‘Straight-Down-The-Middle’ approach, on the other hand, has a lifeless, timid, passive, flacid and grey quality to it.
What if we viewed the Middle Way not as a static point between two extremes, but as an ongoing process of reflection, attunement, and response? A way of sensing nuance, engaging deeply, and adapting thoughtfully to each challenge, each moment?
This, I believe, is where the true artistry of therapy—and of life—resides. Not in simple prescriptions or rigid formulas, but in the ability to listen, to speak, to adjust, to refine. To recognize that clarity and ambiguity are not opposites but partners in a deeper way of knowing.
And perhaps this is what Serkin was teaching. Not to find a fixed answer, not to settle for balance as a safe middle ground, but to remain awake to the shifting demands of each phrase, each moment. To listen carefully, to respond with discernment.
“Yes….,” I can hear him say. “But not toooooooo much….”