Russ’ theory in a nutshell comes down to these three things. For him, counseling primarily involves these elements. When he meets with a client, his first objective is to begin to identify the strategies that the person has developed to cope with the reality of this life. Once the strategies have been developed, a process of grieving must take place. This process includes grieving the strategies and what they have cost us. It also involves grieving the circumstances that fostered the strategies in the first place. The final shift is to experimenting. Once the strategies have been identified and grieved, the client is invited to begin experimenting with getting their needs met in legitimate ways. For them, many of these ways will be new. The counseling relationship becomes one that identifies, experiments and encourages new, healthy ways of having needs met.

This has been an interesting part of the process with Russ. In many ways his theory is very simple and straight forward. For Russ, there is theory and then there are techniques and interventions. The approach, the technique and the interventions are varied and colorful. However, the theory remains constant. The theory underlies everything else and consistently moves in the same direction. Hence, the theory itself is simple. Surprisingly simple.