Incongruence
“Basically, you are telling me something very sad, but you are smiling at the same time. What meaning do you attach to that?” From a metatheory point of view, the perception of incongruence is a counsellor’s constant activity. Incongruences enrich the understanding and thus the formation of hypotheses. They also help to get a sense of what reaction the client is generating in his environment and they can also help him with an explicit intervention to allow previously unconscious psychological processes to become conscious. This is the prerequisite for them to become perceptible (more concise). Then the client can identify with it: “Yes, that’s true, when I concentrate on the feeling, I can notice a quiet sorrow. But do you know, I have not cried since I was a child. A shame really, I have lost something in the process.”.