Several years ago, while watching television, I had a brilliant insight that helped me improve my counseling as well as educational sessions with my clients. In regard to the latter, the publication Teaching For Success® gave me a teaching tip of the year award for the innovation of the cliffhanger strategy!

Quite frankly, watching television (sometimes referred to as looking at the idiot box, in my family of origin) really isn’t my thing. There are one or two shows at best that I watch on a fairly regular basis, I sometimes take in the news, and that’s about it.

On this particular evening, I was watching the local news for the purpose of securing the weather forecast as the TV anchor said, “Don’t even think about planning anything outdoors until you hear what strange weather meteorologist Joe Smith says is in store for us.” Next, the picture switched and (wouldn’t you know it) a commercial from a local car dealer appeared.

Wonderful, I thought. Just what was this strange weather lurking ahead? This was July for gosh sakes. In my neck of the woods, that usually means 80- to 100-degree weather with blistering sunlight or some rain. That’s it. Period. That covers the waterfront.

Was there going to be a six-foot snowstorm? Perhaps our town would be hit with the first ice storm in history to fall in the heat of the summer? I’ll be darned if I was going to wait a couple of minutes listening to some pitch about “buy now and get a $500 rebate.”

I had the remote in my hand and I was in control. I was the man! I smashed my finger down on a button to tune in a rival station that might be delineating this strange weather pattern. Instead I heard their anchor say, “If you are planning a vacation don’t even think about changing the channel. You won’t even believe the nightmare travelers will be up against.” As I cranked the volume up a few notches, I saw that darn car dealer airing its commercial again.

Now, I was in a quandary. Yes, I had to know about the strange weather, but my family was planning a trip and I also had to know about this upcoming traveler’s nightmare. Were the major highways being shut down for repairs? Were hotels gearing up to go on strike?

That minute or minute and a half seemed like eternity. And since picture-in-a-picture was not a TV function at that time, which channel should I return to? I desperately needed the information from both stations!

As that minute slowly ticked by on the clock, I glanced down at an ad in my Sunday paper and my eyes came to a screeching halt. A headline read: Six little-known things every man needs to know about heart disease that could kill him. Horrors! Though the clock was ticking (about T minus 45 seconds until the termination of the car commercials) I grabbed the paper to find out more.

This time — thank God for small favors — a car dealer commercial couldn’t thwart my quest for this information. A little order form that said “Send $19.95 for your copy of our book about heart disease prevention” nevertheless did stop me from getting the information I needed.

Then I had a major insight — an aha experience. What were all these people doing? Of course, it was so simple. They were all leaving me (and millions of other viewers and readers) hanging. I wasn’t about to turn off the TV or throw the paper away. They were baiting me, promising me valuable information if and only if I stayed tuned, or in the case of the print ad, bought the book.

Then it occurred to me how many people drop out of treatment or don’t show up for follow-up sessions. Even in hospital settings, where you wouldn’t think this would be a problem, some patients feign a physical malady to get out of an educational group or therapy.

I thus decided to follow the lead of my local TV anchors and print ads and end my counseling sessions and psycho-educational sessions with a cliffhanger.

Why leave ‘em hanging?
The next day, I met with one of the least motivated clients I had ever seen in all my years of practice. This gentleman routinely missed about 4 out of 5 sessions. He had never, in fact, successfully attended two scheduled back-to-back sessions, despite the fact that I had seen him on and off for years. This time, however, rather than ending the session with a mundane handshake and “I’ll see you next week at this time,” I left him hanging.

I said, “Next time we meet, I’m going to tell you how you can cut your treatment time in half and how another client who had the same problem as you at work turned things around and doubled his salary in less than six months.”

My client, who usually set the record for hitting the exit in a matter of nanoseconds said, “Say Doc, I’ve got a few extra minutes today, can’t you tell me now?”

“No,” I replied, “I have another patient waiting outside.”

About an hour after the session, he phoned my secretary saying that he wanted to know if I had a cancellation. My secretary and I both pinched ourselves to make sure we weren’t dreaming.

He did, in fact, return for his next session and was early for the first time.

During that time period, I was also leading one of the most lackluster groups I had ever seen. I would arrive at each session only to discover that a few more folks seemingly did not return. This time when I ended the group, instead of the old tried and not so true, “see you next time,” I remarked: “Most of you admit that you use drugs and alcohol when you are nervous or tense. Next week, I’m going to do a scientific hands-on demonstration ... that has never been conducted at this treatment facility before ... right here in this room ... to prove that when most of you folks say you are relaxing, you are actually becoming tenser. Moreover, I’m going to show you how most of you can make more progress in learning how to relax in 20 minutes than you have made in the last 20 years.”

Now assume for a moment that I had told my group, “Next week we will do some relaxation.” Would I have achieved the same result? Hardly! In fact, we need not speculate since I had done something similar for years.

A few words of caution: First, when you promise people something, you had better be capable of delivering the goods or you have my word this strategy will backfire. Thus, at least at first, you are going to need to thoroughly plan not only what you say at the end of the session, but also what you will say or do in the subsequent session. Also, unless you are the most creative therapist who ever stepped foot in a treatment center, you will not be able to implement a cliffhanger ploy for every session. Finally, make certain your technique does not violate ethical guidelines.

Conservative practitioners who protest that the technique is a bit flamboyant are, in fact, correct. Yet most of our clients have been exposed to a flamboyant society that hypes virtually everything from the upcoming football game to the nightly weather.

Just for the record — that strange weather pattern turned out to be a high and a low a couple degrees below normal. The traveler’s nightmare was actually the fact that a major hotel chain was going up a couple percent on their rates. Finally, when I received my miracle booklet on heart disease, I was informed that good eating habits and moderate exercise could be helpful. (Pardon me while I yawn.)

Come on, counselors, you can do better than that!

Dr. Howard Rosenthal is the Program Coordinator of Human Services at St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley and the author of the Encyclopedia of Counseling and the first-ever Human Services Dictionary.

This article is published in Counselor,The Magazine for Addiction Professionals, February 2004, v.5, n.1, pp. 30-31.

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