Client Attitude Types Toward the Invitation to Improvise
Daniel J. Wiener, PhD, RDT-BCT
April, 2026
Over the past 40 years I have observed clients improvising RfG enactments in my own clinical practice, learned second-hand from observations made by other RfG practitioners of their own clients’ improvisational behaviors, and observed trainees improvising during RfG training workshops. While I haven’t been rigorous either in recording or cataloging these observations, I believe it may be useful to offer my informal, qualitative sorting of the variety of responses to improv enactment.
My focus in this Blog is predominantly on clients’ initial encounters with improvisation rather than on their practice and/or mastery resulting from repeated encounters, either with the same enactments or becoming better oriented to improv through repeated exposure to improvising. Here, I am not attending to the different demand characteristics of specific enactments, only noting that most of these initial encounters will have been with simpler Exercises rather than the more advanced Games.
I also include some speculations on the likely Life Background of each type—these should not be treated as firm predictions of what may be learned by clinicians later on in therapy, though in my experience they often apply.
Challengers
Challengers question the therapist’s justification(s) for proposing that they perform enactments. This often takes the form of expressing doubts about the possible benefits of enactment (“What good will that do me?”) and/or the appropriateness of the particular enactment proposed.
Life-Background Possibilities: Questioning others is second nature to Challengers—their safety lies in being in charge and maintaining the power to say “no.”
Handling Challengers: Therapists should be alert to their own assumptions and judgments that the challenging client is being contrary, combative or argumentative. Consider the possibility that the therapeutic relationship (always entailing trust and familiarity) may not yet have been firmly established. Therapists will be most successful in getting compliance from all clients (especially Challengers) by having “prepared the ground” during the contracting (pre-therapy) phase, i.e. well before proposing improv enactments, by mentioning her/his use of improv enactments as a distinctive, less common method employed during treatment. In that way, the client is more likely to feel reminded than feel confronted by an unfamiliar request.
Negotiators
Negotiators have conditions or considerations about how they expect the enactment will be judged by the therapist, by other actors or by spectators. They are conflicted over whether to take risks and will often offer some self-referential statement in order to lower others’ expectations (“I’m really nervous”) or (“Well, OK, but I’m not really good at this stuff”). They then perform with a mindset of lowering expectations and pleasing others, presenting themselves as ‘good sports.’
Life-Background Possibilities: Negotiators often lack stability or confidence in their lives and look to improv as a skill that may better enable them to survive. They anticipate the forthcoming enactment as a high-stakes challenge.
Handling Negotiators: The therapist can clarify that the purpose of the enactment is mutual (for both client and therapist) discovery, not evaluation or some devious ploy to bypass the client’s defenses. Not all clients are prepared to accept this clarification at face value—it is natural and well-nigh universal that unfamiliarity itself signals everyone’s Survival Mind to go on protective alert. As with Confronters, interpersonal trust is foundational to accepting influence– you might accept an unfamiliar food from your parent but wouldn’t from a stranger. When clients can extend their own trust to performing an enactment, you can be sure they are paying close attention to indications that your reactions to their performance is, as advertised, free from judgment of their competence or worthiness.
Avoiders
Avoiders outwardly comply with the instructions of the enactment but are actually performing what they believe is expected of them—they are not “there” in the moment and are thus closed off from self-discovery. Their motives are, primarily, to avoid losing control and, secondarily, to test whether their performance is accepted by the therapist as authentic. Most people, excepting some psychotics and those on the Autism spectrum, are practiced in “faking it” on occasion, under specific social circumstances; Avoidants seldom experience exceptions to such inauthenticity. In life, they are adept at the unacknowledged use of pretense as a defense against vulnerability. Merely entering therapy does not alter their avoidant pattern, even when they know cognitively that they are thereby undermining the achievement of their own therapeutic goals.
Life-Background Possibilities: Avoiders may present as two contrasting subtypes: (1) those whose lives are characterized by routines and who seem compliant, so long as they play themselves; (2) those who initially sidetrack and make jokes to delay commitment to the improv task at hand.
Handling Avoiders:
Therapists will often be unable to spot Avoiders at first; their initial performances do not conspicuously signal artifice. In couples or family therapy Avoiders are sometimes “outed” by their partners or relatives. When suspected, Avoiders may be offered dramatic roles that contrast sharply from their social personas, with the frequent result that they “take to” these roles as a safe and enjoyable way to explore adventuring in the playspace. This process may then be offered to Avoider clients as a project, “Learning to Become a Genuine Fake.”
nthusiasts
Enthusiasts are distinctive for being eager to play from the outset, though they may prove to be the most demanding type of all. They often appear impatient to receive instructions—“Let’s get to it!” They get irritated at their therapist’s coaching or repeating enactments to correct omissions in instructions received. More frequently than other types, they are impatient with extending Post Enactment Processing and wish to move quickly onto new enactments.
Life-Background Possibilities: Enthusiasts come in different (non-exclusive) varieties: (1) people who see improv as exploration to adventure beyond a humdrum life; (2) those looking to improv as an escape from worrisome problems; (3) people who are confident in their life abilities and who want to add improvising to their resumes; (4) those who are willing to experience risk-taking—but once only!
Handling Enthusiasts: Praising Enthusiasts’ willingness to take risks seems to reduce their impatience somewhat; as they do not seek insight so much as action, offering a series of enactments with lessened PEP can work. A problem in accommodating them may arise, however, when their scene partners or other group members are not also Enthusiasts.
Conclusion
The Types described above only represent a distillation of my own experiences; I welcome the contributions of others! I encourage others with relevant experience to share and compare their observations, questions and conclusions with the RfG community. To that end, I invite you to email me at: [email protected] with your contribution on this topic. Should there be a sufficient volume of correspondence I shall publish a synopsis of received feedback on the RfG website (www.rehearsalsforgrowth.com).
