Robert's PE-EFT Scotland Blog

Christmas Adventures in Glasgow

2011-12-28T07:34:00.001-05:00

Entryfor 24-27 December 2011

Thisyear we have been exploring unknown territory: Christmas in Glasgow. Each year at this time, for the past fiveyears, we have gone back to the USA for three weeks beginning around the wintersolstice and only returning around the 10^th of January, in time forCeltic Connections. Thanks to the UKBorder Agency, this did not happen this year; and so we are here, for achange. In the meantime, we are savoringthe unfamiliar bits, which are many:

1. Last week we discovered cinnamon and fresh parsley in the supermarket, afterwe had given up on them. As is so often the case, you just have to knowWhere To Look. In this case, thesethings are kept not in a place but in a time: Christmas. I'm not sureabout the fresh parsley, but a bit a research told us that cinnamon was once avery expensive luxury, so it came to be associated for the extravagance of theholidays and so is excluded from ordinary life the rest of the year. If one of the three wise men had left behindhis gold, frankincense, and myrrh, he might have replaced it with cinnamon!(Probably not parsley, though…)

2. You'd think that Christmas carols here would with minor exceptions be prettymuch the same as in the US, given that so many came from the UK and Europe inthe first place. However, this turns out to not be the case. At St.Mary’s, last Thursday's service of 9 Lessons and Carols turned out to be filledwith familiar carols with unfamiliar music, familiar music with unfamiliarwords, or just plain unfamiliar words and music. Very nice... I liked theUK melody for It Came Upon a Midnight Clear better, actually. But different…

3.It turns out that BBC Radio 3, the main classical music channel in the UK,plays hardly any Christmas music. On Christmas morning when I turned iton, they were playing a Rachmaninoff orchestral piece. After the opera onChristmas Eve, this was the last straw, so I tuned into my longtime favoriteradio station from San Francisco, using my handy KDFC iPad app. Afterthat, I listened to a Norwegian Christmas/Solstice program on Music from Hearts of Space, along-running American public radio new age music program, also produced in SanFrancisco. My Dad would have approved! Actually, I've been mining hisextensive library of Christmas music this season, almost a 1000 tracks'worth. I've particularly enjoyed his country and western, new age, andjazz selections, and have been playing them a lot.

4.Diane and I miss our kids and have been Skyping with them a fair amount, butwe've also really been enjoying each other's company in this season. Usually weare distracted by our families of origin and spend much of the holiday seasonin different elliptical orbits, touching base from time to time. We miss our families and spent several hoursSkyping with various more or less chaotic bunches of them, but we are also enjoyingour quiet time together.

5. Over the past few years, as we travelled here and there during the holidays,I've missed the big Christmas services that we had at Trinity in Toledo: OAntiphons, Christmas Eve. I haven't been to a 4th Sunday of Adventservice for years, since we're always travelling then. This year at StMary's we got to experience the whole thing: The 4^th Sunday inAdvent service was devoted almost entirely to Mary, which I loved. WinterSolstice Goddess Festival! Then we had abig Nine Lessons & Carols service, as I mentioned, with the Bishop and all,the church packed out. After that, the Christmas eve service focused on Angels,with Kelvin (the Provost or main priest of the cathedral) asking us to imagineangels hovering over Glasgow. In mostlanguages, the word for “angel” originally meant “messenger”. What messages do they have for us?

6. After snow and bitter cold here last year, this year has been very mild,although wet and windy. We did have some snow and ice a week ago, butit's all gone now, and it's mostly been excellent weather for running. The wind finished eating my umbrella on Christmas Eve on a short trip to thelocal market. But as we walked home at 1am, after the Midnight ChristmasEve service at St. Mary's, the rain had passed and the wind had died down. The streets were unusually quiet for aSaturday night in Glasgow, most of the traffic consisted of taxis, and a fewstars shone through between the clouds.

7.On Christmas day, we had dinner with our Australian friends, Juli & Tony,as well as Beth’s son James, from Brazil. This turned out to be a brilliant idea, given that all of us werefeeling somewhat abandoned by our faraway families. So we enjoyed a multicultural Christmasdinner, with Australian/British roast turkey/pork/vegetables, American applepie/cranberry-orange relish, and a Brazilian confections known as brançinos. But the piece de resistance was Julie’sauthentic Christmas pudding, many weeks in the making, and finally wrappedtightly in a cloth, heated in a big pot of boiling water, doused with brandy,and set afire, before being served with custard.

8. The Roman midwinter festival ofSaturnalia went on for many days. Similarly, in the UK and Scotland, there are the two days of ChristmasEve and Christmas itself, plus New Year’s Even and New Year’s Day, the latter known as Hogmanay inScotland. However, there is also BoxingDay, the 26^th of December, and in Scotland Hogmanay extends to the 2^ndof January. Beyond this, lots of thingssimply close down altogether for the entire week between Christmas and NewYears, and this year the University doesn’t even reopen until 5 January, theday before Epiphany. Most of our localshops are closed. There is hardly anyemail. The result is a large culturalpause, a kind of still point at the turning of the year. This is the time weare living through, this year’s Christmas Adventures.

Indefinite Leave to Remain

2011-12-05T07:33:00.001-05:00

5December 2011:

Outof blue this morning, our visa renewal came in ananonymous-looking envelope, which included our passports with the newvisas saying that we have Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK. Actually, there is nothing indefinite about it: We are "settled", and can stay as long as we want, which in our case is another 4.5 years.

Myfirst reaction was shock, because I wasn't expecting it this soon and hadtotally given up on hearing back before Christmas. For months, we had been mentally preparingourselves for a longer wait and even to be turned down and deported. We had given up on travelling to the US forthe holidays, and had instead arranged for Kenneth to come visit us here. I’d started to worry about a Februarytraining I am scheduled to run in Belgium. Suddenly, all the familiar waiting was gone, vanished, leaving a kind of vacuum of missing expectancy.

Itwas only after the initial shock had worn off and we had read through all thepaperwork that I began to feel an easing in my body, relief from an implicittension that I’d been carrying for many months, really almost a year, at theuncertainty about our future.

Surprisingly,I am also left with a sense of being a bit daunted by having my life, allthese months in limbo, hanging suspended, suddenly shift into gear andmove forward again. But where? How? What’s next? What first? What to do with this unexpected Christmasgift of More Time, a reprieve?

Big Chapter Done: Getting my life back…

2011-12-04T03:46:00.001-05:00

Entryfor 3 December 2011:

I’vebeen working on a huge review chapter on research on experientialpsychotherapies for the past 6 months, and finally finished it late last night,three months late. I don’t know if theeditor will take it that late, but for now I’m glad to have my life back. At times, I despaired we’d ever finish it,but fortunately my co-authors came through with their bits, and that gave methe impetus to push on, if only for the sake of the effort they’d put in.

Towardthe end, as the chapter got more and more overdue, it gradually took over moreand more bits of my life, crowding out things like writing blog entries,running, Saturday Adventures, watching television, going to the folk club,doing email, church, taking a reasonable time to eat breakfast in the morning,reading more than a few pages of science fiction a day, grocery shopping, andso on. At times it felt like having somesort of life-sapping illness. I rarelycheated on my sleep; and I continued to make adequate space for my clients, anddid my teaching. However, my PhD and MScstudents have been neglected (apologies to them!), and at the end Diane hadhelp me check the 300 references.

Yesterday,as the End come into view, I became elated at the prospect of getting my lifeback. Finally, about 11pm I sent it offto the editor and my co-authors. Dianeand I celebrated by watching an episode of TheMentalist and, just for good measure, TheBig Bang Theory. Then, this morningI went for a run, we had a leisurely brunch, and then went on our firstSaturday Adventure in a month:

Wewalked over to see the newly installed Antonine Wall exhibit at the HunterianMuseum at the University of Glasgow. Forlast 300 years they have been collecting the old Roman mile markers, from theroad built by the Roman legions about 140 C.E. just behind the Antonine Wall,which spans central Scotland, from the Firth of Forth to the Firth ofClyde. In addition to almost all of themile markers, they’ve got grave stones, altar stones, lots of statues of theGoddesses Fortuna (Fortune or Luck) and Victoria (Winged Victory), and quite afew bas relief cartoon-like depictions of bad things happening to celticwarriors and prisoners. There are even acouple of statues of Silenus, Bacchus’ drinking companion. There are also lots of roman household artifactsfound in the Glasgow area, some quite fascinating, like a cheese press andaccompanying lead weight, or fake tin denarius coins for a wishing well. Afterwards, we made a quick visit to thenearby Hunterian Art Museum, which I think is underrated due to the proximityof the Kelvingrove, but has its pleasures. Finally, we walked along Byres Road, and then home again. Saturday Adventures were back!

Riding a Coo through the Scottish Highlands

2011-10-23T16:35:00.000-04:00

The next day after I posted The Sunset Run poem blog entry, I was trying to tell a couple of my Scottish colleagues about it. I said, "After I got home, I went for a run and then wrote a haiku."
"What?, they said.
I repeated, "I wrote a haiku."
"Huh?"
"You know, a Japanese poem."
"Oh!," they said. "You mean, a 'hai-queue?' We thought you were riding on top of a high coo [=cow]!"

I was left with an image of the famous picture of Buddha riding the ox...

Sunset Run

2011-10-18T16:31:00.000-04:00

Entryfor 18 October 2011:

Another haiku form poem:

The light goes away

losing five minutes each day:

Late sun still glints bright.

Hard rains these last days:

Weir booms below aqueduct,

fox lopes home at dusk.

Too much on right now:

Still, good day’s training, finished

paper, hard run help.

Reflections on 9/11: Learning from Mona

2011-09-11T10:59:00.000-04:00

Entry for 11 September 2011:

Our friend Becky, from Trinity EpiscopalChurch, our old church back in Toledo, Ohio, asked me recently if I’d bewilling to write a bit for their newsletter about how the events on 11September 2001 had affected me since. Here is a slightly revised version of what I wrote:

In the months after 9/11, I happened to beworking with Mona, a devout Muslim postgraduate student of mine, and hadseveral long conversations with her about the double victimization she and herfellow Muslims experienced after 9/11: First as an American and thus an object of the attacks; but second andmore importantly because of the discrimination she personally and other Muslimsexperienced after 9/11, including constant monitoring of her local mosque byfederal agents. As a result, I learnedmore about Islam and took every opportunity to defend Muslims from unfairtreatment and prejudice. She has sincecompleted her PhD and now works at a university in Cairo, where she has becomeinvolved in the largely peaceful revolution that has been happening inEgypt. My experience with Mona has sincehelped me to work more compassionately with other Islamic postgraduate studentshere in Scotland.

I thought of this again thismorning, on the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, but also becausethe lessons today focused on forgiveness. (For example, at the end of Genesis,Joseph forgives his brothers for having sold him into slavery.) And I found myself wondering again howdifferent things might have been if our main response to the 9/11 attacks hadbeen to seek understanding, reconciliation and forgiveness rather than revenge…

Gareth Williams on Possible Relationships between EFT and Buddhism

2011-09-04T13:11:00.000-04:00

Entryfor 4 September 2011:

This year’s Glasgow EFT Level 1training was marked by more theoretical diversity than ever before, which madefor some interesting dialogues with colleagues from psychodynamic,systemic-couples, … and Buddhist perspectives. One of this year’s participants, Gareth Williams, brought a particularlyBuddhist perspective to the EFT training. After the training workshop, at my invitation,he wrote the following about possible connections between EFT andBuddhism. He’s given his permission forme to publish these comments here. (Thanks, Gareth!)

First, here’s a bit about Gareth: Following 2 years as afull-time volunteer at Lothlorien therapeutic community in Scotland, Garethtrained in person-centred counselling at Strathclyde University with DaveMearns. Since then he has undertaken a long-term study of Arnold Mindell'sprocess-oriented psychology; a Masters degree at the University of Manchester,where his thesis focused on the role of creativity in transformation andhealing; a certificate in mindfulness at Samye Ling; and a certificate insupervision at Tenemos.

Gareth iscurrently based on the border of Staffordshire and Cheshire, where he works asa senior counsellor with North Staffs Mind. Also in the process of establishinghimself as a freelance therapist and supervisor, he has just contributed to aforthcoming book on counselling psychology. He has special interests increativity, anxiety, mindfulness, ecotherapy, working with young peopleand their families, and common factors in therapy.

Hi Robert.

Here's some gathered thoughts on how EFT fits into a Buddhist mindfulnesscontext. My understanding is of course limited and there are many schools ofBuddhism with subtle and not so subtle differences. So this is a personalBuddhist-inspired epistemological take on EFT.

EFT can help us understand the way our mind constructs experience. Not thetruth or anything like that, simply our experience of life.

(And in the process of exploration we no doubt contribute to the construction.)

From a Buddhist perspective, life and who we are cannot be fully summed upever. It’s all part of an ongoing life process.

Shantideva, Buddhist saint from a few hundred years back, said we should regardall phenomena as rainbow-like. EFT can help us appreciate the variousinteractive components of our experience.

Buddhist therapist John Welwood (2000) (Gendlin was one of his mentors) pointsout how we can get tangled up in our reactions to our emotions (secondaryemotions in EFT). Rather than letting a feeling guide us and letting it comeand go, there can be a judging and resisting of it. A whole storyline can beassociated with it, for example, "only failures feel down like this, Imust be a failure."

He goes on to explain how psychotherapy can support people to untangle theexperience and understand the complex information within an overall lived experience.

What comes to mind is mindfulness teacher Rob Nairn citing a Tibetan master, TaiSitupa, as saying that if you let it go/be/play out, without resisting oradding, any thought/feeling will last at most 2 to 3 minutes. If you worry oravoid or resist you tend to suppress and inadvertantly prolong the experience. [Note: In EFT we like to point out thatadaptive emotions are by nature brief: they emerge to help us read, understandand respond appropriately to a particular immediate situation, then they recedein order to make space for the next emotion.]

EFT supports people to allow their experiences.

In mindfulness practice, the meditation support (breath, sound, bodysensations) is an anchor, a regulator, but ideally like a feather on a stream.Not pushing anything away, letting it all be. And mindfulness is awareness andcompassion/kindness. When practiced skilfully, whateveremotion/experience/thought arises is met with kindness. One teaching is tosoften around it. This ties in with Greenberg (2004) on transformation ofemotion through contact between difficult scheme and adaptive scheme.

Rob Nairn teaches his students the importance of not "parking off"their difficult feelings. Compassion training really emphasises making friendswith our pain. Rob draws on Jung's notion of "complexes" - split offparts - and how healing it can be to meet these with mindfulness. Allowing forsome kind of integration and transformation.

Compassionate awareness itself brings change. There is not an agenda of how itshould be in the inner world. Capacity for awareness and kindness is regardedas inherent. It’s often called Buddha Nature.

Tara Brach is a popular mindfulness teacher. She wrote Radical Acceptance and teaches a method called RAIN: Recognise,Allow, Inquire and Non-identify. The inquiry part of the practice seems veryakin to bringing awareness to the different components of the emotion scheme -body, associations, images, etc.

That's probably more than enough for now. Any questions and/or feedback will beenthusiastically received!

All the best and thanks for a great training course. Gareth

Gareth Williams
Human (mostly)

Strontium Anniversary

2011-08-18T19:44:00.002-04:00

Entry for 18 August 2011:

We celebrated our 38^th Wedding Anniversary today. Thirty-eight is the atomic number of Strontium, an alkali metal earth element. Interestingly, this is the first time we have been in Glasgow for our anniversary, and it turns out that Strontium is named after the small Scottish village of Strontian in the West Highlands, north of us, source of the minerals from which it was first isolated 200 years ago.

Strontium is silvery gray in color and highly reactive in air or water. It is a fairly common element, and has had many uses over the past 150 years, including sugar beet production, old fashioned cathode ray tube glass, engine alloy metal, and medical devices. It also used in toothpaste and may – or may not – be useful for treating osteoporosis.

Thus, Strontium seems to us to be a very appropriate element for symbolizing our 38^th anniversary. First, it is a Scottish element, and here we are, celebrating its number in Scotland. Second, like us, it is not an ancient element, but has nevertheless been around for a while. Third, it is silvery in color, and so are we (our hair anyway…). Fourth, it has had many different uses over time, and these uses continue to evolve, just as we continue to evolve.

Scenes from a Holiday

2011-07-31T12:37:00.001-04:00

Entry for 31 July 2011:

Because of our impending deadline for submitting our application for permanent leave to remain in the UK, we took our summer holiday early this year, in July, less than a week after getting back from the Society for Psychotherapy Research conference in Bern, Switzerland.

Whirlwind tour. As usual, we have spent the past three weeks visiting family in the US. This year it felt even more like one of those intense whirlwind 3-week tours of Europe. We started in Ohio with a short visit weekend in Toledo with our son Kenneth and our house-sitter/friend Linda, before flying to Northern California. There, first, in Pleasanton, we saw Diane’s mother and sister Marjorie and her partner Kris. Then, in Murray Creek, just outside of San Andreas, we visited my mother, siblings and their partners. After that, we returned to Pleasanton, then drove south first to Monterey to see my old high school friends Philip and Jackie before making a quick visit to Paso Robles to see my sister Anna (and my mother and sister Louisa again, who in the meantime had gone there ahead of us). Next, we spent another day in Pleasanton before flying up to Seattle to spend the weekend catching up with our son Brendan, his partner Mayumi and our 14-month-old granddaughter Mizuki. Finally, we flew back to Ohio for another brief visit with Kenneth, Linda and her son Jon, who also lives in our old house in Toledo. Even with all this travelling around, I was still able to maintain my running schedule, including two very long, challenging runs: the 7.5 mile loop around the Pleasanton ring road system, and the very hilly Murray Creek road 10k run to “town” (San Andreas) and back.

Overload. We returned to Glasgow two days ago, on Friday, very jet lagged but with our heads and hearts filled with a wealth of experiences. Yesterday we got up late, then sat down and mostly completed our UK settlement application, in the process reviewing our past five years here. But when I tried to go to sleep, I couldn’t: It wasn’t just the jet lag, or science fiction novella I was half way through. Something was unfinished: I needed to give some account of the jumble of experiences, to put them in order, before plunging into an intense month of work prior to this year’s EFT Level 1 training and courses starting again in September. This entry is a start at that; the rest will take time. Here then, are a few impressions of this time:

California Adventures. This year, with the encouragement of Diane’s mom, we initiated California Adventures, modeled on our Scottish Saturday Adventures. These are daytrips of varying lengths, some well-known, others quite obscure.

Our Famous Adventure was to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where we saw a wonderful exhibit, The Steins Collect, full of early Picasso and Matisse. This large exhibit made a big impression on me, demonstrating for me the dialectic relation between art collectors/fans and artists as a process guiding the history of art. However, I was even more amazed by the Belgian artist David Claerbout's video installation, The American Room: A moment suspended in time as the camera pans around the audience and performers at a small musical concert, each person captured cinematically and in their concrete physicality, as if we were there with them, lost in a “timeless moment”. TS Eliot would approve! For more: http://www.sfmoma.org/about/press

Our obscure adventures were to two little-known local parks around Pleasanton, neither of which any of us (including Diane’s mom, who lives there) had ever heard of. One, in nearby Dublin (California), was a little historical park celebrating the early settlers of the area; the other was the Alviso Adobe Park, in the hills overlooking Pleasanton, a site linking the native American Ohlone tribe (represented by a 5,000-year-old grinding rock), a nineteenth century Mexican land-grant family (who built the old Adobe house there), and a twentieth century local dairy farm.

Murray Creek. I’ve already posted my annual Murray Creek poem, but the little valley where my mom, Conal and Holly live never fails to resonate deeply in me. This summer, because of the late rains it was unusually lush for July in California, the many shades and textures of green particularly vivid, and the peaceful atmosphere was accompanied by distant sound of water still running in the creek. Although the visit was short, I had some excellent talks with my mom and siblings, and got a good view of what is emerging in their lives.

Philip & Jackie in Monterey. After my friend Margaret died in February, I realized how important it is to maintain connections with old friends. Fortunately, we were able to organize a visit with two good friends from high school, Philip and Jackie. It turned out that Philip had retired four years ago and they had moved to Monterey, a place long familiar to me from family vacations with my grandmother in nearby Carmel Valley. Again, a brief, intense visit, filled with Philip’s excellent cooking and visits to my grandparents’ graves in Pacific Grove, walk through Asilomar State Beach, visit to Philp’s favorite local Bakery (Pavel’s Bakerei) and a visit to the Monterey Acquarium. The high point, however, was talking with the two of them into the night, with Philip and I reading recent poems to each other, just as we had done in high school so many years ago.

Brendan, Mayumi and Wee Mizuki in Seattle. We found our oldest son and his family much less stressed and more settled in and grounded than on previous visits. Our granddaughter Mizuki is an absolute delight, happy (mostly), walking with ease, interested (even if only briefly) in everything, and very sociable, with a very regal princess wave. Most amazingly, Brendan and Mayumi have taught Mizuki baby sign language, and she charmed us by signing for "more" and "please" and other things. There were also Seattle Adventures: one day to a farm-themed park with blue-berry picking, a first for us; the next day to Seward Park, a peninsula that extends into Lake Washingon. And meals out. And more really good talks about where lives are going.

Saudade. After dropping Kenneth off in Cleveland the day before flying back to Scotland, I was filled with a sense of sadness at not being able to see him and the rest of our family and friends more often. I think that friends and family provide an essential grounding and orientation for us in our lives, and it is difficult and at some background psychic level stressful to be so far away from them, cut off to a large extent by the distances and time differences. We had some great Adventures in the process of reconnecting to people important to us, and we resumed some important conversations, although these conversations are unfinished and left us wanting more. There is the character of nostalgic, almost painful longing about this. In Portugal, I think, this feeling is called saudade; it is the basis of fado music. This is an old feeling, an emotion scheme familiar to me; and I think this is the reason that the music of fado resonates with me so deeply. For me this feeling is a key source of inspiration for poetry, blogging, and even my work as a therapist. It needs to be fed, from time to time, by visits home to people and places I love, by conversations resumed but still unfinished, dangling, waiting to be continued, the warp and weft of my life.

More Murray Creek Haiku 2011

2011-07-17T17:19:00.002-04:00

Entry for 17 July 2011:

Almost a year since

I last passed this way: Sudden

Longing for this place.

Winter storms reshaped

the creek, sweeping up trees, rocks,

berry bushes… bridges.

Blackberries slowly

now return, repopulate:

plenty berries soon!

Labyrinth renewed:

buried stones dug up, re-placed,

gleaming in the sun.

Late rains, cool weather,

water still runs in the creek,

sounding in the dark.

Full moon rises over

eastern ridge of Murray Creek,

outshines Milky Way.

Summer morn, I run

the road to town. When will I

come this way again?

2011-07-10T22:59:00.001-04:00

8 July 2011: Reflections on route to the US: June-July Update

The last few weeks, since the end of May, have been very busy:

1. Courses end. The counseling diploma courses ended, amid the usual drama, tears and last minute marking of assignments. I continue to enjoy my work with the student groups here, counseling diploma & MSc students, counseling psychology professional doctorate students, and research PhDs. They are passionate and committed, which they have to be, because there is so little financial support for them.

2. EFT Training. Also in June, Anja Rutten and I delivered the third and final installment of a very successful EFT Level 2 in Veldhoven, Netherlands, and began planning Level 3 to start in the Autumn. The Strathclyde EFT Level 1 for the end of August is already almost full, thanks in part to the various one-day taster workshops I’ve been do around the UK. Over the past year or so, it has become clear that Emotion-Focused Therapy is gathering critical mass in Europe. The International Society for Emotion-Focused Therapy (ISEFT) is being formed to promote the approach and to develop standards and accreditation procedures for EFT therapists, supervisors, trainers, and training centers.

3. Settlement. After a month of intensive study, Diane and I took and passed our UK citizenship test, entitling us to apply for what is called Settlement, or Permanent Leave to Remain in the UK, equivalent to a Green Card in the US. The test consisted of 24 multiple choice questions divided evenly between blindingly easy questions (“What is Valentine’s Day?”) and mind-numbingly picky ones (“How many representatives to the European Parliament does the UK have?”). We had 45 minutes for the test; Diane was the first of our group of 15 to finish, at 7 minutes. When we return from the US at the end of July, finishing our application will be our top priority; we can’t submit more than 28 days before our visa runs out at the end of August. However, the process requires us to send in our US passports. Once we’ve turned our application in, we’re stuck in the UK until we hear back on our case. That could take anywhere from a month or two, to 6 months or more. I’ve already cancelled or rescheduled most of the travel plans for the period. We will have to be patient and flexible, just like when I was recovering from surgery during the same time period last year.

4. The Summer Solstice, with 17.5 hours of daylight, came, but it was rainy and gray in Glasgow. We’ve a couple of days of nice weather since mid-May, but that’s about it.

5. SPR-Bern. The highlight of my scientific year is generally the annual international conference of the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR), and this year’s conference in the beautiful, historical Swiss city of Bern was no exception. There were many EFT panels on the program, and a group of us did the “EFT Tour” going from session to session, learning about the latest EFT developments, such as applications of Antonio Pascual-Leone’s recently developed model of the emotional change process in EFT, and a new task model of hopelessness (which turns out to be a form of self-interruption). I took Rachel McLeod’s HSCED study of my first social anxiety client (about to appear in Psychotherapy Research) and converted it into a change process study, which worked surprisingly well. Diane gave her first SPR presentation, on clients from the Research Clinic who dropped out after only one or two sessions, and by all reports was informative and entertaining. (I missed her presentation because I was scheduled to present at the same time in a parallel session.) We got together with old friends, like David Orlinsky and the Collaborative Research Network; Bill & Sue Stiles; Art Bohart & Karen Tallman; Chris Barker & Nancy Pistrang; and many others. All in all, Franz Caspar and his team, along with Guillermo de la Parra, the program chair, did an excellent job of organizing the conference, one of the best in years, in my view.

Now, it’s time for a vacation!

Late May Update: Quantum Change?

2011-05-31T18:20:00.003-04:00

Entry for 31 May 2011 (61st Birthday):

After a quiet few weeks in April, things got very busy again and May has flown by with many trips and activities. I can’t believe that it’s been five months since my last update on the state of my recovery and how my life is going generally, but there you have it.

I saw the surgeon and his team at the end of April: They liked what I told them about my functioning, and were particularly impressed that I was once again running my full distance. Then the important thing: they had me tested for PSA again, and eventually, after a couple of weeks, I got a letter saying that my PSA score was still undetectable. This is a great relief.

I've been back to work full time since January, trying not to work too hard while still keeping reasonably on top of things. My colleagues, and indeed all my fellow academic staff members whom I’ve talked to, have also been struggling to stay on top of our workloads in an ever-changing, under-resourced work environment. After deliberately avoiding much in the way of travel during January and February, while we tried to sort out what to do about our immigration status, I over-did things in March, although April was more reasonable. I'd been running regularly, 3 times a week, gradually increasing how much of my course I ran as opposed to walking. As the weather improved and the days got longer, I began riding my bike to work, which turned out to be no problem at all.

My energy has been good and has continued to improve. At this point, it feels like I've got 95% of my life back. I made a big improvement in the incontinence at the beginning of January, but after that I didn’t see much change until early May. I was doing well enough to mostly function, but couldn’t handle standing for long periods of time, so all my teaching and presenting at conferences has had to be done sitting down. Walking quickly in particular was difficult, and I’ve found that overwork and sleep deprivation make it worse.

This was the situation at the end of April. Then, we had old friends from Australia, George and Joy, come for a visit, and we made a trip back to the Kilmartin valley, with its dramatic standing stones, cairns and stone circles, challenging me with hours of walking around and scarce toilets. I didn’t do so well, but got frustrated with my lack of progress … and made another big improvement.

In both instances, there was a moment of insight about how to handle my body: I suddenly saw that the muscles I’d been exercising and trying to use weren’t exactly the right ones but that if I just did it… this way, it worked much better. It’s hard to explain; my granddaughter Mizuki probably understands exactly what I’m trying to say, although she wouldn’t be able to put it into words it either. (She has a good excuse: She can’t really talk yet.) The closest analogy I’ve been able to come up with is the old game/puzzle we had as kids, called Roll-Up, where you had to a roll a metal ball uphill by squeezing it between two metal rods. When I was about 10, we got this for Christmas, and I spent hours and hours trying unsuccessfully to do it. Then one day, it just worked: there is something to it about using just the right pressure – not too much -- to keep the ball rolling up hill, but it is impossible to put into words. Anyway, this is very like that: just the right amount tensing of the just the right muscles, and voila’, I can stand and walk for 30 minutes or even an hour with little problem. Of course, it takes continuous effort and some degree of concentration, so over time it’s pretty tiring to do this, and it gets harder as I get more tired. But still: another big improvement. Quantum change!

This is of course a great relief, and I continue to feel extremely grateful for my situation. Nevertheless, I am determined not to take this lightly and will continue to act as though the cancer is still present but at very low levels. In other words, I plan to continue to take care of myself, take most of my nutritional supplements, get at least 7 hrs of sleep a night, exercise regularly, and generally avoid stressing myself out.

In general, though, I’ve been feeling pretty happy for the past few months. It feels like I have a new lease on life. I find myself whistling. Yesterday I ran 10K and saw a whole row of new 4-story flats along the canal near Firhill Stadium, built since I last ran that far, last summer. Diane and I enjoy hanging out with each other. Absurdly, we are studying to take a UK citizenship test this Thursday in order to renew our visa, and this has turned into a kind of adventure in itself, as we try to memorize ridiculous facts about life in the UK (example: Q: How many people under 19 in the UK in the 2001 census? A: 15 million). The EFT one-day taster workshops I’ve been doing all over the UK have been fun, as have the EFT Level 2 workshops in the Netherlands. The research here continues to be stimulating and interesting. It feels so good to be doing actual process research with recordings of sessions rather than always working with self-report. For example, one of my MSc students, Sarah Shaffner, has done a descriptive study of the characteristics of six carefully-identified Relational Depth events; she’s found that intense emotional contact between client and therapist appears to be the key to these events, but also that therapists and clients don't seem to be able to stay with them.

So the work is good, and so is the living. There is, of course, too much to do. I’ve given up trying to answer all my email, opting instead for a system of prioritizing it and letting the rest pile up. Some things will have to slide. I can only do my best within my limits. Trying to do more than that seems to make it all unpleasant and to take the life out of what I do. None of us knows exactly how much time we have, so it’s really important to take each day as a gift, to do the best with that I can. To quote TS Eliot: “The rest is not our business”.

Saturday Adventure: Sharmanka, Friends, and St. Andrew’s Catholic Cathedral

2011-05-29T11:24:00.002-04:00

Entry for 28 May 2011:

I’ve been travelling a lot the past few weeks, so it was a relief to be able to get back to a proper Saturday Adventure this week. After a slow morning, we set off for the Glasgow city centre, to see St Andrews Roman Catholic Cathedral, recently reopened after extensive renovations. However, after various delays and wading through the Saturday afternoon crowds on Argyle Street, we got to the Cathedral just as people were going in to the 1pm mass.

Instead of going in and having an hour or so to kill before a scheduled visit to Diane’s friend Juli’s, we wandered back up away from the river. ending up at the art space at 103 Trongate for something completely different, which a friend had told us about a couple of days earlier:

The Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre is one of the strangest, most eccentric, evocative and enthralling art exhibits I’ve even seen. It features 20-plus separate mechanical sculptures-cum-theatre-pieces, by Eduard Bersudsky, a Russian wood-carver, junk-collector, gadgeteer, and allegorist. We arrived, by accident, just in time for the 1pm show. We paid our entrance fee, the lights went down, and for the next 35 minutes one piece after another lit up and different bits – cables, chains, wooden figures, bicycle wheels, sewing machine treadles, old fashioned typewriters, pieces of pipe etc etc -- began moving up and down, back and forth, round and round, while appropriately evocative music played. Each piece is a world of its own, evoking a set of emotions, and often unfolded a narrative: a leave-taking, a painful episode in Russian history, a journey, a fantasy novel, an old movie, and so on. The pieces mix sacred and profane, mechanical and organic, and humor and tragedy. What a find! Who knew such a thing existed, right here in Glasgow. For more (including videos), go to http://www.sharmanka.com/

After this, we took the train south of the river to see Juli and Tony. Tony injured his leg and is currently stuck at home, with Julie looking after him. We took a bunch of flowers and the Sharmanka flyer to cheer them up. After tea and cake, Juli gave me the Tour of the house, which is an Alexander “Greek” Thomson property, dating from about 1860, quite spacious, with lovely fire place fittings and has a great view over south Glasgow.

After that we thought we’d try St Andrew’s Cathedral again, this time arriving by accident about 15 minutes into their 5.15pm Saturday evening mass. This time, we went in and sat down in one of the pews, listening and joining in with the service while we absorbed the renovated interior. No more heavy, dark nave: They’ve lightened the walls, which are now a honey colour, and run broad spiraling ribbons of gold-leaf and trefoil up the inside columns; the bosses in the ceiling have been painted green, blue, red, again with gold leaf. There is now lots of natural light and in the left aisle there is a striking, El Greco-like painting, by Peter Howson, of Roman Catholic Glasgow martyr St. John Ogilve. It was lovely just to sit there in this new-old, clean-feeling sacred space, listening to the words and music and absorbing the feel of the place. Afterwards, we wandered for a bit through the brand-new cloister space, in the centre of which is an installation consisting of a set of tightly spaced stainless steel reflecting plinths, with a small channel of water running among them, like a small forest of space-age standing stones.

Afterwards, walking back to Central Station and on the train back to Hyndland, I let the feeling the day wash over me This was one of our best Saturday Adventures ever: blending curiosity/wonder, the pleasure of company, and the peaceful/sacred.

Orkney Wedding, but First a History of the World

2011-05-22T12:05:00.001-04:00

Entry for 14 May 2010

For Louisa and Steve

1. A Brief History of the World as a Search for the Master Motive

Jesus, Plato, Augustine, Bowlby,
And latterly, Lennon all proclaimed,
Love is the force that rules the world.
Freud, at first, reframed this as Sex,
But later, depressed and dying of cancer,
Joined medieval painters of murals,
And early Bergman in the Dance of Death.

In the face of this, the Buddha said,
All is suffering and sought release,
While Greenberg grasped for emotion regulation,
And Nietzsche, Adler, Machiavelli willed
A pecking order of Power and Self.

Others followed: We competed
For Money, and Market; we told ourselves
Everything is Story and Language;
The fruit of the One Tree is bits and bytes,
Knowledge, Reason; Information and Code:
Binary, decimal, genetic, semantic.

Thus we architected the great Archetypes
Of human thought, type-cast ourselves
And others, as players in a theatre of the mind.

Louisa and Steve, what say you to this?
On which of these is your marriage based?

2. Orkney Wedding Journey

Maes Howe, sunrise, the first of May:
Entrance in shadow, cross-quarter day,
Family and friends gather around.
Bending low, you enter the narrow way,
Bury yourselves under the mound.

In central chamber, you strike flint:
Light the flame, reflections glint,
Shadows wave from rooms either side.
Together, you say the old, old words,
Greet old ghosts, barely heard,
People loved and gone before.
Prepare to leave your old life behind!

* * *

Quarter of an hour, which seems a century,
Then we see you emerge, reborn from the cairn,
Hoist you on litters, monarchs of the May,
And carry you on to Ring of Brodgar.

There you lead us, dancing from stone
To standing stone, and weaving between.
Glancing over shoulder we see all around
The ancestors dancing, circling, tall
In our long early morning shadows.

Three times we dance around the Ring:
Once for Death, all of us sing;
Twice for Rebirth, returning again,
And thrice for your Joining, birds on the wing.

* * *

It’s a long journey then, to the Brough of Birsay,
In the far northwest, hours away.
But the tide is out when we arrive,
The two of you lead us by the narrow way:
We carefully walk, rock to rock,
And safely cross to the sacred isle.

There at the foot of the windswept hill,
We gather together by the ancient shrine.
In the afternoon sun, the oldest of all,
The old Father Druid recites the lines
Of Life and Death, Leaving and Joining.

Then hand in hand, Louisa and Steve,
You walk the steep path, ascend the hill,
Silhouetted by sun, blown by wind.

We don’t know yet what adventures wait,
Deepening love, family and friends,
Travel and work, beginnings and ends.

But we do know this: From the top of that place,
High cliffs above the crashing waves,
There you can see… Eternity.

-Robert Elliott, 14 May 2011

Emotion-Focused Therapy and the Person-Centred Approach: Past, Present & Future

2011-05-22T11:05:00.003-04:00

Reference: Elliott, R. (May, 2011). Emotion-Focused Therapy and the Person-Centred Approach: Past, Present, Future. Paper presented at Counselling Unit Twentieth Anniversary Conference, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.

1. A Personal Journey…
1.1. Five years ago: Invited to join the Counselling Unit
1.1.1. Walked into a place with a deep sense of culture and history built up over many years; but also, deeply counter-cultural
1.1.2. Complex web of: Courses and projects; relationships and traditions; large team of talented trainers and counselors; highly committed students, past and present
1.1.3. Fear & trembling: Questions raised:
• Will I be able to do meaningful work in this new setting?
• Will I be accepted?
• Is there space for my way of working with clients here?
• Will I change it?
• Will it change me?

1.2. Crucial Issue: What is the relationship between Process-Experiential/Emotion-Focused Therapy and the Person-Centred Approach?
1.2.1. In the early 1990’s, Barbara Brodley and John Shlien had both said to me: (Process)-Experiential therapy, Focusing, Emotion-Focused Therapy is not Person-centred
1.2.2. But Laura Rice, Les Greenberg & I had all started from a Person-Centred base, and felt we were Person-Centred
1.2.3. So, coming here, I began a five-year Evolving Dialogue with colleagues: •Classical/nondirective Person-Centred Therapy (PCT)
• Broadly relational PCT
• Pluralistic
1.2.4. My position has varied: Curiosity & puzzlement; awe & skepticism; frustration & excitement
1.2.5. Will present what I’ve learned so far from this dialogue: Past, Present & Future

2. The Past: A Brief History of Person-Centred-Experiential (PCE) Therapy
2.1. PCE Time-line:
• Roots/Sources: Humanism (The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, existentialism, Third force Humanistic psychology)
• 1940’s: Nondirective therapy: Rogers
• 1950’s: Classical approach: Chicago: Relationship conditions: unconditional positive regard, empathy, genuineness
• 1960’s: Focus on client process: Wisconsin; Late Rogers, Gendlin. The dialogue begins…
• 1970’s: Experiential therapy: Gendlin: Focusing; Rice, Greenberg: task analysis
• 1980’s: Partial eclipse period: Dismissed in North America; Further development of PCA in Europe
• 1990’s: Beginning of PCE revival; Training centres established: Counselling Unit; Process-Experiential (PE)/Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT); explosion of research
• 2000’s: World Association founded; Journal: Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies; Struggles for recognition; Research continues rapid development; EFT books & training emerge

2.2. Legacy of this Past: The Great Divide:
2.2.1. Continuing dialogue between different parts of the tradition, especially from 1970 on
• One end: “Classical” approaches: Emphasize Nondirectivity, Unconditional Positive Regard, the centrality of the relationship
• Other end: Emotion-Focused Therapy: Emphasize client process, process guiding, the work of therapy
2.2.2. “Pluralistic Approach” fits in there somewhere… perhaps at a 90 degree to the Great Divide

2.3. Examining the Legacy: Dialoging Across the Great Divide
2.3.1. Counselling Unit: One of few places in the world where it would have been possible to carry out this dialogue: Over an extended period of time; and with reference to actual practice
2.3.2. Most importantly, this has allowed exploration of the deeper issues of personal and professional identity:
•Need to hang onto what is essential vs. need to escape oppressive restrictions
•Need to establish self vs. feeling threatened or excluded
2.3.2. Which takes us to …

3. The Present: Have PCT vs EFT differences been exaggerated?
•As a result of recent history of dialogue over our differences, can now ask this question.
Two recent efforts to look at this…

3.1. The EFT Translation Project
3.1.1. EFT jargon can put PCT therapists off: Makes it sound like EFT therapists are pulling levers and controlling clients
• Have been trying to translate into PCT Friendly language; many discussions with Beth Freire, Brian Rodgers, Graham Westwell, and others
• Example: The Six EFT Therapy Principles
3.1.2. PCT-Friendly EFT Principles
• Research Clinic therapists examined the 6 EFT principles; decided the following 3 need no translation:
3.1.2.1. Empathic Attunement: Always start by entering, attending to & tracking the client’s immediate experiencing
3.1.2.2. Therapeutic Bond: Offer genuine, empathic, caring presence to client
3.1.2.3. Self-development: Foster client growth, empowerment & choice
•Three EFT Principles Need Translation into PCT Language; involve different kinds of therapeutic work (=“tasks”)
3.1.2.4. “Task Collaboration”:
•EFT: Offer and facilitate involvement in therapeutic work
•PCT Translation:
(a) Listen for and engage with what client wants to work on
(b) Offer orienting information about nature of therapy and particular ways of working in the session, particularly when the client asks or is puzzled
3.1.2.5. “Task Completion/Emotional Change”:
• EFT: Facilitate reorganization of core maladaptive emotion schemes by helping client resolve key therapeutic tasks
• PCT Translation:
(a) Listen for and engage with key issues clearly or repeatedly presented by client
(b) Help client contact, explore and clarify core, growth-oriented emotions and views of self/others
(c) Keep helping client work on their key issues until they feel they have resolved these or decide they want to stop
(d) … and the client decides what is key, core, or resolved
3.1.2.6. “Process Guiding”:
• EFT: Help client work in different ways at different times; foster relevant client micro-processes/ modes of engagement (e.g., experiential search, active expression)
• PCT Translation:
(a) Be aware of and respond helpfully to common kinds of client experiences and process
(b) E.g, Empathic Refocusing response: allow C to step back from difficult emotions before offering opportunity to return to them
(c) Respond to client-presented issues by offering opportunities for potentially useful kinds of therapeutic work
(d) Always accept client’s decision about whether or not to accept a process offer

3.2. Comparing PCT & EFT: The PCEPS study (Freire, Elliott & Westwell, 2011)
3.2.1. Developed quantitative process rating measure of PCE therapist adherence/competence: Person-Centred and Experiential Psychotherapy Scale (PCEPS)
3.2.1.1. Two subscales:
• Person-Centred (PC): 10 items (Eg Client frame of reference; content nondirectiveness)
• Experiential Process (Exp): 5 items (Eg Experiential specificity, emotion focus
1 – 6 descriptively-anchored scales)
3.2.1.2 Passing = 3.5+
3.2.2. The PCEPS study – Method: Just finished test of measure on 120 segments:
• Research Clinic data
• 10-15 min segments
• 60 sessions, 20 clients, 10 therapists
• 5 student therapists (general client sample)
•5 post-training therapists (clients with social anxiety): 2 PCT, 3 EFT (2 fully trained)
3.2.3. The PCEPS study: Summary
3.2.3.1. PCEPS is reliable (across items and raters)
3.2.3.2. In general, PC and Exp items correlate very highly with each other
3.2.3.3. We also found a Nondirectiveness factor: Empowering Presence, Content Nondirectiveness, Clarity/brevity
3.2.3.4. Student therapists scored lower on all items
3.2.3.5. No difference between fully trained PCT and EFT therapists on: PC, Exp, and nondirectiveness subscales
3.2.3.6. Conclusion: Therapist and training effects much more important than PCT vs EFT differences

4. The Future: Some concluding thoughts about avenues for continuing the dialogue & an agenda for the future
•Where does this leave us?
4.1. Beyond ideology, Or: Back to the Process Itself
• Is it worth continuing to argue at an ideological level over nondirectivity and process guiding?
• Like Psychology, we have been neglecting study of concrete behavior in favor of the ease of self-report data: Both quantitative questionnaires & qualitative interviews
• PCEPS study illustrates value of following the example of early Carl Rogers and colleagues: We need to return to the study of therapy process

4.2. A Pluralistic community of practice: Using our different strengths as therapists to complement each other
4.2.1. Most of us are never going to be effective therapists across a range of different therapy approaches
4.2.2. But: We can do a better job of listening to and learning from each other within the PCE tradition:
• Classical, nondirective therapists
• Broadly relational person-centred therapists
• Focusers and EFT therapists
• Person-centred-based pluralistic experimenters in other approaches
• Near neighbors in 4th generation CBT (eg Schema therapy) and contemporary relational psychodynamic therapy

4.3. Toward a deeper understanding of nondirectivity via Task Analysis
•Here in the Counselling Unit, I have found myself fascinated by rigorous nondirectivity in therapy
•Personally, I could never adopt a sustained, rigorously nondirective stance
• Nevertheless, it is clear to me that there are clients and moments when this is absolutely the best thing to do
• I want to know:
(a) What are these moments? (=client markers)
(b) How can I maintain nondirectivity at these moments? (=therapist processes)
(c) What are the immediate and ongoing effects of these moments? (=micro-outcomes)

4.4. Conclusion: Living with the creative tension between nondirectivity and process guiding
4.4.1. It’s so difficult to live in the middle: Between dichotomies/unresolved differences/ ambiguity/ complexity (David Rennie’s “rocky middle road”)
4.4.2. However, I strongly suspect: Nondirectivity and Process Guiding might actually need each other: Can be a source of moderation and creativity for each other
4.4.3. My dream for the next 20 years of the CU: That as a community, we learn how to effectively live with and grow from from the creative tension between Nondirectivity and Process Guiding

5. Coda: And by the way…
• Those questions I asked five years when I walked into this place…
• About doing meaningful work, being accepted, finding space, changing things, and being changed…
• The Answer is … Yes

The Transcendent Witch Emerita of Oz

2011-05-07T19:58:00.003-04:00

The Transcendent Witch Emerita of Oz

Entry for April 30, 2011:
Poem for Jeanne Brockmyer on her retirement
Video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG8TSlOOIy0

No, I can’t imagine you in blue gingham,
But still I picture you setting out,
A young woman, blond hair flying,
Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.

Travelling through strange lands --
Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Illinois, Ohio --
Collecting loyal companions along the way,
It’s a long journey, and it doesn’t always
Go according to the Book:
One dog isn’t enough, and
Your tin woodman loses heart along the way.

But there are plenty of flying monkeys,
Wicked Witches, little people;
Betrayals and acts of courage,
Partings, and reunions;
Many adventures.

At some point we realize
There’s been a career progression:
Instead of staying stuck in the same role,
Like Dorothy in book after book,
You get promoted to Distinguished Senior
Research Witch --
Jean, Good Witch of the Main Campus.

Teacher and mentor for generations
Of apprentice witches and wizards,
We, your travelling companions,
Witness your fierce loyalty,
How you take up your magic notebook
Against the abuse of the weak,
The hypnosis of mindless violence.

Now you’ve been promoted again:
Hail, Jean,
Transcendent Witch Emerita of Oz!

What’s next for you?
What further journeys,
Promotions, transformations?

As TWE, you are now able to travel
Anywhere you want
Using the silver shoes
That came with your promotion.

Deadly Deserts? Clashing rocks?
No problem!
As TWE, you can practically be everywhere.

But I’ve a hunch that most of the time
We’ll know where to find you:
In your backyard, with your dogs,
And your Magic Book;
There’s no place like home!

Somewhat belated report on Holiday Weekend Adventure

2011-05-07T19:55:00.002-04:00

Our old friends George Wills and Joy Norton spent last weekend with us. I met up with them at Euston Station on Thursday night. We were all just a bit older and grayer than we’d been when we’d last seen each other in Melbourne, Australia, in 1999, but it was wonderful to see them again, and also brought back fond recollections of the memorable six weeks we’d spent there.

Over the next three days, we caught up with each other as we watched the royal wedding together; went to Hill House in Helensburgh (signature Charles Rennie MacIntosh house); walked through the West End by way of the Royal Botanic Garden; helped George buy a mandolin at a music store at Kelvinbridge; did a mini-tour of Provand’s Lordship House, St. Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life and Art and Glasgow Cathedral; had dinner at our favourite Scottish restaurant, The Sisters – Jordanhill; and watched Dr. Who together. Finally, we spent a day traipsing around the Kilmartin Valley, revisiting burial cairns, standing stones, stone circles, and rock carvings. Joy and George managed to locate a henge that we’d missed on our previous visit; and on our way out of the valley we hiked up to the Achnabreck rock carving site, consisting of a large collection of cup and ring carvings, some looking uncannily like primitive Cretan-style labyrinths.

So it was that, with some sadness and quite a bit of exhaustion, we walked Joy and George down to the Hyndland Train station on Monday morning to see them off back down to London. We’d had a lovely visit and revisited many of our favourite Scottish places. I don’t know when I’ll see them next but I’m hoping we’ll be back to Australia again before too many years have passed.

Good Friday in Glasgow

2011-04-22T18:52:00.003-04:00

Entry for 22 April , 2011:

Good Friday and Easter Monday are “bank holidays” in Scotland and the UK, making a four-day weekend, a time for family gatherings, driving places or just hanging out. Not that many people go to church anymore, so it’s more of a secular than a religious holiday for most.

After a late night out, got of up late this morning. Brisk start to a lovely Scottish Spring day: Ran 100% of my standard canal-river kelvin 5k+ course today for the first time since my surgery last September. Time 30:26. It's taken me months to carefully work up to this, but it feels good to finally be there.

Then a quick late breakfast and a walk down Great Western Road: Trees in blossom, pink and white, just starting to leaf out. People out in droves, many in short sleeves, enjoying the sun and 15C Good Friday weather, in a festive mood, almost bemused to be out on a nice day, without work or Saturday errands.

Our destination: St Mary's 3-hr Good Friday Devotions service, filled with moving readings and sermons and powerful music. I'm left with Peter Jones' modern Hebraic-flavored version of the ancient Good Friday Reproaches ("O my people, what have I done to you? How have I hurt you?") stuck in my head. Also: Graham Maule's hymn setting of Isaiah to Burns's Ae Fond Kiss ("Who would ever have believed it?") brought tears; Cedric's sermon observations on Pontius Pilate and the muddled (mis)use of power: and Kelvin's poetic, poignant story of a sale bin spotted in Camden Market: "Gods: 3 for £5", and his invocation of the Buddha's "Life is suffering" as an appropriate commentary for Good Friday. (If you're interested, check his blog: http://www.thurible.net/20110422/good-friday-2011-devotional-address/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thurible+%28thurible.net%29&utm_content=Google+UK)

An emotionally draining experience, which has left me finally ready for Easter.

Emotion-Focused Therapy: Level 2 Workshop Series for 2011-12

2011-03-15T07:49:00.002-04:00

Facilitated by Robert Elliott
Professor of Counselling, University of Strathclyde

Saturdays, 9.30-16.30, 15 October 2011 – 19 May 2012
Sir Henry Wood Building,
Jordanhill Campus, University Of Strathclyde
(Sponsored by HASS Research & Knowledge Exchange,
University of Strathclyde)

The Counselling Unit at the University of Strathclyde is offering further training in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) for counsellors and psychotherapists (Diploma level or above) who have completed Level One training in EFT or the equivalent. This series has been restructured from its previous evening format and will now meet on seven Saturdays throughout the 2011-12 academic year, beginning in October. The format will be a mixture of brief lectures, videos or demonstrations, experiential practice exercises in small groups, supervision of cases seen by course members, and discussion.

The specific topics to be covered will feature material not covered in the Level 1 course, including
• Therapist experiential response modes
• Client modes of engagement
• Narrative Retelling of difficult/traumatic experiences
• Relational Dialogue for Alliance difficulties
• Creation of Meaning for meaning protests

In addition, the Focusing and different forms of Chairwork will be particularly emphasized:
• Focusing with difficult or painful experiences
• Clearing a Space for overwhelming or chaotic experiences
• Two chair enactment for Self-interruption splits
• Two chair conflict split work for depression, anxiety and self-harm behaviour
• Compassionate Self-soothing for painful self states
• Empty chair work for unfinished business

This series is scheduled for the following dates:

Autumn 2011:
15 October
26 November

Winter-Spring 2012:
14 January
18 February
24 March
21 April
19 May

• Enrolment is set for a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20.

• Course fee: Until 1 Oct: £395; after 1 Oct: £445. Please send a non-returnable deposit of £50.00 to secure a place if not paying the whole fee at time of booking.

• The course could be taken for continuing professional education credit.

Please direct enquiries and requests for applications to HASS Research & Knowledge Exchange, Jan Bissett (jan.bissett@strath.ac.uk, 0141 548 3418).

Soft Flows the Stream, As Stars Upon the Sea are Pearls

2011-03-06T16:50:00.003-05:00

In memorium, Margaret Linstrom Weitzel, 1950 – 2011:

Background: When I was in Toledo in early January, I went up to my study and found a couple of folders, one with letters from Margaret from 1967-1969, saved all these years, and the other of poems from the same time, including a couple held together with a rusty paper clip and a 4 X 6 index card (possibly left over from high school debate?) on which I’d written “early Margaret poems”. At first it felt a bit painful to read them: They seemed full of unnecessary obscurity, when what I really wanted to say was that I really respected her as a person.

But there they were, and I couldn’t not read them. What I can’t remember now is whether in fact I ever presented any of them to her. The references in the middle section of the main one (“The Turning”) make me think that I must have written this for her 17th birthday, not long after I got back from my family’s long trek to Alaska in the summer of 1967. In reading through it, I was struck by how parts of the poem seemed to prefigure things that happened later.

So a couple of weeks before she died I sent the poem to her in an email together with some of this explanatory material before and after. I knew that she didn’t have long to live, so it was my good-bye to her. Now that she is gone, it seems to apply to her present situation, on her journey from this life to whatever is next. No one knows what this is, but sometimes we get inklings. My mom has since had a vision of her in a white room filled with light, being healed and ministered to by those who came before her. That makes sense to me. However, my vision of her is a bit different: We know that she was excited about the prospect of discovering what was next for her. For me, it feels as though she has at last begun the voyage described in a poem I wrote for her in 1967. Looking at this poem from the other end of my life, in the wake of Margaret’s passing, I wonder what it will be like for me to take the same journey that she has now begun.

The title is a complicated and fairly obscure play on her name. Since this, I’ve a done lot with this kind of etymological-metaphoric approach over the years, in other poems but also in a series of articles I published. Much of the meaning of the poem eluded me at first, but as I went through I started adding a few annotations in brackets, and that helped.

Soft Flows the Stream, As Stars upon the Sea are Pearls

Soft flows the stream:
See the humble coracle,
[a small skin boat used by medieval Irish monks;
I suspect that this is supposed to represent Margaret]
Riding the waters in silence.
Leaving the flowery leas,
One cast eyes upon
The crystal crucifix
And you saw a single Pearl
Amid the last brilliant flashes
Of the setting sun’s
Last beam.

Came the insect
[I don’t know exactly why, but I think I’m referring to myself]
As the coracle reached the sea,
Scratching to be seen.
Brendan smiled,
[a reference to the famous sea-faring medieval Irish saint,
15 years before we looked at our new born first child
and realized that this was his name;
here I think he’s meant to symbolize the Spiritual generally:
God, Jesus, Buddha]
Transfiguring the insect:
A guilty cloud of smoke,
Expanding supernova cloud,
Took the disembodied journey.

A turn in the starsea path
Brought the dolphin
[I think this and the previous bit are talking
about reincarnation, which means that the dolphin
is also me, a much nicer image, I think…]
Beside her [the coracle’s] rounded bow.
The saint smiles
But she is free –
You are free, and
The dolphin desires
Only the Koinonia.

Seeing visions of islands
In the west;
[In Celtic mythology, the land of Faerie,
where we go when we die, is in the West; that is, Heaven]
Promises to find and keep
Where the sea is the table
For all such things;
[The image of the Communion Table
comes to me now as I read this]
Where grace is the way
To lead all things;
The dolphin will not
Force the course;
Two wakes meet
And mix between.
[Thirty-nine years later, in 2006,
I would use a similar image in the poem I wrote
for Brendan and Mayumi’s wedding.]

[I’ve skipped a dark and somewhat muddled part here; then we come to the middle section of the poem, which I apparently later pulled out as a separate poem, called:]

The Turning

Times change
Refining todays, melting
All the layered yesterdays.
[McArthur Park is melting in the rain, anyone?]

Smile upon the changes good
Mark well all changes evil…
Time and changes will not cease;
Perhaps, soon a bit more evil
Then more good.

But of time there is
No real knowing
Time is not the seeming
Nor we. The
Counting of years increases:
Years are so arbitrary
Yet their turning marks with
Symbolic pageantry
The growth, the changes within.
Within the changes:
Symbolic initiation
The turning of the stair…

O do not despair
The length of the journey:
The island you chose as destiny
Is fair but far;
Others may rest sooner
But the gain and glory
Will be yours.

[I’ve skipped a section here that seems to go on too long about storms and things, then we get to the last section:]
… Until the storm fades
To gentle breeze,
Soft stream from fragrant
Flowery leas borne on
The smell of salt,
And the humble coracle
Nears the island [of the Blessed]

So far to journey
So long from Eire [Ireland],
Genesis of journey,
And the memory
Of home sings of childhood
And hope,
While the tide comes in,
While time passes beyond years
Marked with circumstance,
To mean another branch has grown,
Another step is taken up the beach.

And the vision of dawn shimmers
Wherever your eyes gaze,
Shining prophecies of the promise
Into the sea,
And the blessings of an advocate
[1 John 2:1]
Emanate from the Cross
Of crystal and the Pearl:
Keeping company
With the coracle, with you,
With the Saint’s unseen presence,
With the dolphin:
Rippling stars upon the sea
Glitter to open eyes,
Pearls set upon the swirling sky
In the hours
Before Dawn.

-Robert KW Elliott, August 1967

Further reflections from 2011: As I worked my way back into this poem after all these years, it felt like a form of time travel, like Proust and the madeleine cookie in Remembrance of Times Past: The essential meanings and feelings of it came back to me, now reflected calmly and without the pain and the need to hide behind obscurity. Here was a heady, shy 17 year old, just starting out on the main part of his life journey, trying to communicate to another 17 year old, just starting out on the main part of her life journey, a very simple message: The hope that in some way their journeys would be connected. The amazing, unexpected thing about this is that the hope came true, both in the more mundane, exterior sense of occasional visits and catchings up, but also in the more important sense of taking her along as part of my interior community. By the time I’d finished typing this poem into my computer, cleaning up the punctuation, adding annotations to blow away some of the cobwebs of obscurity, and cutting the bits that wandered or went on too long, I was impressed. In the later sections of this poem I finally managed to get outside of my self-preoccupation and to really focus on another person. In the years since, I’ve written dozens of poems for people I’ve cared about: parents, siblings, children, in-laws, friends, and colleagues. But as far as I can tell, that all started here.

Stephen & Elliott (2011), “Developing the Adjudicated Case Study“

2011-03-03T18:04:00.002-05:00

Entry for 3 March 2011:

Commentary on a Commentary: For the past several years Dan Fishman, editor of Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy, has been trying to get me to submit one of our HSCED studies to his online journal. For various reasons, we’ve been unable to accommodate him. However, last Fall he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: the opportunity to write a commentary on two adjudicated case study projects, one from Ron Miller and his team, and the other from Art Bohart and colleagues. I asked Susan Stephen, one of my PhD students to work with me on this, because she has a special interest in the topic and is doing her PhD research on the HSCED method.

When the package of 10 articles arrived at the end of this past December, however, we realized that we’d gotten a bit more than we’d bargained for. There was a lot of material get through! However, we dived into the papers and were able to work our way through them. In the process, Susan got considerably ahead of me and ended up writing the bulk of the paper, so I was very pleased for her to be first author. Actually, I thought she did a great job, although I was able to earn my keep by adding several sections and contributing bits here and there, especially on the history. In the process I think we produced a very useful paper discussing issues about the implementation of adjudicated case study methods that we hadn’t seen discussed before. This paper, along with the rest of this issue of PCSP, now becomes required reading for everyone involved in HSCED and other adjudicated case study methods, or even just contemplating using this method.

Abstract: In this commentary we discuss Miller’s Panel of Psychological Inquiry (PPI) and Bohart’s Research Jury method approaches to the development of the adjudicated case study method, as represented by the papers assembled for this issue of Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy. In our view, the case studies presented here demonstrate the rapidly developing potential offered by this approach for psychotherapy research and reveal many parallels to recent research using the Hermeneutic Single Case Efficacy Design (HSCED) model. In our view, each of the three models has taken significant steps forward in adapting particular aspects of the legal process as viable psychotherapy research procedures. In this commentary we summarize the HSCED method, then take readers through the issues of the sources of the evidence used; ways in which that evidence is tested; claims, burden and standard of proof; and the handling of the adjudication process itself. We conclude with recommendations for further development of adjudicated case study methods.

Reference: Stephen, S., & Elliott, R. (2011). Developing the Adjudicated Case Study Method. Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy, 7(1), 230-241. Available online at: http://pcsp.libraries.rutgers.edu.

Saturday adventure to the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh

2011-02-20T12:18:00.001-05:00

Went to see amazing exhibit of photographs by early 20th century German photographer August Sander: People of the twentieth century: A cross section of people, Farmers and merchants, composers and bankers, Nazis and Jewish death camp prisoners, all portrayed with great compassion and without judgment, inhabiting their social roles, transcending time and place, reaching the level of human archetypes.
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/exhibition/5:368/19935/

Saturday 12 Feb 2011 along the River Kelvin

2011-02-15T18:04:00.002-05:00

Running along the Kelvin River path on Saturday, thinking about Margaret's Memorial service that would happen in a few hours, I stopped at St. Gregory's Church and spent a few minutes praying at the shrine to the Virgin Mary in the car park at the back of the church: From a niche cut out of the rock face, she looks out toward the River Kelvin. I realized that she has been watching me every time I ran by here for the past 4 years.

A few minutes later, in another of the crazy contrasts that is such a part of our life here in Glasgow, as I ran up the path toward Half-penny Bridge, I came upon a gaggle of fisherman, fishing poles held high…. And a piper arrayed in kilt and all. I stopped to watch, and 30 seconds later, the piper began to play “Scotland the Brave”, the unofficial national anthem of Scotland. He processed over the bridge, followed by about 10 fishermen and various fellow onlookers. On the other side, he stopped, and the fisherman gathered by the rail, while two of them climbed over. A quaich and a bottle of Famous Grouse whiskey appeared. One of the men held the quaich, while the other poured the whiskey into it, then passed the bottle back over the rail where is was used to fill a lot of plastic cups. There was brief ceremony, to mark the opening of fishing season on the River Kelvin, “and may be it be a good a last year’s!”, followed by cheers and toasts and around.

Margaret Linstrom Weitzel, 1950 - 2011

2011-02-12T13:02:00.004-05:00

Entry for 6 Feb 2011: (Posted to coincide with Margaret's Memorial Service in Reseda, California)

I first met Margaret in 1964 when she sat next to me in high school Latin 1 class. I was just back from a trip to Europe with my Grandmother, and was just starting to come out of my shell. I don’t remember how she did in the class, but it was a real struggle for me. We were both pretty shy at the time and only developed a friendship over time. I was just starting a spiritual journey that, over the next 8 years, would take me away from the Episcopalianism I’d been raised in, on a long, looping orbit through Quakerism, atheism, Buddhism, Christian Fundamentalism, Roman Catholicism, and eventually back to the Episcopal Church. Margaret was an essential part of the journey for me, drawing me back when I was in danger of flying off into interstellar space, helping me ground myself in the Bible as I accompanied her and her family to the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Stockton (and later to one of the Baptist Churches in Lodi), where I was able to experience and to appreciate the importance of a deep grounding in a personal faith and the Bible.

Yesterday, on the 5th of February, 2011, Margaret died of cancer, aged 60. From my point of view, 60 is too young for her to die, but I don’t think it’s how Margaret saw it. Four months ago, as I was recovering from my surgery for prostate cancer, Margaret’s cancer was discovered, already at the metastatic stage. After Gail, her sister-in-law and a long-time friend (whom we’d just seen on her way through Glasgow on a North Atlantic cruise with Margaret's brother Hugh), emailed us in early October about Margaret’s cancer, I was in periodic contact with Margaret by email, as each of us followed our different cancer trajectories. We exchanged stories about our granddaughters and their metaphoric resonance with our situation, and wrote about how our illness was highlighting what was most important to us. I prayed for Margaret; she prayed for me. Through this time, she continued to inspire me, as she always has, with her spiritual, moral and personal witness, even as she grew too weak to respond to me herself and had to have her husband Rich write for her.

This morning, before church, I woke to find Gail’s email saying that Margaret had died. We’d been expecting this, but it was still a shock, as if some part of me had died also. All day I’ve carried this sense of mourning with me.

I heard her voice in today’s lessons: Isaiah 58: 1 -9 and 2 Corinthians 2: 1 - 12. I remembered how she read and quoted the Bible from memory, the excitement and energy and joy in her voice. And I realized that ever since then, whenever I had to get up in church to read a lesson, it was Margaret’s voice speaking through me, echoing the ecstatic cry of the creatures in Revelation, untangling Paul’s sometimes twisted syntax to pull out the meaning.

I remembered also how she “found me” in the Letter to the Hebrews, as, like Jesus, a priest not of the Levites (the Jewish priestly tribe) but “of the order of Melchizedek”, a perfect metaphor that found a place for and validated my restless searching that sometimes seemed to place me outside conventional spirituality.

But most of all, I remembered Margaret’s absolute faith in God, so solid compared to my doubts and waverings. Once, late in high school or more likely early in our university years during a holiday, someone led us through a guided meditation. Margaret visualized herself as a speck of dust, almost insubstantial. “How awful!”, the rest of us said. “No,” Margaret said, “I don’t need to be any more than that, because God is there: He is more real and more solid than I am, and He is all I need. He is the only thing I am sure of, that I know with certainty.” I have never forgotten this vision of hers, and of her ability to be absolutely certain of God. It is this certainty that God was holding her through the cancer that I have carried with me these past months, imagining her surrounded by God’s Light and Love.

After the service I went up to St Anne’s Chapel and put up a prayer request for Margaret; then I went to the back of the Nave and lit a candle for her. It was only then that a huge wave of sadness hit me, and I went and sat down and cried for a few minutes. As I cried, a bit of her certainty suddenly came over me, saying, “Margaret is OK,” and I felt something ease in my body. I said to myself, “It is the rest of us who are hurting. But really, the truth is, she is in all of us still, and she’s not going away.”

I have more to say about Margaret and may do so at another time, but this is enough for now, to mark her passing: For most of my life, even without her knowing it, she has been a personal saint for me, on my sometimes wandering or wavering spiritual journey. I am now experiencing her absence in my outer life, but the deeper truth is that she is still very much part of my inner landscape, and will be for the rest of my life and even, I hope, following her example, in how I approach my own death.

9-12 Feb 2011: Afterword: The Missing Story of the Mother Cat:

Apparently what I wrote above was not enough, because a couple of days later, and after I had sent along the Remembrance piece above to Rich, Hugh and Gail, I had an extremely vivid and complex sequence of dreams. I may share these dreams at a later time, but on reflection it became clear to me that the dreams were telling me that I had left outa very important and timely story of what I wrote above:

When I was about 19, I was home one summer, driving down a country road south of Lodi, when I came around a curve too fast to avoid running over a mother cat leading her kittens across the road. I hesitated, tempted to simply drive on, but then stopped my car and went back to house in front of which I had run over the mother cat. Getting out of my car, I went up to the woman in the front yard and told her I was very sorry but I had just over her mother cat. Now I don’t remember anything else, but later that day or perhaps the next day, I told Margaret about this incident. Pleased with myself for having had the courage to stop, and trying to reassure myself, I said, “But it’s OK because I told the woman who owned the cat.” Margaret paused and said something, calmly and with great conviction, that I have never forgotten: “No, it’s not OK; the mother cat is still dead.” In that moment I felt confronted by my own naïve, moral carelessness. The lesson for me was that although I didn’t intend to harm the mother cat or her owner or her kittens, and although I did take responsibility for my actions, several someones were still damaged by what I had done and it was very important not to lose sight of that.

It’s clear to me now that I previously put off telling this story because it was too emotionally resonant with Margaret’s death. My sense of her deep moral integrity is such that I can only imagine that she would apply the same principle to her own situation even now, in death. But I want to say this to her now: "Although your death causes me pain and leaves me feeling very sad, it is a pain and a sadness that I gladly bear, because it marks how important you have been and will continue to be to me. The sadness I feel at your passing tells me not to pull away but instead to connect with those I love and who love me."

Emotion-Focused Psychotherapy 2011 Level One Training at Strathclyde

2011-01-28T18:45:00.004-05:00

Entry for 28 January 2011:

Facilitated by Robert Elliott & Lorna Carrick

Tuesday 30th August – Friday 2nd September 2011, 9.00 – 16.30

University of Strathclyde, Jordanhill Campus, Glasgow

(Sponsored by HASS Research & Knowledge Exchange,

University of Strathclyde)

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) – also known as Process-Experiential Therapy – is a humanistic, evidence-based form of psychotherapy/counselling that integrates person-centred and gestalt therapies, with particular relevance to working with depression, trauma, and anxiety difficulties. It has gained international recognition through the work of Les Greenberg, Robert Elliott, Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman, Sandra Paivio and others. The Counselling Unit at the University of Strathclyde is again pleased to offer Level One professional training in this approach to qualified counsellors and psychotherapists (Diploma level or above).

Now in its sixth year at the University of Strathclyde, this successful, four-day Level One EFT training programme will provide participants with a solid grounding in the theory and skills required to work more directly with emotion in psychotherapy. Participants will receive an in-depth skills training through a combination of brief lectures, video demonstrations, live modelling, case discussions, and extensive supervised role-playing practice. The workshop will begin with an overview of EFT Emotion Theory, including basic principles and the role of emotion and emotional awareness in function and dysfunction; this will be illustrated by Focusing-oriented exercises. Differential intervention based on specific process markers will be demonstrated. Videotaped examples of evidence based methods for evoking and exploring emotion schemes, and for dealing with overwhelming emotions, puzzling emotional reactions, painful self-criticism, and emotional injuries from past relationships will be presented.

Participants will be trained in the skills of moment-by-moment attunement to affect, and the use of methods of dialoguing with parts or configurations of self and imagined significant others in an empty chair. This training will provide therapists from person-centred, psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioural and related backgrounds with an opportunity to develop their therapeutic skills and interests.

Educational Objectives: Participants on the training programme will learn:

1. To implement the basic principles of EFT

2. To identify different types of emotional response;

3. When to help clients contain and when to access emotion;

4. To help clients reprocess difficult emotions;

5. To facilitate emotional processing to resolve self-critical splits and unfinished business.

Programme Outline

Tuesday Morning: Foundations, Emotion, Empathy, & Alliance Formation

• Distinctive features of the EFT: neo-humanism & therapeutic principles

• Process-experiential emotion theory: emotion schemes

• Emotion response types & emotional change principles

Tuesday Afternoon: Therapeutic Tasks, Accessing and Managing Emotion

• Therapeutic tasks and process formulation

• Emotion regulation

• Focusing and Clearing a Space

• Skills practice

Wednesday Morning: Reprocessing Problematic Experiences

• Empathic exploration, evocative empathy, empathic conjecture

• Evocative unfolding, Narrative Retelling, and Meaning Creation

• Skills practice

Wednesday Afternoon: Accessing Primary Adaptive Emotions & Restructuring Emotion Schemes

• Empty chair dialogue and unfinished business

• Supporting the emergence of primary needs

• Helping clients use adaptive emotions to challenge core problematic emotion schemes

• Letting go of unmet needs

• Skills practice

Thursday Morning: Active Expression Processes - I

• Dialectical constructivist models of self

• Two chair dialogue and splits

• Accessing adaptive and problematic emotional responses

• Skills practice

Thursday Afternoon: Active Expression Processes – 2

• Accessing core problematic emotion schemes

• Varieties of splits

• Adapting two-chair work to different kinds of clients

• Skills practice

Friday Morning: Identifying Tasks; Empirical support,

• Review of tasks

• Strategies for identifying and selecting tasks

• Skills practice

Friday Afternoon: Personalized Applications

• Summary of Research evidence

• Practical parameters

• Depression, Post-traumatic stress difficulties

• Social anxiety, Borderline processes

• Question & answer period

About the Facilitators

Robert Elliott, PhD: Robert is professor in the Counselling Unit at the University of Strathclyde, where he teachers on the postgraduate diploma and MSc courses in Person-Centred Counselling. He taught at the University of Toledo 1978-2006, where he was Professor of Psychology, Director of Clinical Training and Director of the Center for the Study of Experiential Psychotherapy. He has also been a guest professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, University of Sheffield, UK, and La Trobe University, Australia. He is co-author of Facilitating Emotional Change (1993), Learning Emotion-focused Therapy (2004), and Research Methods for Clinical Psychology (2003), as well as more than 100 published scientific articles or book chapters. In 2008 he received both the Carl Rogers Award, Division of Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association, and the Distinguished Research Career Award, Society for Psychotherapy Research. He is editor emeritus of the journal, Person-Centered Counseling and Psychotherapies and directs the Scottish Consortium for Psychotherapy and Counselling Research and the Strathclyde Centre for Psychotherapy and Counselling Research.

Lorna Carrick, MSc:
Lorna is a lecturer in the Counselling Unit at the University of Strathclyde. She is the course director for the Postgraduate Certificate in Counselling Skills and teaches on the Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling courses. Lorna’s background is in mental health and project development and as a founder member of the first Health Board-funded person-centred counselling service in Scotland, Lorna has over sixteen years experience in counselling, supervision and service development within the field of counselling and psychotherapy. Lorna is currently the director of the Glasgow Counselling in Schools Project and Chair of the Counselling Unit’s management group. Lorna’s research has focused on working with clients in crisis within the Person-Centred-Experiential approach and the use of counselling and Pre-therapy skills in the field of autism services. She has been practicing EFT within a broadly Person-Centred relational approach since 2006, and has also participated as an EFT therapist in the Social Anxiety research protocol of the Counselling Unit’s research clinic. She is committed to helping counsellors/therapists bridge the perceived gap between EFT and nondirective Person-Centred ways of working with clients.

Application Information: If you would like to reserve a place on this training course, please contact me or Jan Bissett for the application form. Places are strictly limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

The fee for this four-day event is has been set at £445. Please note that to keep costs to a minimum, catering is not included in this fee.

We are pleased to offer an Early Bird Discount of £50.00 to those who book before 1st July 2011. To take advantage of this offer, applications must be received by this date with no exceptions.

For further information on this event, please contact Jan Bissett, HASS Research & Knowledge Exchange (jan.bissett@strath.ac.uk, 0141 548 3418).

End of Year Update

2010-12-31T20:35:00.003-05:00

Entry for 31 December 2010:

I had been feeling very impatient with the slow pace of my recovery when I saw my surgeon at the beginning of December. Amusingly, when I disclosed my fear that perhaps my progress was being slowed by scar tissue, he said pridefully, “Impossible! The anastomosis was perfect!” Then he told me that my progress was in fact good and was encouraged by my gradual but continuing progress. He told me to give myself at least 6 or 7 months post surgery, and had me schedule a follow-up visit for another 3 months on.

Then they tested my blood for PSA. After a couple of days of anxious waiting, the nurse phoned to say that my 3-month follow-up PSA was undetectable, essentially zero, which was really, really good news, and actually quite a relief for me. This is another sign that the surgery was successful in removing all the cancer, and that it hadn’t spread elsewhere. I now feel like I have my life mostly back.

It is of course still possible that there are undetectable micrometastases floating around my body somewhere, which means that it is now my job to make sure that I live my life to make it less likely that these potential tiny loose cancer cells might take hold somewhere. This means eating healthily, continuing my micronutrient regime, getting plenty of sleep (at least 8 hours a night), keeping the stress down, and restarting my running.

I asked my surgeon if I could start running again and he said yes, so the next day I went out for a run. I am pretty out of shape in terms of strength and aerobic capacity, from the aftereffects of the surgery and the results of the sedentary life I’ve been living for the past 3-plus months. I tried to take it easy the first day, running about half the time on my usual 5k course over Clevedon Hill to the Canal, then down the River Kelvin to the Botanic Garden and home, but it was still a bit too much, so I backed off a bit from that. Since then I’ve been able to work up to running 3 times a week a week, running about half the distance, sometimes under rather appallingly icy conditions in Glasgow. It has felt very good to get out and run again, but I’ve noticed that I’m more tired afterwards than before the surgery. So, I will continue to slowly build my capacity.

The incontinence is another matter: After more than 3 months, I am fine as long as I am laying down or sitting, and am OK if I stand for a few minutes (the latter is a recent development); however, I have problems whenever I have to walk for more than a couple of minutes. This is called stress incontinence, but it certainly doesn’t take much stress for this to happen. This doesn’t sound like much but is in fact progress and makes me hopeful.

So I have settled in for the long haul, the long game. Mostly, I am philosophical about this, put it into perspective: Compared to dealing with metastatic prostate cancer and death, this is a Wonder, a miracle that has given me literally a new lease on life. Living with incontinence is annoying and sometimes pretty frustrating, but it beats dying of cancer by a mile, and I feel very grateful.

Moreover, the lifestyle changes I am now making and continue to forge as I phase back into work are things that I should have done ages ago. My project now is to negotiate with myself and the University a slower, less intense pace of work. A few weeks ago I wrote to my head of school that it was now clear to me that I am going to be able to work 40 hours a week without difficulty, but that the 50- 60 hrs/wk that I’ve been working for the past 30 years is going to be out of the question. She wrote back to remind me that in fact our work week is 35 hrs and that no one is asking me to do more than that. I appreciate this, but it strikes me that the volume of work that we are asked to do exceeds what can be done within 35 hrs/wk, so the real issue is going to be reducing the amount of work in order to fit into the available time. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of months.

In the meantime, I've enjoying my time in the US, first touching base in Toledo to finish Christmas shopping before going on to visit my oldest son, Brendan, his partner Mayumi, and our 7-month old granddaughter for Christmas. Mizuki has inspired me these past months with her attempts to crawl, which have recently met with success. We’ve now flown down to Northern California, where we enjoyed a peaceful post-Christmas period with Diane’s family. We then drove up into the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Sacramento to stay at my sister Louisa’s and to celebrate New Year’s Eve with my mom, siblings and their partners. No Murray Creek this year, but still, Happy New Year, everyone!

Empirically Supported Relationships Summaries Published Online

2010-11-29T13:15:00.002-05:00

Entry for 13 November 2010:

Last year, Art Bohart, Jeanne Watson, Les Greenberg & I were asked to update our 2002 meta-analysis of research on the relationship between therapist empathy and therapy outcome, published in John Norcross’s Psychotherapy Relationships That Work. The revised version, in book chapter and journal article formats is still in press; however, a sneak preview version has just been published online, along with the rest of the reviews to appear on the second edition of John’s book.

SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, is a branch of the US government responsible for improving treatment of mental health and substance abuse issues by funding research and disseminating information about evidence-based practice. Somehow, the Powers That Be were persuaded to sanction summaries of the current set of meta-analytic reviews being published on their website.

SAMHSA have now published online a set of summaries of evidence supporting the importance of different aspects of the therapeutic relationship for promoting successful psychotherapy or counselling. We updated and replicated our previous analyses with somewhat larger data set and found a moderately strong and highly reliable relationship between therapist empathy and therapy outcome. In addition to empathy, the other Rogerian conditions of therapist warmth and genuineness also fare quite well.

The summary of our review can be found at: http://www.nrepp.samhsa.gov/Norcross.aspx#chapter6

The other reviews can be found in other parts of the same document/webpage.

Reference:

Elliott, R., Bohart, A.C., Watson, J.C., & Greenberg, L.S. (2010). Empathy. In J. C. Norcross (ed.), Evidence-Based Therapy Relationships. National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP). Online Resource, available at: http://174.140.153.165/Norcross.aspx#chapter6

Journey to Health: Eight Weeks Post Surgery

2010-10-31T17:16:00.004-04:00

Entry for 31 October 2010:

It has now been 8 weeks since my surgery. I have spent that time off work, on medical leave, getting lots of sleep, spending an increasing amount of time on pelvic floor muscle (“Kegel”) exercises, walking 30 – 45 min/day, reading, doing email, writing & beginning to do phone consultations with my research students. It has been a time of healing, rest, recovery, but also frustration as I have had to deal with post-surgical complications (urinary incontinence) that were worse than I had anticipated (hence the exercises).

When the biopsy results came in, they indicated that the cancer was more advanced than anticipated (T1c => T2c), but that they had got it all (the prostate margins were clear of cancer). It’s a very good thing that I didn’t wait any longer to have the surgery!

I did a bunch of reading to try to understand what was happening to me, and what I learned struck me as deeply ironic and darkly humorous: While women have only one urinary sphincter, controlled by the pelvic floor muscles, men have three: one between the urethra and the bladder, the prostate itself, and the external sphincter, which is the same one women have. This is why women have more trouble with incontinence generally than men, and especially after giving birth vaginally, and why most women are familiar with Kegel exercises. I had apparently been relying heavily on my other two urinary sphincters, which now had been removed surgically along with my cancer and associated replumbing. This put me on an even footing with all the women in the world, including my new granddaughter Mizuki! There appears to me to be some sort of poetic justice to this. And while the adult women I know clearly now have a headstart on me, I am pretty much in the same camp as my granddaughter, trying to learn how to use a part of me that I wasn’t even sure I could sense, let alone control. I feel like I now have a new body, which I have to learn how to use.

From my research I learned that I was likely to have to practice these exercises for as long as six weeks before I would even begin to see any effect. I would have to do them on a sort of blind faith; I would have no basis for judging my trajectory of recovery. The research I read indicated that a systematic program of exercises of at least 6 weeks was likely to produce substantial positive results; however, I had no way of knowing if those average results would apply to me. To tell the truth, I found the whole situation scary, embarrassing, infuriating, and as I said ironic and darkly humorous.

I’ve now been doing my Kegel exercises for 5 weeks now, and am starting to see some results, but it’s slow, incremental progress. Over time, they’ve become a kind of prayer, for myself and friends who are going through a hard time.

All through this period, I gradually increased how much work I could do, to the point where I was easily doing 4 or 5 hours of email, writing and phone consultation a day. I managed to work my way through the enormous backlog of emails dating back to last January. I wrote a challenging book chapter on negative therapist reactions.

Last week, after having had my medical leave extended to near the end of October, I met with both my GP and the University’s occupational health physician. They both agreed with my assessment that although I am not currently able to work full time, I am fit enough to go back to work on a part time basis, on a “phased return to work”. The plan is for this process to continue for the next 6 weeks, between now and the Christmas holidays, with me gradually increasing the amount of work I’m able to do. This makes eminent good sense to me, although it is requiring some renegotiation of commitments for that time period. Tomorrow (Monday) I give my first lecture in months!

In the end, as much of a nuisance as the incontinence is, it is infinitely preferable to having a cancer that I now know was far more dangerous than I realized at the time. I am enormously grateful to have that burden removed and equally so for this time of rest and healing, which I so badly needed. This is clearly a much more healthy way of life. I am also deeply grateful to all those who brought by gifts (some quite creative) and cards or who sent positive thoughts, prayers, and wishes my way. Although I have spent most of the past 8 weeks in my flat, I haven't felt lonely with all of this caring around me. Thanks!

My current challenge continues to be, as one of my friends recently wrote to me, “master of my flow”. But after that, the even bigger challenge will be learning how to master the flow of my life so that it is no longer overwhelming and harmful. It is now clear to me that this will be a matter vital for the health of both my body and my soul.

Theories, Models or Approaches?

2010-10-21T17:38:00.002-04:00

Entry for 21 October 2010:

I’m still at home, recovering from surgery, but sometimes I get questions out of the blue, little bits of grace like falling autumn leaves:

Dr. Elliott-

I first would like to apologize for the forward nature of this email as I am indeed a complete stranger to you. However, I have spent several days searching for an answer to my query and am at a loss as to who to turn to for assistance. I first emailed Dr. [Clara] Hill who promptly referred me to you (see her response below). Please know any information you can provide if your time allows will be warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated.

I am currently a graduate student at the University of __ in a counseling skills class where [Clara Hill’s] book Helping Skills: Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action is being used as our text. I was recently in discussion with a peer about different models that explain the concept of helping skills. I think the term 'model' is what has me blocked. My first response was simple...person-centered or a humanistic approach (the basis for the exploration stage), a behavioral model, and of course a psychodynamic model all came to mind as models used in the helping process. I realize after further thought that these concepts are theories and may not be considered 'models' within the realm of helping skills. The scope is certainly much broader than that. My friend argued for a more complex idea that 'models' include approaches such as motivational interviewing, solution-focused brief therapy, and the like. To me, these are methods or techniques used in counseling. Would you consider these approaches to fall under the category of helping skills are they 'models'?

It is quite possible this makes no sense to an outside expert, so please let me know if further clarification is needed. I just wanted a little guidance on what the term 'model' in reference to helping skills might mean to you. Dr. Hill labeled her approach as an integrated three-stage model; are there other models such as this with different theoretical foundations authored by other practitioners/researchers in the field?

Again, I appreciate your valuable time in offering any insight to this query. Have a wonderful day in the meantime; it is an honor to communicate with you.

Sincerely,

Carissa

Graduate Candidate in MHR

Dear Carissa,

You are engaged in philosophy! The questions of what is a theory and what is a model and how they are and are not similar; these are philosophical questions. Philosophy can be very useful for clarifying what we are talking about, and reducing the probability that we are talking nonsense! Of course, an awful lot of what we do when we talk about counselling and psychotherapy is, from a philosophical point of view, nonsense, because we usually don't stop to clarify our concepts.

To properly answer your question, we would have to look at how people (philosophers, scientists) have defined the words "theory" and "model". I'll leave that for you to do a bit of investigating into; you'll soon find that there are lots of different definitions and views, but in general we're talking about systematic representations of reality. Beyond that, it quickly gets very complicated. This means that whenever you or someone else uses a word like "theory" or "model", you or they need to be clear about what they mean by the word. What kind of systematic representation of reality? For what purpose? How systematic? Descriptive or prescriptive? Big or little bits of reality? etc.

What I generally say to people when they ask me a question like this is, "Isn't it fun how many words there are in English that mean roughly the same thing? And isn't it interesting how when there are a bunch of words meaning roughly the same thing, people start inventing distinctions and attaching them to the different words?" But if you were Winnie the Pooh, you'd laugh and say "It's the same thing!"...

"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"

"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"

"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.

"It's the same thing," he said.

I hope haven't been too irreverent in addressing your question. The fact is, models, theories and approaches to counselling are very interesting and exciting and fun. It sounds like you are enjoying yourself and I hope you go on doing so!

Yours,

Robert Elliott

Footnote: I should also have added that underlying Carissa’s question is an ancient distinction that goes back to the Greeks: theoria vs. praxis: theory vs. practice; that is, how we represent the world vs. what we actually do. Theories, models and approaches are different ways of talking about representations; counselling skills (or help-intended speech acts) are what we actually do in practice.

“I Take My Waking Slow”

2010-09-19T16:58:00.001-04:00

Entry for 19 Sept 2010:

I am not bored; there is plenty to do, and just the right level of visitors. My main frustration is with the catheter. This has gotten pretty old, especially over the past few days when, as I've gotten more active and find that it holds me back. I don't like this at all! However, it turns out that the catheter is my friend also, for one very important reason: It reminds me, forcefully at times, to go slow, to not try to rush things. This is critical for me at this point, because going slow is exactly what I need to be doing.

This going slow is such a contrast to my normal life, where I often have to rush around from meeting to meeting and sometimes end up being double-scheduled. Deadlines loom, and I feel forced to stay up late to meet them, cheating on my sleep, which isn't healthy. Email piles up, because ordinarily I don't have time to read it during the day. There were over 1000 messages in my inbox when I went into the hospital; it's less than that now, in spite of the time I've spent in hospital and resting at home. So ordinarily, I live under quite a bit of time pressure and feel like I have to do things quickly and not “waste time”.

But it does make me wonder: Was living at such a pressured, fast pace EVER a good idea? It now seems to me that this was one of the most unhealthy aspects of my old lifestyle, creating conditions for the cancer to develop -- or now for it to reoccur. Maybe the slow life I'm living now is actually closer to the way I should be living my life in general. Is there a way to go back to work in a healthy, less pressurised way? I don't have any answers about this, but it seems important to think about.

In the meantime, as Theodore Roethke writes, "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I know by going where I have to go." I first encountered this line 40 years ago and now I try to take this as my motto to live by. I live in my old gray cotton bathrobe, reminding myself of some kind of celibate Hugh Heffner, but the love that surrounds me is not eros (or more accurately porneia, whence pornography), but rather philia and agape. This is calming; this is what I need; not striving (trishna, in Sanscrit), but letting go of striving, as the Buddha preached. It is a bit of heaven, as I've said before, a gift, a blessing.

2010 Emotion-Focused Therapy: Level 2 Workshop Series

2010-09-19T08:47:00.002-04:00

Facilitated by Robert Elliott

Professor of Counselling, University of Strathclyde

Saturdays, 9.30-16.30, 20 November, 2010 – 14 May, 2011

Sir Henry Wood Building

Jordanhill Campus

(Sponsored by HASS Research & Knowledge Exchange,

University of Strathclyde)

The Counselling Unit at the University of Strathclyde is offering further training in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) for counsellors and psychotherapists (Diploma level or above) who have completed Level One training in EFT or the equivalent. This series has been restructured from its previous evening format and will now meet on seven Saturdays throughout the 2010-11 academic year, beginning in November. The format will be a mixture of brief lectures, videos or demonstrations, experiential practice exercises in small groups, supervision of cases seen by course members, and discussion.

The specific topics to be covered will feature material not covered in the Level 1 course, including

· Therapist experiential response modes

· Client modes of engagement

· Narrative Retelling of difficult/traumatic experiences

· Relational Dialogue for Alliance difficulties

· Creation of Meaning for meaning protests

In addition, the Focusing and different forms of Chairwork will be particularly emphasized:

· Focusing with difficult or painful experiences

· Clearing a Space for overwhelming or chaotic experiences

· Two chair enactment for Self-interruption splits

· Two chair conflict split work for depression, anxiety and self-harm behaviour

· Compassionate Self-soothing for painful self states

· Empty chair work for unfinished business

This series is scheduled for the following dates:

Autumn 2010:

20 November

11 December

Winter-Spring 2011:

15 January

19 February

19 March

16 April

14 May

Enrolment is set for a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20.
Course fee: Until 15 Oct: £395; after 15 Oct: £445
The course could be taken for continuing professional education credit.

Please direct enquiries and requests for applications to HASS Research & Knowledge Exchange, Jan Bissett (jan.bissett@strath.ac.uk, 0141 950 3135), or alternatively Counselling Unit office (muriel.walker@strath.ac.uk or 0141 950 3165) or, after 1 October, Robert Elliott (Robert.Elliott@strath.ac.uk or fac0029@gmail.com).

Recovering from surgery

2010-09-15T09:37:00.002-04:00

Entry for 14 September 2010:

Last January, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, apparently early stage. I did not record here my experiences during this process; I chose not to circulate them in this forum. Why? There were many reasons, but the principal were the uncertainty; my own discomfort and embarrassment (it somehow felt like a personal failing); and because I didn't want this to turn into a cancer blog. Thus, I chose not to reveal this information here. However, because this has been the major process going on in my life throughout this time, it has had the unwanted effect of pushing this blog to the side. In this entry I attempt to remedy this situation by offering a summary of my process over this time.

In the USA, men are routinely screened for elevated PSA from age 50 onwards, and I'd been tracked for slightly elevated PSA scores for the 6 years before we moved here. PSA screening isn't done routinely here, because of its high false positive rate and the resulting risk of over-diagnosis and unnecessary treatment. Now my elevated PSA (7.8) had been followed by two biopsies, the second of which identified early stage prostate cancer in a small part of my prostate. What was I to do?

There is currently a controversy -- on both sides of the Atlantic -- about what if anything to do about early stage prostate cancer. Here in the UK, NICE guidelines advocate Active Surveillance, essentially continued testing until it progresses to a more advanced stage, while some in the US are beginning to question indiscriminate prostatectomies for this stage of prostate cancer, because a large majority of men diagnosed with it die of something else first ("die with it, not of it").

What I did was to read a lot studies. It turns out the prostate cancer outcome literature is far messier than the psychotherapy outcome literature, because the cancer generally grows so slowly that 15-20 year follow-up studies are needed. Also, it turns out that most early stage prostate cancer is diagnosed in men 75+ or older, only 5% of whom will die of it. Eventually, I found a study of a European study tracking men of my age with my stage of prostate cancer for 8 years: I could see that death from prostate cancer leveled off a year or two after surgery, but with Active Surveillance the death rate kept trending upward in a shallow but straight line. Extrapolating from these data and given my life expectancy (I was 59, otherwise healthy, and could expect to live at least another 20 years), there was a better than even chance that this would kill me before something else did. Furthermore, I was more likely to be able to make a full recovery, with less chance of recurrence, if I had the surgery now rather later. I decided to go for it, in defiance of the NICE guidelines.

The issue of what kind of treatment was also problematic, and has odd parallels to the psychotherapy outcome literature: There are several competing treatments, with no compelling arguments or evidence to support any particular one, but a lot of strong opinions. Paralleling psychotherapy research, however, the crucial variable appears to be skill of the surgeon, indexed in this case by their having carried out whatever procedure it was hundreds of times previously. The person of the surgeon is more important than the procedure itself. On this basis, I decided to stay in Scotland and to receive an older form of the surgery at the hands of a highly skilled surgeon, rather than attempt to fly back to the North America for a more modern laproscopic-robotic surgery.

More importantly, as I delved into all this, I learned (a) that prostate cancer is now considered by key researchers like Neil Fleshner and his team at the University of Toronto to be primarily a nutritional/lifestyle illness, and (b) that there is a pretty good chance that the cancer had already spread to other parts of my body micro-metastically. This meant that surgery, of whatever kind, wasn't going to be enough; I would have to change my lifestyle: I switched to a mostly vegetarian diet (the exceptions being fish like salmon and free range, organically grown chicken); began making sure I got at least 7 hours of sleep each night; went on about 10 micro-nutrients with research evidence supporting their anti-cancer properties; and substantially increased my level of exercise. I also starting drinking alkalinizing water (at the encouragement of my friend Leigh McCullough), and tried in general to reduce the level of stress in my life.

I'd like to say that these measures reversed my prostate cancer and removed the need for surgery, but unfortunately that turned out not to be the case, although further PSA testing clearly indicated that its steady progression was halted and remained steady for the past year after years of steady increase. They did, however, ensure that I was in peak physical condition going into the surgery.

Finally, on the 3rd of September, I had a radical prostatectomy, that is the complete removal of my prostate gland. This is a delicate, painful, major operation: I was under anaesthetic for about 5 hours and hospitalised for 4 days; the catheter will have to be in for 3 weeks, and I won't know for some time after that how much incontinence and impotence I will be left with long term. In addition, although I've been assured that the surgery was successful and appears to have removed all of the cancer, I don't have the pathology results yet. Ultimately, I'm not likely to know for years whether the combination of surgery and life style changes will have prevented a recurrence of this cancer. But in any event, I will have done my best.

So that's the story. I will be off work for at least 4 weeks through the end of September and possibly for much of October. It's my hope to be able to continue regularly to write this blog during this time, but at this point, in the meantime, really my only job is to heal as best I can: Drink a LOT of fluids, to prevent blood clots and to keep my catheter open; to take daily walks around my neighbourhood (for the same reasons); to sleep a lot (8 - 9 hrs / night); and to be at peace. Mostly, I take my days slowly, and listen a lot to my body. This makes it a special, almost holy time, like being on extended spiritual retreat, communing and listening to what my body and spirit are saying. In fact, it is a marvelous gift to be given this time for healing and reflection.

Rubidium Wedding Anniversary Adventure

2010-08-28T20:07:00.002-04:00

Entry for 28 August 2010:

Although actual date was more than a week ago, things were a little busy in the US before we left, so we decided to celebrate our Rubidium Wedding Anniversary (ie, number according the Periodic Table of Elements).

According to Wikipedia, “Rubidium is a soft, silvery-white metallic element of the alkali metal group.” It is “soft and highly reactive.” Rubidium is not biologically active, but is metabolized like Potassium, which is above it in the Periodic Table, which means it can be used as a marker in brain scans. It is highly stable in its more common isotopes. More recently, it was been used to form Bose-Einstein condensate, an exotic form of matter that displays quantum effects.

I suppose we could make something of the “highly stable but reactive” nature of this element, but I’m more struck by the fact that it means that we have started a whole new row of the Periodic Table.

We celebrated by taking a Saturday Adventure to the National Museum of Rural Life, a farm museum not far from Glasgow. We had been a bit leery about this locate National Trust property, but in the end we were delighted by the working dairy adjoining the farmhouse with all its original fittings. We spent a lovely few hours there talking with the volunteer in the house, the farm manager and dairyman as he milked and fed the cows, and with the docent, who proudly showed us their prize baby bull calf and pigs. We’ll have to take a closer look at the actual museum, gift shop, formal garden etc next time…

On our return, we walked down Great Western Road to a new restaurant, Persia, where we had a very nice meal. We finished our day by Skyping with our son Kenneth. It was a lovely finish to a great day!

Murray Creek Impressions 2010

2010-08-22T08:18:00.001-04:00

Entry for 19 August 2010:

The haiku form seems to work well for writing about Murray Creek, especially now, when it is so quiet and peaceful.

Late summer stillness

Deer eat brush just below house

Nature fills our space.

Leave all that behind

Labyrinth knows what matters

Arrive at center.

Old trail above creek

First time cleared in many years

Heart must follow now.

Unpicked all summer

Wild blackberries that yield easiest

To hand taste so sweet.

Before he left, my

Brother removed dam from creek

Water finds new place

Tree branch reflects in still water.

Dusk: we wait for owls

Their low cries come up from creek

Suddenly fill the trees.

California Spotted Owl Visitation

2010-08-20T19:57:00.002-04:00

Entry for 19 August 2010:

For the past 3 nights, my mom has been receiving nightly visitations from an owl, which on each occasion landed on the rail of her deck. The first two nights there was a cry and a silent visitation while on the previous night my mom had interacted with the owl for several minutes, as they mirrored each other’s head movements, and the owl emitted its haunting cry. What did this mean? It seemed worth further investigation.

Therefore, last night after dinner, we went out and sat on the deck about 8:30. It was dusk and the colors were fading into darkness as we looked out over the valley. We talked and waited and listened as the darkness deepened. After awhile I could barely hear, at the edge of my ability, a long, low cry in the distance, sometimes punctuated by a chattering sound. Since I was a small boy, I’ve loved strange noises (which might have something to do with why my musical tastes are so broad); so I tried imitating the cry with a breathy sort of whistle. After ten or fifteen minutes of this, we noticed that the cries were getting louder, and as they got closer, it began to sound like more than one.

Then suddenly there were cries from the top of the tall tree just below my mom’s house, then from the next tree to the left of it, opposite the deck where we were sitting. There were soft flutterings and a couple of times I saw a shadowy form flitting from one tree to the next. Finally, a third set of cries emanated from the tree above the house. The three owls continued to cry back and forth to each other, and I joined in. Entranced, I’d been sitting on the chaise lounge, out under the stars in order to see better, but I was now struck by a powerful sense of uncanniness, and began to feel terribly exposed sitting out in the open. I felt as though at any moment these three mysterious beings might descend on me, and I was filled with a mixture of exhilaration and terror. I got up and moved under the shelter of table’s umbrella.

My mom and I now really wanted to know who our mysterious visitors were, that is, what kind of owls they might be. I went inside and got my new iPad and brought back it out again. I found www.owling.com and began looking up likely species and listening to their calls. After trying about 20 or these, we finally came to the California Spotted Owl, whose recorded cry closely matched what we’d been listening to. The annotation to the matching cry characterized it an “agitated contact call" which “may be associated with territorial disputes”; it noted that this type of cry is mainly used by females. At some point during the process of trying to explain what we were experiencing, the object of our interest got bored and moved away back down the hill toward the creek. As often happens in life, reflection had replaced direct experience.

Because the two outlined shapes we had glimpsed looked smaller than what my mom had seen the previous nights, she concluded that we had been visited by a mother owl and her two young owlets, whom she was instructing while at the same time checking out the humans who live in their valley. This narrative seems as good as any other, and my mom vowed to continue her Owl Vigil in order to see what might come next.

Birthday Haiku Poem for Gladys

2010-08-20T15:51:00.002-04:00

A linked set of stanzas, roughly in haiku form, in honor of Diane’s mother’s 80^th birthday. The first stanza plays with the mathematical factors of 80 (not counting 1 and 80). We celebrated her birthday in great style, with 40 people, including family, friends and friends of family. Gloria, Diane's exchange student sister also came from Chile along with her husband Juan & eldest granddaughter Daniela.

Eighty years, many factors:

Two, four, five;

Eight, ten;

Sixteen, twenty, forty.

Who knew?

Such a petite person

Could actually be

A very large tree?

Roots sink deep

Through valley's sandy loam,

Ground tree to grow

Strong secure base.

Branches spread:

Children, grand-, great-,

Adopted by marriage or exchange.

Friends flock, many-colored birds,

Summer and winter,

In your sheltering shade.

There is a stillness:

You listen without judgement

Reveal indwelling treasure.

Time passes: Four generations.

Spreading wave of love.

Everything connects.

-15 August 2010

Fifty to Sixty

2010-08-19T16:16:00.004-04:00

Poem written for family celebration of my 60th birthday a week ago. Kenneth has been reading Greek poetry and had been critical on the lack of poetic structure in my poetry, which I took as a challenge to try to work on a more formally structured way. The poem is in pentameter, although the individual lines vary between iambic, trochaic and alexandrine (trochaic but with a final foot consisting of a single stressed syllable.

At fifty years, I faced my fear of death:
And found it based on greed, a need to live
Forever, grasping after endlessness.

And so I made a prayer, a thing to say,
Recited as I run, approaching home:
Lady of the Universe, I know not
Where I came from first, before my birth;
I don’t know where I’ll go after my death.
The limits of my knowing are: I come
From nothing, and therefore, to nothing go.

This means, every moment is a gift:
Every day a gift, and every month;
Every year a gift, and all my life.

This prayer weighed my life against the empty
Nothingness of death, dividing every
Separate moment of my life by zero:
Undefined, divine, they shoot toward
Infinity; each one showing, magnified,
In sharp detail, is luminous and glowing.

Since then, ten years have passed, a time of turning:
A broken job, a father’s death, and more:
Children graduate, house then empties out;
A move, across the sea, new place to be,
New work in Scotland next unfolds for me,
New daughter, and granddaughter now arrive,
And illness, brings re-thinking of my life.

Of course in saying something over and over
My prayer of every-day-a-gift evolves,
It does not stay the same; things happen to it:

So other parts appear, to say their piece:

Lady of the Universe, I also know that
All I am comes out of all that’s come
Before me: Galaxies and trilobites,
Etruscans, Galicians, parents, siblings: all.
Likewise, all I’ve been, am now flows out
Through all I’ve known and touched in sixty years,
And does so every moment, day and month:
Children, colleagues, students, grandchildren: all.

And then my mind runs far beyond its common
Orbit, and this image comes to me:

We are all there, in an endless place,
Beyond this life, beyond all dates, we wait;
And with us, people nine hundred years from now,
And from all times, they wait, these ecologues,
Star-dwellers, strange galactic citizens;
Even blue-green algae, waiting for the
Final flare, and all the company of
All conscious creatures, standing, swimming, floating
Assembled in the endless Hall of Being,
Watch in awe as universe completely
Cools, and time exists no more.

-Murray Creek, Aug 2010

Elliott & Farber (2010) Carl Rogers Research Leader Chapter Published

2010-08-19T16:04:00.003-04:00

Entry for 14 Aug 2010:

A couple of years ago, Louis Castonguay and other colleagues in the North American Chapter of the Society for Psychotherapy Research decided to do a book on famous/important psychotherapy researchers, as a way of “bringing psychotherapy research to life”. I felt very pleased and honored when they asked Barry Farber (an old SPR friend and former fellow clinical psychology course director) and me to write the chapter in Carl Rogers.

In order to prepare myself, I got a hold of a pre-publication copy of Howard Kirschenbaum’s (2007) new Rogers biography, which I read on the plane while flying across the Atlantic back to Ohio, and then mostly drafted while on holiday. Barry added other bits, a broader perspective, and bits of poetic expression. In the process of writing the chapter, it became clear to me in a way that had I not fully grasped before that Carl Rogers really had invented most of contemporary psychotherapy research.

We were under fairly tight space constraints and had a lot of material, so writing the chapter ended up feeling a bit like write haiku, and indeed writing it did inspire a kind of lyric quality in both of us, I think the following passage, which opens the chapter illustrates what I mean:

In many ways, Carl Rogers was and continues to be a figure of contradictions. Dreamy idealist who was also a hard-headed pragmatist; humanist grounded in positivism; shy, somewhat stiff midwesterner who ended up advocating openness, disclosure, and intimacy; persuasive advocate for empathic and respectful listening raised in a judgmental, non-expressive home; founder of a major school of therapy who discouraged followers, training institutes, and professional organizations; academic who rebelled against almost all of the trappings of academia; and key figure in the origins and development of psychotherapy research who at a crucial moment gave it all up to move to California to pursue encounter groups, educational reform, and peace-making. What are we to make of these contradictions? Do they detract from his contributions? Or are they essential to what drove him and what continues to inspire his supporters more than twenty years after his death in 1987? (p. 17)

References:

Elliott, R., & Farber, B. (2010). Carl Rogers: Idealistic Pragmatist and Psychotherapy Research Pioneer. In L.G. Castonguay, J. C. Muran, L. Angus, J.A. Hayes, N. Ladany, & T. Anderson (Eds.), Bringing psychotherapy research to life: Understanding change through the work of leading clinical researchers (pp 17-27). Washington, DC: APA.

Kirschenbaum, H. (2007). The life and work of Carl Rogers. Ross-on-Wye, UK: PCCS Books.

SPR Asilomar 2010

2010-07-01T17:53:00.002-04:00

Entry for 28 June 2010:

In 1980, The Society for Psychotherapy Research’s annual international meeting was held at Asilomar, a retreat and conference center in Pacific Grove, California. This was familiar territory for me, because I had been there many times before as a child and teenager. The first time I was 10 or 12 when my grandmother brought me there to hear an author speak.

In 1980, Mardi Horowitz, as president-elect, was program chair (I talked to his son, who was very proud of his dad). Ed Bordin gave the presidential address, “Of human bonds that bind and free”, laying out his now-famous universal model of therapeutic relationship as comprised of three components: bond, goal agreement, and task agreement. I presented an early version of Elliott, Barker, Pistrang & Caskey (1982), on the helpfulness of different therapist response modes.

This year’s international SPR meeting returned to Asilomar, 30 years later. Like SPR itself, the place has grown over the years, to a large, rambling complex of dormitories and meeting rooms. It took a while for me to connect my memories to the present site, but the dining hall (now expanded with an additional dining room), the social hall, and the chapel eventually clicked into place, on three sides of the meadow of sand and beach scrub vegetation.

Louis Castonguay led off with a stimulating presidential address on different kinds of theoretical and research-practice integration, and the conference itself was a rich mix of sessions on the diverse aspects of psychotherapy research in different theoretical orientations and research methods. I was especially struck by the new generation of committed and talented psychotherapy researchers that has emerged. I find this reassuring and heartening.

I came to the conference exhausted from an intense two weeks of work that had followed after Diane flew to Seattle to see our new granddaughter. I’d been hard at work revising the chapter on empathy for the second edition of Norcross, Psychotherapy Relationship that Work; Bruce Wampold had taken exception to the primitive statistics (ANOVA) that I’d used in the empathy-outcome meta-analysis, and so I had had to learn newer statistics (Cochrane’s Q in particular) and concepts. This entailed completely rewriting the methods and results sections and occupied me all across the Atlantic and up until the day before SPR started.

My main activity for this conference was acting as discussant for three different panels. Over the past couple of years, I have been increasingly called upon to do this, and I have been honing my skills as discussant. In general, I seem to do best if I don’t over-prepare, which is good because it is usually difficult to find time to read through long presentations beforehand, on top of everything else. I take acting as discussant as a kind of extreme sport calling for quick integration of information. It reminds me of the extemporaneous speech event in the speech tournaments that I competed in high school. In a couple of panels that I was discussant for, I think I managed to nail the essence of what the researchers were trying to do, balancing praise with stimulating but constructive critique. It’s a really nice feeling to see the faces of these younger psychotherapy researchers, knotted in thought and at the same time pleased to have their work engaged with seriously and in depth. In the process, I came up with the following:

Robert’s Recipe for a Successful SPR Panel

1. New data

2. Interesting phenomena

3. Multiple methods

4. Videos!

As always, the high point of this year’s SPR was reconnecting with old friends and making new friends. For example, this year Mardi Horowitz and Bill Pinsof returned to SPR after many years’ absence, and it was good to catch up a bit with them, along with regulars Karla Moras, Les Greenberg, Adam Horvath, Irene Elkin, Lynne Angus, Sandra Paivio, Jesse Geller, Barry Farber, and many others. The conversations were far-ranging, from statistics, to qualitative research, to colleagues, to health, to the World Cup, to EFT training. For me, the spirit of Ed Bordin hovered over the conference, but also Lester Luborsky, who died this past year, as well as others who were here in 1980, the last time we met in this place: Ken Howard, Hans Strupp, Sol Garfield, Laura Rice, and Enrico Jones; all of their spirits hovered over the meeting, a host of ghosts, their voices in the wind and fog that blew in from the sea.

Reference:

Elliott, R., Barker, C.B., Caskey, N., & Pistrang, N. (1982). Differential helpfulness of counselor verbal response modes. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 29, 379-387.

Elliott & Zucconi (2010) Practice-based Research Framework Chapter Published

2010-05-15T11:20:00.003-04:00

Entry for 15 May 2010:

Before the Rome SPR meeting in 2004, my friend Alberto Zucconi took me to dinner with some of his friends and colleagues. Over several bottles of wine and a massive amount of food, they persuaded me to become the Scientific Director of an international project to encourage research on psychotherapy and psychotherapy training. We had no funding and no concrete plans; we just wanted to encourage practice-based research on psychotherapy, especially in training centers. We eventually collected a group other folks to be on a steering committee, set up various sites/virtual communities on the World Wide Web, and applied unsuccessfully for a couple of complicated, multi-center EU grants. The most concrete thing to come out of this project was the Leuven Protocol (Stinckens, Elliott & Leijssen, 2008), and a couple of articles, one published with Alberto Zucconi in 2006 in Person-Centred and Experiential Psychotherapies, and the other a chapter in a book on practice-based research that has just come out: A core approach to delivering practice-based evidence in counselling and the psychological therapies, edited by Michael Barkham, Gillian Hardy and John Mellor-Clark.

When Alberto and I were trying invent our project, I wasn’t too clear about the organizational bits, but what I could do was develop a conceptual framework for practice-based research, so that’s what I did. This book chapter is a further refinement of that conceptual model, with different examples, so that it complements the earlier PCEP article. The International Project on the Effectiveness of Psychotherapy and Psychotherapy Training (IPPEPT) remains a project in the existential/aspiration rather than the practical/concrete sense: The project is really a Life Project to generate more research in counselling and psychotherapy training courses and by counsellors and psychotherapists in real-world practice settings. On this front, progress is slow and incremental. So far, the Leuven Protocol, led ably by Nele Stinckens at the University of Leuven, is the clearest sign of the success of the project, still going strong and even expanding all over Flemish-speaking Belgium in a variety of mental health settings. However, just last month, helped by a boost from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, the teaching staff for Postgraduate Diploma in Person-Centred Counselling at the University of Strathclyde finally agreed to convert the case study paper into in systematic case study, with quantitative and qualitative assessment of outcome and process.

Summary (condensed from the introduction of the chapter):

The gap between psychotherapy research and practice has led to the disenfranchisement of many forms of therapy, including person-centred/experiential, psychodynamic and systems approaches, all of which are currently under-represented on lists of empirically-supported or evidence-based treatments. The key to maintaining and increasing the recognition of these and other therapies in the current political-historical moment is for us to study them using a variety of methods, quantitative and qualitative, single case and randomized clinical trials, treatment development and practice-based. The present situation has inspired researchers and educators in several countries to develop demonstration programmes featuring practice-based research and Practice Research Networks (PRNs). In this chapter, we describe some organizational structures and conceptual frameworks for encouraging collaborative practice-based research. In particular, we present a practice-based research framework and protocols for studying treatments and training experiences in psychotherapy training centres and institutes. We conclude with a discussion of recent methodological developments that promise to enhance this research and a list of suggestions for getting involved in therapy research collaborations.

Reference: Elliott, R. & Zucconi, A. (2010). Organization and Conceptual Framework for Practice-Based Research on the Effectiveness of Psychotherapy and Psychotherapy Training. In M. Barkham, G. Hardy, & J. Mellor-Clark (Eds.). A core approach to delivering practice-based evidence in counselling and the psychological therapies (pp. 287-310). Chicester, UK:Wiley & Sons.

EFT Convergence and Thoughts about Future Training

2010-04-25T18:23:00.001-04:00

Entry for 25 April 2010:

This week almost all the different bits of the Emotion-focused Therapy training that I run here at Strathclyde converged, like the planets all lining up:

1. Tuesday evening: EFT-Network meeting: This consists of a small group of folks who have completed all three levels of EFT here and want be part of a free, continuing conversation about EFT. Anyone who has done EFT-1 is welcome to come along, but in practice it turns out to be the post EFT-3 folks. We’ve mostly been looking at videos of EFT and related practice this year. This week we finally reached the penultimate session of Les Greenberg’s wonderful EFT Over Time box set of 6 sessions plus audio commentary. The previous 4 sessions were very interesting, impressive and useful, but this one was the most moving, exciting session yet, featuring an excellent piece of Empty Chair Work. Over the previous months, in addition to Les we’ve also looked at sessions of Diana Fosha (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) and Leigh McCullough (Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy), all published by APA. We were very impressed by both of these and found them to be quite close to EFT practice. Next month, for our final meeting of the year, we’ll watch the final episode of Les’ 6-session series.

2. Wednesday afternoon: Fulltime Postgraduate Diploma Counselling Course: I do a series of 5 90-minute sessions on research for our diploma course. The fourth session, which I did this week, is about systematic case study research, but I illustrate it with the case of George, my client with bridge phobia, who is the subject of my 2009 Adjudicated HSCED paper in Psychotherapy Research. The presentation is a stealth EFT input because it features two video clips of me working with the client, including a very powerful break-through segment from session 4. As has happened in the past, the students were very happy to see an example of one of their tutors doing therapy.

3. Wednesday evening: EFT Level 3: This year, EFT Level 3 has been a blend of supervision and presentations and skills practice on specialized topics, such as dreamwork, self-soothing, eating disorders, and, this week, working with Fragile (or “borderline”) process, including self-destructiveness. This included and updated material in the Learning EFT book. I’m gradually transitioning to talking about “fragile” rather than “borderline” processes, following Margaret Warner’s usage, because it seems more descriptive and less stigmatizing to me. A central conundrum for me continues to be whether all inner Critics, no matter how nasty they are, are trying to help (the position of Ann Weiser Cornell and others); or whether some Critics are simply destructive and seek only the destruction of the person and thus need to be externalized (“That’s not you; that’s your mother/father/etc.”). The latter fits my clinical expression, but as I said again this week, I’m not sure if maybe I just lack the insight or wisdom to see beyond the destructiveness in these relatively rare instances.

4. Thursday morning: Full-time: Postgraduate Diploma Counselling Course: The next morning I was once more in front of our postgraduate diploma course students for my annual workshop on Working with Depression, which features a bit on the nature and diagnosis of depression but is mostly about EFT Two Chair Work for Self-Criticism Splits. This makes a nice EFT “taster” experience that is easy for everyone to identify with, since everyone is very familiar with their Inner Critic. As usual, I played a section of the video Les made in 1989 for the Shostroms (the same folks who brought us the Gloria videos). This session also seemed to go well. (It probably helped that they’d seen a video of me doing enactment work with “George” the previous day.)

5. Friday morning: Counselling Psychology First Years: Back in February, I did two days of intensive EFT training with the first year students on the Counselling Psychology Doctorate course. On Friday this week, I returned for the first of two follow-up sessions with them, this one a practice session on Systematic Evocative Unfolding. Between a theory input I did last Fall, the 2 intensive days in February and the two follow-up sessions, it appears that we have covered the same amount of material as the 4-day EFT Level 1 intensive course does. I’m not sure why this is; it may be that there is less burn-out in this format than there is on the 4^th day of EFT-1. At any rate, we had a useful session an initial question and answer period, plus plenty of practice. Next week, I’ll finish up with them, offering a session on Open Marker Work (also known as “find the task”).

6. Saturday: EFT Level 2: I was getting a bit run-down by the time Saturday morning rolled around, but as usual I found the day-long Saturday format invigorating. This was the sixth of the seven monthly workshops, and it seems to me that the change in format has been very successful: People are fresher on Saturday morning, and we build up momentum over the course of the day, by putting an empathy-based task in the morning and a Chair Task in the afternoon. Saturday’s session, on Meaning Creation and Empty Chair Work, worked quite well, especially as these two tasks complement each other.

Six EFT-related presentations in five days is a lot, so I was very glad when we finished late Saturday afternoon. I had fun, and so did my various groups of students.

The Future. The EFT-2 group wants to know about EFT-3 for next year, but I’m not sure what to tell them. I can’t run both EFT-3 and EFT-2 on Saturdays; it’s just too many Saturdays. If I run EFT-3 on Wednesday evenings, I’m going to lose several people, and the course may not be viable. One solution would be to run EFT-2 & EFT-3 on alternate years. Another possible would be to run day-long EFT-3 sessions on a weekday. Fridays, anyone?

Another issue is training to competence. At some point, in order to designate a therapist as competent in EFT, they are going to have to be supervised in the process of seeing two clients for at least 15 sessions each. I’m going to need to set this up in the next 6 months, for the research. A useful format would probably be small supervision groups of 3-4 supervisees, each seeing 2 clients, and meeting every two or three weeks for two hours.

The Danger of Spring in Glasgow

2010-04-11T10:27:00.001-04:00

The first bright, warm weekend in Glasgow brings traffic snarls and makes driving a nightmare: The beautiful weather appears to dazzle and distract drivers used to rain and fog, while the sidewalks are flooded with pedestrians escaping their gloomy houses, similarly blinded by the light, stunned by the heat (all of 60F/15C), and wandering heedlessly into the streets. After a harrowing journey to the grocery store after church, we are relieved when we arrive safe and sound at home.

Early April Saturday Adventures

2010-04-11T10:16:00.001-04:00

Entry for 10 April 2010:

1. Castle Gloume. For our Easter Saturday Adventure, we drove northeast into Fife, through the town of Dollar, and up the Dollar Glen on a steep and winding single lane road. There’d been a blizzard in most of Scotland, including Fife, a few days before, but now the snow was quickly melting in milder temperatures that had arrived in the meantime.

The ruins of Castle Gloume, better know for the past 500 years as Castle Campbell, sit on a ridge between the Burn of Care and the Burn of Sorrow, now in full spate from snow melt. Unlike many of our castle visits, there were actually quite a few people wandering around the place. Although the temperatures were milder, it was not particularly warm either, and there were strong winds up on the ridge. For this reason, we were pleased to be able to sit down to a lunch of sandwiches and warm soup. After this, we wandered over the ruin, up and down the stairs connecting the four levels and roof of the castle keep, where we admired the spectacular view far to the south, across the Firth of Forth. Over the millennia, the water rushing off the Ochil Hills has cut deep through the rock, affording dramatic views down narrow crevasses.

After a satisfying castle ramble, I left Diane to take the easy path back to the car, while I walked and ran along the path down into one of the two narrow glens surrounding the castle. The path wound along the rushing burn, sometimes next to the watercourse, sometimes on bridges suspended above the water. It was green, noisy, magical… and worth the steep climb back up the hill to where we’d parked the car.

2. Holmwood House and Greenbank Garden. Then, today, we picked up two more local National Trust properties. First, we visited Holmwood House, in Cathcart, on the south side of Glasgow. Actually, we’d been past it a couple of weeks earlier on our visit to Linn Park, along the White Cart Water. I’d noticed an impressive building in the distance, up the hill from the path we’d been walking, which turned out to be Holmwood House, built in the 1850’s by Alexander “Greek” Thompson, the other famous Glaswegian architect (besides Charles Rennie MacIntosh). Thompson’s buildings, in a high Greek Revival style, can be found around Glasgow, including Great Western Terrace, which is 5 minutes walk from our flat in Hyndland.

The restoration of Holmwood House from its former neglect is very much a work in progress: The outside has been restored to its original condition, partly to prevent further damage to the interior, but also to provide an impressive approach. However, the restoration on the inside not particularly far along. There is an amazing dining room on the ground floor, featuring doors and fireplace with ornate classical Greek decoration, and illustrations from the Iliad running along both sides of the room, flanking a partially restored illustration of Homer and his muse, with the Olympian gods looking down from above. The most amazing thing is that this has somehow survived 150 years of neglect and abuse, including having been wall papered over to make the room into a chapel in the 1950’s. There is also an elaborately decorated drawing room upstairs, with bas relief stars on the ceiling.

I found that I really like the geometrical starkness of the Greek designs, including meander patterns and spiky thistle/floral themes in the runners, fireplaces, doors, exterior stonework and elsewhere. Viewed from the front, the house is designed to remind you of the Acropolis, with temple-like architectural features piled one on top of the other. At the top of the staircase, there is a circular lantern/cupola decorated on the inside with carved statues of Greek mythological creatures known as chimeras (also referred to locally as the “Holmwood Cats”).

As usual, the high point was a mini-tour by a voluble veteran docent, an old fellow who gleefully entertained us with stories and details about the place.

3. Greenbank Garden. After Holmwood, the day was still so lovely that we felt that we needed to spend more of it outside, so we drove down to another National Trust property, a few miles south. Greenbank Garden was much more crowded than Holmwood, but made a pleasant contrast. After a quick snack in the Tea Room, we wandered the walled, formal garden, which is divided into many varied smaller gardens on different themes. It’s very early in the season, so not much beyond crocuses (crocusoi?) and daffodils was in flower, but the space is charming, with its numerous hidden nooks and benches, fountains, hourglasses, topiary, and so on. People were sitting in the sun enjoying the day. After the long winter, it was a real pleasure to wander around and enjoy the sunshine and mild temperatures. Spring in Glasgow!

Elliott (2010). Psychotherapy Change Process Research: Realizing the Promise

2010-03-31T19:04:00.001-04:00

Entry for 31 March 2010:

When I received the Distinguished Research Career Award from the Society for Psychotherapy Research in June 2008, it came with a catch: I had to produce a paper for SPR’s journal, Psychotherapy Research. Paulo Machado asked me in Barcelona shortly after I got the award, giving me what felt at the time like a generous deadline: Aug 1, 2009. I spent months wondering what I should write about; I even sounded Paulo and Clara out about using my long-neglected Adjudicated HSCED paper (Elliott et al., 2009) for this purpose, but was gently reminded that it had to be single-authored.

Somewhere around February or March 2009 I finally realized that the only logical thing was for me to write about Change Process Research (CPR), a topic close to my heart and one that has spanned my research career. By a strange piece of synchronicity, Madison, Wisconsin, provided a 30-year time loop encircling my interest in CPR: At the front end of the time loop, my scientific interest in CPR dates back to a fateful conversation that I had with Les Greenberg in 1977, as we drove to O’Hare Airport after that year’s SPR meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. At the other end of the time loop, I had given a plenary paper on CPR at the 2007 SPR meeting, which was once again in Madison. The Madison 2007 paper became the starting point for my senior career award paper.

Because my writing schedule is generally restricted these days to 20 minutes each morning, work on the paper proceed slowly, as the pressure from Paulo increased to produce the paper, as it turned out, earlier than the original deadline. April and May passed, with the paper being repeatedly pushed aside for other pressing writing projects, including final work on the adjudicated HSCED paper. I had promised Paulo something by the end of June; however, I arrived in Santiago de Chile in late June with only a fraction of the paper drafted.

Then I came down with the H1N1 or Swine Flu, which was pretty awful in itself, but turned out to be gift from heaven as far as my senior career CPR paper was concerned. First, I was quarantined in my hotel room for a week, so I had plenty of time to lay in bed with minimal distractions. Second, the doctor had given a timely dose of Tamiflu, which reduced the flu symptoms enough so that I actually had enough energy to work on the paper. As a result, I wrote most of the paper during the week after the Santiago SPR meeting.

The paper turned out to be a tour de force, a survey of the major approaches to CPR, featuring lots of references and examples. It felt big, and was an odd contrast to my situation at the time, living in the enforced role of an invalid while putting together a grand survey of the key approaches at the core of the most central focus of the psychotherapy research field. Nevertheless, thanks to the H1N1 virus, Tamiflu, and especially to Diane’s patient help, the paper got written and was submitted on the 3^rd of July.

See also January 18, 2010 entry on this blog for a previous excerpt from this article: Change Process Research on Relational Depth: The Added Paragraph

Reference:

Elliott, R. (2010). Psychotherapy Change Process Research: Realizing the Promise. Psychotherapy Research, 20, 123-135.

Abstract: Change process research (CPR) is the study of the processes by which change occurs in psychotherapy, and is a necessary complement to randomized clinical trials and other forms of efficacy research. In this article I describe and evaluate of four types of CPR. The first three are basic designs and include quantitative Process-Outcome, qualitative Helpful Factors, and micro-analytic Sequential Process; the fourth, the Significant Events approach, refers to methods such as Task Analysis and Comprehensive Process Analysis that integrate the first three. The strengths and weaknesses of each design are described and summarized using both causal and practical criteria, as part of an overall argument for systematic methodological pluralism.

Questions about EFT, Part 1 (Groningen, March 2010)

2010-03-13T19:04:00.003-05:00

Entry from 6 March 2010:

I’ve been doing a lot of EFT training lately, and recently began asking participants to generate questions from skill practice sessions. On the last day of EFT Level 1b (= days 3 & 4 of Level 1) in Groningen last weekend, Jeanne Watson and I ran a long “Open Marker” skill practice session, in which participants were asked to first locate the client task and then to work with whatever it was. Afterwards, we asked them, “What questions do you have from the Open Marker Work Practice?” On this occasion, the participants came up with a particularly rich set of questions, which Anja typed into my computer so that everyone could see them. Finally, Jeanne and I tried to answer the questions, to the best of our ability, while Anja again recorded our answers. The following is an edited and elaborated version of those notes. (Many thanks to Jeanne Watson and Anja Rutten for their help in formulating and recording this material.)

A. On Two Chair Work:

1. How do you know when to suggest that my client switch chairs in 2 chair work?

(a) In general, when a request/demand/ultimatum is made, a place where in a regular two-person conversation you would naturally expect the other person to respond. You may feel this in your body.

(b) Jeanne points out an important time to change: When the client has expressed a primary adaptive feeling and the associated need, particularly when this is directed back to the other part. Then it’s important to see how the Critic responds to this, to see whether they are able to soften and begin negotiation. If not, then the client can go back to the Experiencer chair and talk about the experience of the critic not softening.

(c) It’s also useful to look at what the Critic (or Other in Empty Chair work) is doing, not just their content/words, thus move a bit beyond content in process. For example, acting dismissively, showing scorn in face, or sitting in a particular way, etc. The therapist can formulate this back to the client and help them heighten it (“Are you aware of look of scorn on your face? Can you do that some more?”).

(d) It’s also important to pay attention to the fact that clients sometimes change parts but not chairs, which can confuse things a lot. Pay attention to the manner and content of each part, so that you can hear if this happens then suggest that the client go over to the other chair and say it from that part.

(e) Finally, Jeanne notes that in 2 Chair Work, the two parts can sometimes get stuck in a pattern of ‘fight-fight’ that goes in circles and stays on the surface. Then, stopping the usual back and forward and helping the client to deepen one or the other part can be useful.

2. When you are working with 2 chairs and heightening Critic, how do you know when there is enough heightening?

(a) Remember that the Critic is your friend in the process, so often what we are doing is helping the client heighten their Critic until something “pops”. You can test this: Have the client try out a critical statement or repeat it, then switch and see what comes up in the Experiencer. If there is no response from Experiencing chair, then it is not enough. Also, you can use your own felt response as a test.

3. In Two chair work, when the client hesitates to switch chairs, when is it a good idea to address it and explore it with the client?

(a) It’s natural for clients to be hesitant about chair work, given that it is

so different from ordinary everyday processes. They generally think it’s crazy until they’ve tried it.

(b) At the same time, it’s always a good idea to pay attention to client hesitation in changing chairs, although once understood it is often OK to proceed anyway.

(b) Nevertheless, any serious hesitation requires therapeutic attention and exploration, and possibly alliance repair work.

4. What do I do with a collapsed Experiencer?

(a) Don’t panic! This is common and expectable part of working with conflict splits in depression, social anxiety etc.

(b) See Learning for a description of the Two Routes, via the critic or via the experiencer (sometimes both).

(c) Via the Critic: Ask: “What happened there? It looks like you were starting to do/say X, and then it just collapsed. That’s really interesting! Is that what happens?” Change chair task and look at how critic makes experiencer crumble by heightening the critic. Heightening critic can intensify the experience; for example, it may make the experiencer angry, so that they protest. It also is important to help the Critic see what s/he is doing to the experiencer.

(d) Via Experiencer: Client will be in a ‘collapsed experiencer’ state. Ask, “What is it like to experience that, what happens, can you stay with that?” Help the client deepen the Experiencer by responding empathically to the pain, then listen to experiencer in order to find their growth tendency and help them come up again, usually by asking them what they need/want, which helps them move toward action/self assertion. Clients with severe social anxiety may not have a strong enough sense of self, they may need help to build this.

5. A related question: What do you when the client in the chair of the harsh Critic displays tears/vulnerability? Do you stay with the strong criticism or the first sign of softening?

(a) It’s important to hear both things, to hear the critical message but also to ask what the tears are saying.

(b) It’s also important to find out if softening is in the Experiencer or Critic part.

B. Other Practice-oriented questions:

6. Can you change from one task to another and if so when?

(a) See Principle 5 in the Learning book for more on this issue. If a new, more central task emerges, it’s generally a good idea to switch to the more central task, e.g., from 2 chair to empty chair or vice versa.

(b) In addition, many different relationships can exist between different tasks, and markers often overlap. You can have tasks nested within tasks, such as doing a bit of Empty chair work within a Two Chair dialogue, or vice versa. Also, some tasks go nicely with others; for example, after the Meaning Bridge in Unfolding, it can make a lot of sense to switch to Two Chair Work to work on the broader issues, which typically involve a conflict between old and new ways of seeing things.

7. What do you do when you think the client is leaving something out/there is something missing?

There are really two different situations here:

(a) It’s easy if you think client knows it but isn’t saying it: Use empathic conjecture.

(b) However, it’s trickier if client really seems to be unaware of what you are seeing. Here there is a risk of ‘therapist cleverness’ disempowering the client, so you have to be very careful. Here are some suggestions for handling this situation:

•First, pay attention to your emotional attachment to your interpretation. Where is it coming from? Does it come from a need to feel clever? Does it come from a desire to help the client by giving them insight into their problems? Do I believe that insight is an important change process?

•Second, consider the advice that Laura Rice once gave me: Remind yourself that no matter how clever my interpretation is, the client’s own idiosyncratic self-understanding of what is going on will fit them better. The main problem with most therapist interpretations is that they are too simplistic.

•Third, take your interpretation and ask yourself: If I’m right about this, what would be in the client’s experience? Then offer an empathic conjecture about this experience. For example, with a transference link between the client’s experience of you and their parent, is there something about relating to me that feels familiar and old to them?

8. How do I help my client internalise/represent the work we have done with language or symbols?

(a) In general, make time to process the work at the end of the session, talking about what happened; eg, how harsh the critic is.

(b) It can be important for the client to remember/conceptualise some key words (like ‘handles’ in Focusing), to give sense of process they have come through. This often means distilling the key message, eg, with abused clients, ‘it wasn’t my fault’. Jeanne tells about a client who dreamed of a special creative place, which she came to understand as representing taking more care of self

(c) Offering awareness homework is also helpful here, suggesting that the client pay attention to a key feeling outside session. For example, Jeanne suggested at the end of the session to the client who had dreamed of the creative place, that her client try to ‘hold on to the memory of the place and the feeling she had experienced in there’.

(d) Jeanne points out that if there is real resolution, there is often no need to work at helping the client remember it, because work is done and they are already seeing and experiencing in a new way, which will establish itself.

(e) So internalizing work is probably most useful and common in work that is half way, where the client can see ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ but isn’t there yet. Helping the client symbolize what is and isn’t clear at this point makes a ‘placeholder’ for future work.

9. How do I learn more about all the different markers in the different tasks?

(a) Read Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy; (b) do EFT Level 2; (c) Practice, practice, practice!

10. Anything else you want to tell us?

The main roads by which we can help clients access their emotion schemes: (a) Paying attention to their body (Focusing); (b) accessing episodic memories (Unfolding; Empty Chair Work); (c) actively expressing the action tendency/need linked to the emotion scheme.

C. General Questions:

11. Does doing EFT change the way my body feels?

Yes, by becoming more self-aware of it. It may (a) hurt more, if pain has been ignored; (b) or there may be physical relief or a sense of space or a feeling of easing from resolving a problem.

12. How do I get more professionals around me to support my EFT work?

Network! Building your skill at EFT takes time and a network of fellow practitioners to support your developing practice. Set up an EFT study/intervision group in your area. Find an EFT-friendly supervisor. Take part in research on EFT, either on your own or as a part of a practitioner research network (PRN) or larger study.

13. What is the difference between EFT for couples and EFT for individuals, for example, regarding attachment?

(a) Attachment processes are vital to EFT-I (EFT for individuals), just as it is in EFT-C (EFT for couples). However, like Les Greenberg, we don’t see attachment as the only interpersonal process; there are also power and autonomy needs that need to be balanced and integrated in working with couples.

(b) Jeanne and I don’t do couples therapy training so we feel unable to fully answer this. However, we note that Les’ version of couples’ EFT work allows more space for work with individuals within the couple, especially once it’s become clear how each individual’s own issues help generate the couple’s problems. I can remember times in work with a couple when witnessing the other partner’s distress can genuinely touch the observer couple member. However, it’s also the case that the person who is working can feel guilty or exposed; and sometimes it is too painful or not safe to reveal deeply painful experiences to the other.

(c) I speculate that in EFT-C there is really one main task: To help the couple repair the attachment injury in the relationship; it just happens to be a very large task.

(d) Of course, healing the attachment injury will typically mean helping the couple address their individual injuries and the associated emotion schemes from their past that are involved in their recent partner injuries. This may require EFT-I.

Saturday Adventure in Balloch

2010-03-13T18:28:00.001-05:00

13 March 2010:

We had briefly visited Balloch, at the southern end of Loch Lomond, in July 2006, when we were in the process of organizing our move here. At the time, we didn’t do much more than have lunch at an Italian restaurant and walk around Balloch Castle. At the time, it seemed a bit touristic, so we hadn’t been back.

However, when the weather suddenly turned sunny (though still a bit chilly at night) this week, we began looking at an outdoor excursion. So this morning we decided it was time to give Balloch another look. It’s extremely convenient to take the train from Hyndland directly to Balloch, which is what we did. We arrived in time to catch an early afternoon one-hour boat tour that essentially ran up to to Inchmurrin (St Mirin's Island) and back. It was a bright day of mixed sun and cloud. There is still snow on the hills and low mountains around Glasgow, which lend drama to the views around the city. From the boat, Ben Lomond was particularly impressive, looming in the distance across the loch that is named after it: snow-covered, its peak in the clouds while the sun glinted off brightly off its lower slopes. From time to time, the pilot pointed out the castles and refurbed great houses along its southern shores. There were about twenty of us on the little tour boat, mostly fairly hardy souls up for the cold wind on the observation deck. We had difficulty sitting still and kept going up and down the stairs between the observation deck, where we were chilled and attacked by the wind, and the cabin, which was warm but where the view wasn't as good.

On returning, we set off for Loch Lomond Shores; along the way we discovered the Maid of the Loch, a 1950’s lake steamer with side paddle wheels, sitting at dock next to the public slipway. It’s open to the public while it’s being restored, so we spent some time traipsing about it. Actually, it’s a bit sad, some of the staterooms full of old TV sets and used books from jumble sale fund-raising efforts. The most interesting thing was the engine room, dominated by the enormous crankshaft that turns the paddle wheels.

After this, the Loch Lomond Shores and aquarium turned out to be a medium-sized shopping mall cum tourist trap. However, there was also a pretty decent Scottish-cuisine restaurant, the Kilted Skirlie, where we ate a late, leisurely lunch while admiring the stunning view of Ben Lomond, watching the late afternoon light change its appearance. I had a new dish for me: chicken Bonnie Prince Charlie: a chicken breast on top, and under it layers of snow peas, a cross section of baked apple, bits of turnip, with skirlie (an oatmeal stuffing) as the bottom, all drenched in a sauce of drambuie and slivered almonds. Nice!

Finally, we took a walk around sculpture park next to the shopping mall, made of paths winding through the trees connecting various pieces, varying from an outdoor video installation of waterfalls mounted in a wooden beam(?) to a field of blank reflective stainless steels “labels” mounted on little metal polls stuck in the ground. My favorite piece is a curving retaining wall made of local quartz (the artist had help from a local “waller”, that is, a person skilled in building traditional walls).

And at the end of the day’s Adventure, we simply walked down to the train station and got on the train to go back to Hyndland, tired but satisfied from a lovely late winter day, filled with the promise of Spring, soon to arrive.

Saturday Adventure: Strathclyde Country Park

2010-03-04T17:46:00.001-05:00

Entry for 3 March 2010:

After a long and welcome sleep, I finally get out for a longish run last Saturday morning. With all the cold weather we’ve been getting, it isn’t surprising that the canal was still pretty iced over. (Coldest winter in 30 years, said the newspaper headline last week, while displaying a photo from 1955, of people sledging across the ice on Loch Lomond to deliver the mail.) The swans live along the canal all year, so I am more amused than startled when I come up behind a couple of them, carefully striding along the ice with a curious back and forth wading motion, as they tranverse the sippery surface from one patch of ice-free water to the next, about 50 yards distant.

After returning home, I pull out our 25 Walks Around Glasgow book to identify a suitable destination for the day, which is rapidly disappearing underneath the Saturday morning dallying over break, paper, shower etc. Strathclyde Country Park looks doable, however, so we print off directions and information and are off.

Strathclyde Country Park is not the prettiest of the regional council parks in the Glasgow area, centring as it does around the large artificial Strathclyde Loch and primarily featuring a medium-size “theme park”. (I can’t tell exactly what the theme is, unless maybe it’s pirate ships.) This, however, is not our destination; instead, I have my heart set on a walk up the Calder Water.

But before that, we want to take in the ruins of the Roman bathhouse, which turns out to located next to the mouth of the Calder Water where it flows into the loch. The Roman bathhouse is a bit bigger than our local one in Bearsden, with two levels of warm room (tepidarium). Unfortunately, it is no longer sitting on its original site, having been moved up a bit to escape the rising waters of the loch when the latter was created. Nevertheless, the foundations and walls have been carefully reassembled and are quite evident. We happily roam over the site taking photos and imagining the Roman soldiers scraping off the mud from a day’s march south from the Antonine Wall in Glasgow, working their way up through the levels of heat to hottest (calidarium) before returning to jump into the cold plunge bath at the end.

I suddenly remember visiting the hotbaths at the Tassajara Hot Springs, south of Carmel Valley, as a child: My dad is initiating me into the ritual of the hot baths, and I am nervously easing myself into the bubbling, smelly hot water at his urging. He tells me to imagine all the toxins coming out through my pores into the water. After soaking a bit, he leads me to the cold plunge bath, telling me that this is necessary in order “close your pores” so as not to get chilled we emerge into the fresh air again. I’m even more wary of this than the hot bath, but I grit my teeth and jump in after him. It’s quite a shock, but afterwards I have a sense of triumph, and feel a bit more grown-up.

After several false starts and the discovery that my Glasgow walks book is out of date (the cute arched 19^th century “Roman Bridge” has been closed, presumably for health and safety reasons), we eventually locate the path. At the beginning it runs at some distance from the Calder Water, along the edge of Motherwell, past football pitches (i.e., soccer fields) and housing estates, but eventually the path veers off into the forest, and we gradually descend toward the Calder Water gorge. Before long, we come upon the enormous stone arches of a great viaduct spanning the gorge: This is the Orbiston Viaduct, over which the West Coast line passes on it way south from Glasgow. I have ridden over this viaduct many, many times, and when I happened to look out the window when we crossed it, shortly before reaching Motherwell, I always thought we were crossing the River Clyde rather than the Calder Water. Another connection made!

We take lots of photos of the viaduct, which is relatively easy to see with the trees still bare at this time of year. Then we continue up the Calder Water, finally descending to a path that runs right next to it. There is a roaring in the distance, and then we arrive at a large weir, where the water plunges dramatically. Above and below the weir, the water is quite calm, almost tranquil, but not here.

Walking further, we pass a man, with a dog, fishing on the other side of the river. Then the path bends away from the river and ascends, until we reach a pedestrian bridge that takes us over to the other side of the river, and we follow the path back down from whence we came, as the sun sinks lower in the west. Along the way pass the man and dog again; the man is digging for earthworms or grubs, then we pass under the Orbiston Viaduct again, red sandstone cliffs on either side and follow the path up to the cliffs. We also pass a clump of older men, with a large collection of bottles of various kinds of alcohol, standing around drinking. Diane is surprised and disturbed by this scene, but it is very familiar to me from runs along the canal in Glasgow, where there is usually a similar collection of sad, seedy-looking people hanging out near Ruchill. After we pass by, she remarks,“But they are so old! I thought it was just kids that did that.” “They’ve probably been drinking since they were kids,” I observe.

After this, we follow the path through the park and finally down to the main road and the parking lot. There is still enough light left for a trip to See Woo, the enormous big box Asian grocery where we buy 20 lbs of California sushi rice, a little bit of home to cook in our rice maker. It’s been another lovely Saturday Adventure, all the more welcome because I’ve been travelling so much lately that we’ve missed out on quite a few. For me, such days are a little bit of heaven, a blessing, part of the ever-growing web of our experience of Scotland.

Emotion-focused vs. Emotionally-focused?

2010-02-28T17:59:00.001-05:00

Entry for 28 February 2010:

I’ve been doing a lot of EFT training in the past month, and various interesting questions have appeared along the way. For example, when I was in Veldhoven in the Netherlands late January, some folks had recently done EFT Couples (EFT-C) training, which is rapidly emerging in the Netherlands.

So I went back and looked again to the issue of Emotion-focused (Greenberg, Paivio, Watson, Elliott et al., EFT-I) vs. Emotionally-Focused (Sue Johnson et al., EFT-C). Emotionally-Focused Therapy was used in Les Greenberg & Sue Johnson in their 1988 book on couples work. It appears that Les later corrected the usage to Emotion-focused, as part of his work with Sandra Paivio on their 1998 book. In the meantime, Sue Johnson kept the original usage, so that today both names are used but in different contexts. To further confuse things, Les has recently published a book on Emotion-Focused Therapy for Couples (2008), while the Emotionally-Focused Therapy for couples folks now also offer training in individual therapy.

Let’s analyze the two forms semantically, to see if this sheds any light:

1. Emotion-focused means “focused on emotion”. “Emotion” here is a noun, pointing to the idea that the therapy is really about emotion.

2. Emotionally-focused means “focused in an emotional manner”. “Emotionally” here is an adverb, describing the therapy as dramatic and emotionally powerful.

It seems to me that both descriptors refer to important aspects of EFT, regardless of how it is spelled and who is in the therapy room.

Kilpatrick Braes

2010-02-11T18:33:00.001-05:00

Entry for 6 February 2010:

For last week's Saturday Adventure, we took the train to Old Kilpatrick, down the River Clyde, just past Dalmuir. We got off at the Kilpatrick station, turned right down the main road, crossed under the rail line and the A82, and walked up and up and up into the Kilpatrick Braes. We walked uphill for at least an hour, pausing regularly to look around as Glasgow and Firth of Clyde gradually unfolded around us. Although it was a grey, misty day, the view was still stunning.

First, we saw the Erskine Bridge emerge from behind the village, looming over it. Soon, however, we were above it, and we could see the River Clyde twisting away east behind it, into the distance, a ribbon between the buildings Glasgow lining both sides.

We passed a farm and then the path became rough and steeper. We passed a little tree shrine by the side of the road, with children’s toys and Christmas ornaments nestled in the branches, telling a story that we could only guess at. As we walked further, the Erskine Bridge seemed to shrink beneath us, and we could see further east as far as the grey and mist would let us. We could see the Campsie Fells, and Bearsden and Milngavie. At this distance, it was the highrise blocks of flats and the tall buildings of the city centre that stood out to view. We looked west down the Firth of Clyde, but the ridge of the brae was in the way and we couldn’t see much. We pushed on, and finally reached the ridge so that we could see beyond it.

There in the distance was Dumbarton Rock, actually looking rather small from where we were. Beyond it, on the far side of the Firth, we could see the sweep of the coast and there was Greenock, a bit to the left of the point where the Firth makes its sharp left turn and heads south toward Ayrshire. And beyond that, the uplands that run west of Glasgow, forming the rest of the rim of the great bowl into which Glasgow is nestled. It was magnificent.

We look down the other side of the ridge into a little valley where sheep were small grazing patches far below. We followed the path as it ran up along the ridge, away from the Clyde, and as we did so, the land became wilder, craggy and bracken-covered. Canny, alert, wild sheep watched us suspiciously from further up. The path entered a little valley between low, craggy hills. We walked just a little ways further, turned around and came back down, experiencing the whole thing in reverse and front of us this time.

* * *

Four days later, as I flew out of Glasgow on the first leg of a trip to Portugal, the plan took off to the northeast, as happens when there is an east wind. I flew over the same territory that we’d walked on our adventure, but from even further up. Starting from the Erskine Bridge I retraced our walk with my eyes, and saw what was beyond the little valley where we turned around and went back: Loch Humphries perched amid the hills, and further to the right, rocky Duncolm. How many times have I flown over these hills in the past 4 years? And only now do I begin to really know them in my body, my legs and my feet, as real places, rough and grassy, craggy and smooth, lonely spaces with occasional sheep.

Celtic Connections 2010 and Beyond

2010-02-07T10:00:00.002-05:00

Entry for 6 February 2010:

Today we have finally reached 9 hours of daylight, the same amount that Toledo gets at the winter solstice. I'm still grateful for it!

As always, Celtic Connections helped us through the worst of the January Dark Time. We went to the finale concert last Sunday, a couple of hours after returning to Glasgow from the Netherlands. This was the yearly Transatlantic Concert, with a load of exceptional Scottish and North American musicians jamming for 2+ hours. Tickets sell out fast for this concert, so Diane and I couldn’t get seats together; however, we managed to end up in the same section of the concert hall. The concert was fun and engaging, and the tribute to Kate McGarrigle, who died a couple of weeks earlier, moved both of us to tears. Since then, I’ve been on a McGarrigle binge, revisiting their old albums and remembering just how good they were.

Actually, I found Darol Anger and the Republic of Strings, the week before, to be a more satisfying experience, musically: The musicianship was just as superb, but it hung together better, as a folk/bluegrass/jazz/classical string quartet but with guitar instead of second violin. Darol Anger, with his exceptional fiddle playing and quirky sense of humor, really impressed me, but the rest of his group were all uniformly excellent. I hope that this configuration of the group releases an album soon!

However, our favorite concert was at the Universal Folk Club on Sauchiehall Lane. Every year Universal puts on a series of concerts during Celtic Connections, featuring traditional songs of Scotland. They get three different solo singers to take turns presenting songs on a theme or from a particular area of Scotland. The concert we saw was “Songs of Marriage, Birth & Death”. The musicians aren’t usually professionals and are not always particularly polished, but for a down-home, authentic, Scottish folk experience, it is hard to beat this series of concerts. We vowed to make sure we take in at least one of these concerts every year.

But of course there is folk music to be found during the rest of the year, so this past Thursday we returned to the Star Folk Club, in St. Andrew’s in the Square, to hear Mick West and his band launch their new CD: As I think I've said before, he has an excellent voice; his fellow musicians are highly skilled; and his research into traditional sources, including rendering old ballads back into Scots, is impeccable. With concerts like this, we can have our personal Celtic Connections experience throughout rest of the year!

Compassionate Self-soothing Dialog for Stuck/Collapsed Self State:

2010-01-24T04:18:00.003-05:00

Entry for 14 January 2010:

Draft Task Description (R. Elliott; EFT-3; version 14/1/10)

We’ve been talking about a self-soothing task for years, but have never gotten around to writing it up. Now, however, it’s turning out to be a really important part of our work with clients with Social Anxiety, where we are using it as part of a process of helping clients build up a sense of themselves as being able to stand up to their critic. A recent peer supervision session with Lucia about a kind of work that she learned from her supervisor Paolo Nuttrini inspired me to write up the following outline of the work, which I then tested out with the EFT-3 group. I’m next going to add the work to the EFT-2 curriculum for later this year.

A. Background:

•New chair work task; being developed in EFT & other approaches

•Flip side of self-criticism split work

•cf. Paul Gilbert, Compassion-focused therapy (CBT + Buddhism): Compassion dialogs

•Useful with Post-trauma, social anxiety, borderline processes, depression; also within Two Chair Dialogue and Empty Chair Work

•Changing emotion with emotion (emotion scheme restructuring, memory reconsolidation)

•Use to strengthen self

B. Markers: Collapsed/stuck state of self

1. Self-critical or interpersonal loss process leading to collapsed/weak self

2. Strong emotional pain plus stuckness (e.g., vulnerable self with implacable other in Empty Chair work; repeated “I don’t know”)

3. Fails to respond to usual strategies for reactivating collapsed self (heightening critic or deepening experiencing self)

C. Therapist stance:

•Active, genuine compassion for client

•Active process guiding with collaborative co-construction of exercise

•Close empathic tracking

•Patience

D. Different Self-Other combinations:

1. Imagine yourself in the other chair as a small/hurt/lonely/scared etc child and speak to them.

2. Imagine some other scared/lonely/hurt child in the other chair and speak to them (from Liz Ballinger & Lorne Korman, EFT therapists from Toronto who working with clients with depression/opiate abuse).

3. Imagine a very close friend of yours, so similar that they have had the same experiences as you and are feeling the exact same way as you. What do you want/wish for them? What would help them? What can you give them to help this? Try it. Are they convinced? If not, what would help instead? (from Italian Gestalt therapist, Paolo Quattrini by way of Lucia Berdondini)

4. Imagine your parent/significant other in the other chair not as they were but as you needed them to be (idealized parent). Ask them for what you need. Then have them speak to you. (Extension of Empty Chair work)

E. General suggestions for facilitating client work:

•Be patient; don’t try to move too fast into self-soothing. Make sure you spend time helping the client evoke and experience the emotion pain and collapsed stuckness.

•Make sure you have a firm empathic/compassionate connection with this aspect.

F. Proposed Task Resolution Model

Client Resolution Stages

Therapist Facilitating Responses

1. Marker: Collapsed/stuck self; high arousal

Therapist: Reflect marker; propose task

2. Task initiation: Selects and evokes sad/scared/ collapsed self-aspect or other

Therapist: Propose an appropriate self-other combination to enact; adapt as needed.

•Ask client to imagine the sad/scared/ collapsed aspect; use evocative language

•If possible, help identify what client needs/wants/wishes

•Provide solid empathy for this aspect and allow client to really experience the collapsed/ stuck state before moving on

3. Offer self-soothing: Enact compassionate self-aspect or other

Therapist: Encourage client in Compassionate person role to offer collapsed aspect what is wished for it or what it needs

•Model soothing, compassionate stance

4. Partial resolution: Experiences emotional/bodily relief

Therapist: Listen for, reflect bodily felt shift in response to compassionate, soothing offer

•Encourage client to stay with the new feeling

5. Shifts toward more positive, empowered view of self

Therapist: Help client explore the emergent, stronger sense of self

6. Considers how to extend this process in their life

Therapist: Help client explore possibilities for carrying self-soothing or empowered self forward in their life

Change Process Research on Relational Depth: The Added Paragraph

2010-01-18T19:01:00.002-05:00

Entry for 18 January 2010:

Sometimes, an editor or reviewer will call for a last-minute revision that turns out to be a kind of gift, because it takes the paper to another level. In my forthcoming paper on Change Process Research, to appear in the next month or two in Psychotherapy Research, one of the reviewers challenged me to add an example of how the framework of types of change process research I’d been presenting might inspire research. When I asked myself what kind of therapy process might provide a good example, I suddenly thought of Relational Depth, which is a sort of University of Strathclyde speciality. The following paragraph came quickly after that, as I outlined a program of research on this therapy process variable:

Instead [of an RCT on Relational Depth], any one of the designs reviewed here provides a sounder basis for inferring the operation of particular therapy processes in bringing about client change. The optimal strategy, however, is to use several different Change Process Research designs, within or across studies, to build a convincing case for a particular change process. Take for example relational depth (Mearns & Cooper, 2005), a newly-minted formulation for a powerful state of felt connectedness between client and therapist. In order to make a strong case for the causal efficacy of this change process, researchers might want to start with Helpful Factors studies, in order to document the existence and general nature of moments of relational depth (e.g., Knox, 2008). Next, Significant Events studies, using Comprehensive Process Analysis or Task Analysis, could be used to develop and refine models of how client and therapist behaviors and experiences unfold and interact during episodes of relational depth. These models could be further tested at a micro-process level using the Sequential Analysis approach. Finally, quantitative measures (e.g., Wiggins, 2009) could be developed and used in Process-Outcome studies to predict therapy outcome. A body of such complementary studies would go a long way toward establishing the causal efficacy of relational depth in bringing about change in therapy, something that would be difficult if not impossible to do using randomized clinical trials.

References:

Knox, R. (2008) Clients’ experiences of relational depth in person-centred counselling. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 8:3, 182-188.

Mearns, D. & Cooper, M. (2005). Working at Relational Depth in Counselling and Psychotherapy. London: Sage.

Wiggins, S. (March, 2009). Developing the Relational Depth Inventory: Prevalence, Moderators & Characteristics of Relational Depth Events. Paper presented at Meeting of the UK Chapter of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, Ravenscar, UK.