EFT-2 Starts Again

Entry for September 6, 2007:

When I got to the end of the EFT level 2 training series last June, I felt that I had finally reached the point of feeling confident in what I was doing. I had a realistic sense of the needs and abilities of counsellors at this level, and at least some of what I have to offer them. I was then able to carry this clearer understanding into the Level 1 training that Jeanne Watson and I did last summer, to good effect.

Now the cycle continues with a new Level 2 training, which started last night. I was pleased to see 15 students, including one person from the previous years’ training, show up, full of enthusiasm and interest. Here are my impressions and reflections:

This group seems less anxious and more enthusiastic that last years’ group did. Is it me or is it the particular mix of people? In fact, most of this group have already started experimenting with PE-EFT methods with their clients, and are interested in things like supervision. One person is here partly because she had been supervising some of my students from last year and wanted to learn what they were talking about!

The main changes for this year are: (1) Sessions are every three weeks instead of every two weeks. This seems to have made it possible to people to come from farther away, because this year we have two people from Aberdeen. (2) I’ve given up even pretending to do supervision in this series, but offer it as a possibility if folks want to bring material in for supervision at the beginning, during the unfinished business period. (3) Instead, I make a solemn promise to the group that I will provide some kind of example in every session, either a video or a live demonstration. This is something I hardly did last year, until the end, which was out of character for me (in retrospect, I think I was a bit intimidated by the experience level of the participants).

Proving that every group is different, this group decides that most would rather try to meet up for a quick bite beforehand at the Three Craws Pub than have to worry about whose turn it was to bring food. The rest of us will bring our own food to eat before or during the break.

Most of the session is spent with (re)introductions, preliminary processing of structure and ground rules, but we do get down to the business of considering therapist experiential response modes, i.e., what is often disparaged as “counselling skills”. As usual my exposition of the response modes takes longer than I expected, and partway through I begin to wonder if maybe they’ve actually already heard all this last summer from Jeanne and I. Finally, we get to the video I’ve brought in, which is session one of one of my clients from the PTSD project. I stop it every time I say something and ask them to say what kind of therapist response mode they think it is. Many in the group find this procedure to be startling and distracting; they are used to watching things through, instead of micro-analyzing. In the end, after watching 7 minutes of the session, the exercise seems to work nicely at (a) demonstrating a wide range of therapist responses; (b) helping folks look at therapy in a much more process-oriented way; and (c) demonstrating how PE-EFT therapy starts. We leave on a high note, heading our separate ways home in the comfortable early autumn evening.

An interesting development is the interest expressed by several in the possibility of having assignments, to help them learn the material. I respond with a bit of market research re: the possibility of validating the courses as credit-bearing; i.e., toward a certificate, say in PE-EFT. There seems to be enough interest to warrant further exploration of the possibility.

Process-Experiential/Emotion-Focused Therapy: Level 3 Supervision Series

Facilitated by Robert Elliott
Professor of Counselling, University of Strathclyde

Tuesday, 6-9pm, 11 September, 2007 – 10 June, 2008
Sir Henry Wood Building
Jordanhill Campus
University Of Strathclyde
(Sponsored by the Professional Development Unit, University of Strathclyde)

The Counselling Unit at the University of Strathclyde are pleased to offer continuing training in Process-Experiential/Emotion-Focused Therapy (PE/EFT) for counsellors and psychotherapists (Diploma level or above) who have completed Level Two training in EFT. This 10-week series will meet approximately every four weeks throughout the 2007-08 academic year, beginning in September. The format will primarily focus on supervision of recorded therapy sessions, supplemented ass appropriate by viewing of archival video-recordings, brief lectures, experiential practice exercises in small groups, and discussion. Emphasis will be on putting PE-EFT into practice.

This series is scheduled for the following dates. Sessions will take place in Wood W510, except where otherwise indicated:

Autumn 2007:
11 September
9 October
6 November
4 December
Winter-Spring 2007:
22 January
19 January
19 February
18 March
15 April
13 May (W613A)
10 June

-Enrolment is set for a maximum of 12.

- Course fee: Until 15 August: £295; after 15 August: £345.

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

Professional Development Unit applications may be downloaded at http://www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/PDU/shortcourses/shortcourses.html (Note that that this course is not on the official list.)

Please direct enquiries to the PDU office (0141 950 3734) or Robert Elliott (Robert.Elliott@strath.ac.uk or fac0029@gmail.com ).

Pluralism Day Conference, Scottish Society for Psychotherapy Research

Entry for Sept 3, 2007:

Overview of the day. Today was the first event of the new Scottish local area group of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. Stephen Goss, a colleague of John McLeod’s at the University of Abertay, took the lead in organizing the day, which featured presentations by Stephen (on the philosophical background for pluralism), John McLeod and Mick Cooper (the latest installment of the pluralistic therapy model they have been working on), and me (Process-Experiential therapy as a Pluralist therapy; see previous blog entry), concluding with a final plenary discussion. The conference, attended by 40 – 50 people (mostly practicing counsellors), took place at Dudhope Castle. The castle sits on a hill above the city of Dundee, with a view out across the Firth of Tay and has a very nice garden, where many of us took our lunch and coffee breaks, enjoying the uncharacteristically sunny, pleasant day.

My presentation. I had worked on hard on my presentation, trying to articulate the somewhat ambivalent position of Process-Experiential/Emotion-Focused Therapy vis-à-vis pluralism. On the one hand, as I tried to explain in my talk, the original inspiration for PE therapy was fundamentally pluralist: that there is more than one kind of productive client process in therapy, and that the heart of PE-EFT is a kind of systematic therapeutic pluralism in various forms, the most obvious being therapeutic tasks. On the other hand, we have generally described PE-EFT as integrative rather than pluralist (it brings together person-centred and gestalt therapies, plus a bit of existential therapy), and I have long felt that my own practice benefited greatly from my becoming less pluralist after my transition in 1985.

The further complicate matters, I have been concerned about Mick and John running away with certain elements of PE-EFT (the idea of tasks and markers in particular) and claiming it for their own, which activated some territoriality in me. So I felt the need to be there to represent my point of view. Having volunteered myself, I then became concerned about making a reasonable contribution and not being obnoxious, so I felt I should really take a serious look at the relationship between PE-EFT and pluralism. And this is what I did, finally arriving at a positioning of PE-EFT as what I referred to as a form of “integrative pluralism”, and offering guidelines for the continued assimilation of other ways of working (e.g., CBT techniques) from other approaches into my approach.

Providing video of what it actually looks like in practice really helps to ground the theory, so in the end I was pleased with the content and presentation of my contribution to the day. But what made the day for me was the following two ideas that emerged:

Rigorous pluralism. The first interesting thing for me was that Stephen and John and Mick have all being thinking all the same lines about the limits of pluralism, so that each of us came up with our own qualified pluralism. Mine is “integrative pluralism”; Stephen’s is “systematic pluralism”; and Mick & John’s is “collaborative pluralism.” It appears that pluralism by itself just won’t do; it has to be tempered or balanced or combined with something else. This “rigorous pluralism” works for me!

The possibility of a task analysis of radical collaboration. The second thing that really struck me was that the heart of what John and Mick have been developing is really an intensely collaborative way of working with clients, which goes beyond what we have been able to articulate in the PE-EFT approach. I would call it “radically collaboration” (cf. Ann Weiser Cornell’s “radical acceptance”), even to the point of offering CBT techniques to a client with obsessive-compulsive difficulties (one of John’s cases he briefly presented today). The high level of therapeutic flexibility, via meta-communication, responsiveness to client needs, and in-session process evaluation was truly impressive.

In my opinion, the emphasis on the collaborative process would be an excellent way of addressing potential difficulties of lack of focus in writing, training and researching their collaborative pluralist model of therapy. I have long been concerned with the difficulty in carrying out interesting, focused research on integrative or eclectic therapies, and have been afraid that this would be the case with their pluralist therapy also. However, the articulation of the emerging body of therapeutic wisdom on the process of developing radical collaboration is eminently researchable.

For this reason, my first impulse is to encourage them to initiate a task analytic research program on establishing therapeutic collaboration. This would actually an elaboration and further development of the alliance formation task, which I have done some work on, but haven’t been able to develop in a really powerful or illuminating way. A task analysis of radical collaboration would be very interesting to see, and I’m sure that it could have a broad impact, sort of like Safran-Muran (interpersonal-psychodynamic) or Kernberg-Yeomans (transference-focused dynamic therapy), but humanistic rather than psychodynamic therapists!

Altogether a successful day, then! May Scottish SPR long prosper!

Process-Experiential/ Emotion-Focused Therapy as a Pluralistic Approach

Entry for 3 September 2007:
Presentation at one-day conference of Scottish SPR, "Pluralism in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Practice, Training, Research and Theory". University of Abertay, Dundee, Scotland.

Pluralism vs. Monism: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -Archilochus (7th-century bce)

I. Introduction:
A. Pluralism (American Heritage Dictionary)
• 1. The condition of being multiple or plural.
• 2.a. A condition in which numerous distinct ethnic, religious, or cultural groups are present and tolerated within a society.
– b. The belief that such a condition is desirable or socially beneficial.
• 4. Philosophy
– a. The doctrine that reality is composed of many ultimate substances.
– b. The belief that no single explanatory system or view of reality can account for all the phenomena of life.

B. Pluralism: Etymology
• From plural = Relating to or composed of more than one member, set, or kind
• From Latin pluralis, plus = more
• From Proto-Indoeuropean: pel' = to fill (cf. plus, poly; full, plenty, folk; supply, plethora)
• Root metaphor: Pluralism as hunger (greed?)

C. Pluralism(s) in Therapy
• Multiple causes of client problems
• Multiple people (client & therapist): relational
• Multiple perspectives (client, therapist, observer)
• Multiple client processes (modes of engagement)
– productive & unproductive
• Multiple therapeutic processes (tasks)
• Multiple outcomes

II. Process-Experiential Therapy as a Pluralist Approach
A. Starting point:
- There is more than one form of productive client process
– Classical PCA specified a single form of productive client process
– Exploration and formulation of self-relevant experience
– Client Experiencing Scale (Rogers, Gendlin, Klein, Kiesler, et al.)

B. Process-Experiential/Emotion-Focused Therapy (PE-EFT)
• 1985-1992: Greenberg, Rice & Elliott developed Process-Experiential therapy as an alternative to existing humanistic therapies
– Best for communicating within the PCA/humanistic therapy realm
• 1990’s: Re-branded as Emotion-Focused Therapy for communicating with therapists from other orientations

C. Multiple Forms of Productive Client Process
• Greenberg & Rice (1990): Modes of engagement (micro-processes)
– Attending
– Experiential search
– Active expression of emotion
– Contacting/connecting with therapist
• More recently, expanded to 14 (Elliott, 2006)

D. Multiple Forms of Productive Therapeutic Process
• Different therapeutic processes will facilitate different client modes of engagement:
– Focusing => Attending
– Systematic Evocative Unfolding => Experiential search
– Chairwork => Active expression of emotion
– Empathic Prizing => Contacting/connecting with therapist
• Referred to as “Tasks”
– From research on human problem-solving
– Research method: Task Analysis
– Now expanded to 13 tasks (Elliott et al., 2004)

E. Multiple Client Markers
• How do we know when particular client modes of engagement will be most productive?
• Unclear felt sense => Focusing => Attending
• Problematic reaction point (PRP) => Systematic Evocative Unfolding => Experiential search
• Conflict split or unfinished business => Chairwork => Active expression of emotion
• Vulnerability => Empathic Prizing => Contacting/connecting with therapist

III. Organizing Frameworks:
A. Pluralism Risks Chaos
• Complexity theory: Self-organizing systems emerge at the boundary/ dialectic between order and chaos
• Without some chaos => excessive order kills/stifles/rigidifies
• Without some order => chaos/entropy
• Thus: Need organizing frameworks to contain plurality

B. Organizing Framework 1: Therapeutic Principles
• Formulation of Process-Experiential approach began with a qualitative analysis of principles or guidelines for practice (Elliott, Greenberg & Rice, 1986)
• Organized into 2 broad groups
– Relationship principles: Foster safe, productive relationship (has precedence)
– Task principles: Foster therapeutic work on specific therapeutic tasks
• Operate in tension with each other
• Three main treatment principles within each
• Framework holds the plurality of causes, processes, outcomes

(A) Relationship Principles
• Facilitate safe, productive relationship:
– 1. Empathic Attunement: Enter, attend & track client’s immediate experiencing
• Always start with this
– 2. Therapeutic Bond: Offer empathic, caring presence to client
• = bond aspect of alliance (Bordin)
– 3. Task Collaboration: Offer and facilitate involvement in therapeutic work
• = task/goal aspect of alliance (Bordin)
(B) Task Principles
• Facilitate work on specific therapeutic tasks
– 4. Experiential Processing: Help client work in different ways at different times
• Foster relevant client modes of engagement
– 5. Task Completion/Focus: Facilitate client completion of key therapeutic tasks
– 6. Self-development: Foster client growth, empowerment & choice

C. Organizing Framework 2: Therapeutic Tasks
• Clients bring specific immediate problems (cognitive-affective tasks) to sessions
• Elements of a therapeutic Task:
– 1. Marker: observable sign that client may be ready to work on a problem
– 2. Client steps to resolution
• Measured by 6-point Degree of resolution scale
– 3. Therapist interventions: What therapist can do to help client resolve
– 4. Resolution state: What resolution looks like

IV. General Empathic Exploration for Problem-Relevant Experience
• Generic/baseline task for PE-EFT
• Client Mode of engagement: Experiential Search

• A. Marker: Problem-relevant experience:
• Any experience that draws client’s attention
– a. Client expresses energy/ interest in the experience
– b. Experience has personal relevance to client
– c. Incompleteness/complexity: Experience is powerful, troubling, incomplete, undifferentiated, global, abstract or external

B. Empathic Exploration Micro-sequence:
• (a) Therapist Initiation: Exploratory question
• (b) Client Response: Answer (description of experience) (may elaborate, initiate new topic)
• (c) Therapist Formulation: Exploratory Reflection (or similar comment showing receipt of answer) (may ask “fit question”)
• (d) Client Confirm/disconfirm (may initiate new topic)

C. Task Model for Empathic Exploration
• Stage 1: Marker
• Stage 2. Task initiation. Help identify particular client experience worth exploring further.
• Stage 3. Deepening: Exploratory manner & responses; Forms of Deepening Exploration

• (1) Redirecting client to internal experiencing:
– When C is external, abstract or intellectual: T:“So what does that feel like inside?”
• (2) Re-experiencing of particular experiences:
– Re-living particular experience(s) in imagination. (episodic memories) (T: “Can you take me through that? So there you were...”)
• (3) Searching edges of awareness:
– Explore unclear, vague, general; troubling, painful; puzzling, confusing; tangled, stuck, blocked; unfinished, missing; or incipient, emerging ("inklings") (T: “So the part that’s not quite clear to you is...”)
• (4) Differentiating experiencing:
– Specifying experience (T: “There are lots of kinds of anger; what is the quality of the anger you’re feeling right now?”)
• (5) Elaborating Experiencing: Filling in missing pieces of emotion schemes
– (a) Missing context or “aboutness”: sources, origins, situations (T: “What it is the sadness about?”) (=situational/perceptual)
– (b) Missing internal/bodily experiencing (T: “What does it feel like inside you?”) (=bodily/expressive)
– (c) Unsymbolized experiencing: global or unverbalizable (T:“How you describe it or picture it to yourself?”) (=verbal/symbolic)
– (d) Missing needs, wants or action tendencies (T: “How would you like it to be?”) (=motivational/behavioral)

Closure/Resolution:
• Stage 4: Client experiences some clarification of experience
• Stage 5: Client attains a sense of full understanding, and an appreciation and owning of the experience in its complexity or richness (“Now I know what that’s all about”)
• Stage 6: In addition to the above, client also feels a marked sense of relief (not feeling so distressed about it) or empowerment about the experience (knowing what to do about it)

V. Two Chairwork for Self-Evaluation Splits
• A. Conflict Split Marker
– 1. Two wishes or action tendencies
– 2. Description of contradiction, conflict between
– 3. Expression of struggle, coercion
• Prototypical Split = Decisional conflict
• Experience: uncomfortable "tornness"
• Alternative Forms:
– 1. Self-Evaluation (self-criticism)
– 2. Coaching splits (self-coercion)
– 3. Attribution splits (externalized; over-reaction to others)

B. Two Chair Dialogue for Conflict Splits: Client Resolution Model
1. Marker/Task Initiation: Describes split in which one aspect of self is critical of, or coercive toward, another aspect. Broadly: Describes two aspects, whether attributed or in somatic form.
2. Entry: Clearly expresses criticisms, expectations, or "shoulds" to self in concrete, specific manner.
3. Deepening: Experiencing chair may agree with critic (“collapse”); primary underlying feelings/needs begin to emerge in response to the criticisms. Critic differentiates values/standards.
4. Emerging shift: Clearly expresses needs and wants associated with a newly experienced feeling.
5. Softening: Genuinely accepts own feelings and needs. May show compassion, concern and respect for self.
6. Negotiation. Clear understanding of how various feelings, needs and wishes may be accommodated and how previously antagonistic sides of self may be reconciled.

C. Therapist Facilitating Responses
•Identify client marker (including pre-marker work)
•Elicit client collaboration in task
•Structure (set up) experiment
•Create separation & contact
•Promote owning of experience
•Intensify client arousal
•Access and differentiate underlying feelings in the experiencing self (including collapsed self process)
•Differentiate values and standards in the critical aspect
•Follow deepening forms of the conflict
•Facilitate identifying with; expressing; or acting on organismic need
•Bring contact to an appropriate close (=closure/ending experiment w/o resolution)
•Facilitate emergence of new organismic feelings
•Create a meaning perspective (=processing)
•Facilitate softening in critic (into fear or compassion)
•Facilitate negotiation between aspects of self re: practical compromises

VI. Conclusions:
A. Task Plurality…
• Empathic Exploration and Two Chairwork are clearly different processes:
– Different markers
– Different primary client modes of engagement
– Different facilitating therapist responses
– Different end points/resolutions
…Common Therapeutic Frame
• Yet both can be readily contained within one therapeutic frame:
– Therapeutic relationship: empathic attunement; genuine/caring personal bond; spirit of collaboration
– Way of working: constantly being adjusted to current client mode of engagement; focusing on key client tasks; supporting client growth, choice, empowerment
– Task structure: Six stage model: Marker; Entry; Dialectical Deepening; Emerging Shift; Broader Reflection; Empowerment/Action

• B. Also: Organization Framework 3: PE Emotion Theory
• Multiple aspects of experience connected by emotion
– Emotion Scheme model
– Perceptual, conceptual, bodily, need/action
• All emotions play important roles in human adaptation
– Even so-called negative emotions:
– Fear, shame, disgust, hopelessness etc.
• Multiple types of emotion response
– E.g., different kinds of anger
– Primary adaptive, primary maladaptive, secondary reactive, instrumental
• Multiple forms of emotion regulation:
– Access/approach
– Contain/distance

C. Broader Reflections : Pluralism vs. Integration
• We have consistently referred to PE (and EFT) as an Integrative therapy (primarily Person-centred, Gestalt)
• Tried to argue that this integration of different causes and client/ therapist processes also makes PE therapy pluralistic
• Also: Tried to show how plurality can be usefully organized within integrative frameworks
• But: Can integration be truly pluralistic?
– Is integrative pluralism an oxymoron?

D. Broader Reflections: Limits of Pluralism in PE-EFT?
• Left unanswered: How much can be integrated into Process-Experiential therapy without violating its integrative frameworks?
• What about elements of CBT? E.g.,
– Systematic desensitization
– Thought stopping
– Rational disputation of thinking errors
– Assertiveness training in groups

E. Proposed Test for Integrating New Elements in PE Therapy
1. Apply Therapy Principles:
• 1. Can empathic attunement to client immediate experience be maintained while carrying out this kind of work?
• 2. Can the therapist continue to offer an empathic, caring presence?
• 3. Can task collaboration be established with the client?
• 4. Can key client processes and facilitating therapist responses for this work be identified?
• 5. Is this a key task for clients?
• 6. Most importantly, can this work be pursued without the therapist becoming an expert on the client’s experience, thus interfering with the client’s personal power, responsibility and growth?

F. If a CBT Technique is not Consistent with PE principles?
• Strategy needed for developing parallel PE task models
– Accomplish what CBT techniques do
– Without violating relationship and client autonomy
1 Questions for Developing PE Task Models from CBT Techniques
• 1. What is the client marker for this kind of work?
• 2. What is the desired immediate outcome (resolution) of this kind of work?
• 3. What client modes of engagement does the technique seek to activate in order to reach resolution?
• 4. What therapist responses might facilitate these client modes of engagement without making the therapist into a content expert?
2. Developing PE Task Models from CBT Techniques: Resources
• 1. Empathic, caring, genuine, flexible, task-focused, empowering relationship
– Research evidence supports
• 2. Task analytic approach
– Leads to specificity of CBT without need for theory-driven expertise
• 3. Power of primary adaptive emotion processes to motivate change
– Don’t need therapist expertise/persuasion

VII. Beyond Foxes and Hedgehogs
• What we need most is to be able to integrate many things within a broader pattern
• Integrative pluralism
• Eagle… or homo sapiens?

The Hermeneutic Spiral: Start of Another Year in Scotland

Entry for 26 August 2007 (en route to Scotland):

We are becoming experts at leaving Ohio: Last year at this time, we were sprinting toward our department for Scotland, exhausted and overwhelmed by the work of tying up enough loose ends that our new life wouldn’t become totally unraveled before we could get our bearings. I had spent 4 weeks nonstop clearing out my lab and office at the University of Toledo; we had divided all of our possessions into 3 categories: leave in Toledo; take to Scotland; or Throw Away; the movers had come and gone with the Scotland part of the triage; we had made new wills and powers of attorney for various people who would act on our behalf during our absence; and we had deposited our youngest child at University. In the end, we left things in rather a mess, and Linda, the friend who is house sitting for us got stuck cleaning up after us. It took us two more trips back to Ohio to sort our house there out.

Now we are actually getting good at this, and were packed and ready to go the night before, early enough even to get a decent night’s sleep. This year, we had once again to take Kenneth back to university a couple days before we left for Scotland, and once again he was very glad to be on his own again, after a long summer with his parents. But this time, we all knew the drill, and the packing and leave-taking process went more smoothly and with much less stress, and Kenneth was looking forward to living with a suite of like minded friends. We left him yesterday afternoon minding the CWRU Go Club table at the student activities fair. After lunch with Brendan and Mayumi at their apartment nearby to Kenneth’s dorm, we left Cleveland, confident that our children and daughter-in-law will have a good year and will be there as a small support net for each other. On the way back to Toledo, we were repeatedly buffeted by a series of intense but brief thunderstorms, a consistent sign of summer in Ohio. Compared to these, the slow Scottish smirr is gentle and comforting.

So we complete the circle of a year, returning to the place where we began our Scottish Adventure one year ago (to paraphrase T.S. Eliot), to find that we know it for the first time: We now know what a year in Scotland looks, sounds, smells and feels like; we know the rhythms of daily, weekly and now yearly life. I know what my job is, something about which I had very little clue last year; I know that I can do it. That is, most of it, most of the time; to do all of it, all of the time, is clearly impossible!

So we depart, and commence another turning of what feels like a circle, except that it is really a spiral, maybe the kind of folded spiral that is the seven-circuit Cretan Labyrinth. Of course, to say that we start another turning of the spiral doesn’t tell whether this path we are travelling is spiraling up, as though we were ascending Glastonbury Tor (whose main path traces the pattern of the Cretan Labyrinth); or whether our way is spiraling downward (as if descending into the pit Dantean Hell (with its 9 circles of everlasting torment, something like my experience during my last several years in my previous job). And we do not always know either whether our journey spirals inward toward the core or centre of our life’s meaning while temporarily separating us from our ordinary external concerns (like going into the Labyrinth as a walking meditation or symbolic pilgrimage); or whether our way takes us out from the Labyrinth, away from the centre and back into the life of external connections and involvements (like when I went away to university expecting a contemplative existence and instead found myself plunged into a whole new world of relationships).

So here we are, entering the next circuit of the spiral: another year in our hermeneutic circle (which is actually a spiral), and we will have to see where it takes us: up or down; inward or outward. We will just have to see…

Kyte TV, Sausalito, APA, and Pleasanton

Entry for August 21, 2007 (traveling back to Ohio):

After the end of the Humanist Therapy conference on Thursday, David Rennie and I take BART back up to San Francisco, getting off at the Powell Street Station and walking up to Union Square together. I have arranged to meet my brother Joseph at this office there and go back with him to his place Sausalito.

Kyte TV. Along with his business partner Daniel, Joseph (Joe to his co-workers, but Joseph to his family) presides as chief technical officer over an office full of about 15 computer programmers (software engineers they’re called nowadays). The elevator opens directly and startlingly into their office, receptionist right in front of you. In the open room to the right, commanding a roof view of this part of San Francisco, Joseph sits at his desk; like most of his staff, he is working with two large computer monitors, side-by-side. The place feels intense: their flagship product, Kyte TV, launched just a couple months ago and they are Hot right now, expanding rapidly and bringing in capital and generally trying to hold it all together. It’s one of those internet start-up things that you read about, only this one’s happening to my brother.

When Joseph introduces me as his older brother, some of the programmers pretend not to believe him; one of them asks me if I’m really from another, even hotter start-up in the South Bay (Santa Clara county, San Jose) who has come to try to lure him away with lots of stock options, great working conditions etc). I deny it, saying I’m from Scotland; when he still doesn’t believe me, I say, “And ah’ve got this relly fake Sco’ish auccent tae pruive et!” This finally convinces him, and he desists.

CarShare. We’ve missed the 6:47 commuter bus, and anyway, my suitcase is too big, so Joseph gets on the internet and reserves a CarShare in a public parking garage a block and a half away. This is another one of those things that I’ve read about but never seen for myself: For four dollars an hour (2 dollars after hours), you can use a shared car for a fixed period of time. Joe has to get the parking garage guy to unlock that part of the garage; we go down, and sure enough, there’s his car-for-the-night waiting. He unlocks it using an electronic fob-shaped key, we get in, and away we go to Sausalito, through North San Francisco, the Presidio, over the Golden Gate Bridge, down into Sausalito, and finally up the steep hill to his place, a duplex perched overlooking Sausalito and its little bay. Sausalito is in shadow by now, but the sun is still golden-red on the hills to the east.

Turkish feast. Joseph’s wife Ebru and her mom, Guler, are there to greet us. Guler is visiting from Turkey for the month, and has apparently been spending most of her time cooking, so we are treated to a sumptuous Turkish feast, as she brings out one dish after another until we cry out for mercy, defeated by her culinary inexhaustibility. My cousin Elliott, one of the top OB docs in San Francisco, arrives about 8, directly from work delivering babies in high risk pregnancies. He keeps us spellbound with a long, tragic, and ultimately uplifting story about the baby he has just delivered. He reminds me that we have known each other for some 40 years, since he visited my family on his way to the Philippines and I introduced him the I Ching. As night falls and deepens, we discuss work, family, community, and music, working our way through Guler’s many dishes. Guler, who is a physician also, doesn’t speak English, but understands bits and pieces, and every so often interjects something into the conversation via Ebru.

I didn’t manage to get my Friday morning talk for APA finished before the first conference, and now I am running out of time to finish it. After Elliott leaves and Joseph, Ebru and Guler go to bed, I sit up for a while in their living room looking out over the Bay, working on my talk, a meta-analysis of humanistic therapy outcome with depression. When I can’t keep my eyes open and more, I go to bed.

APA talk. The next morning, after a lovely Turkish breakfast, Joseph drives the CarShare car back into San Francisco, where we drop it off at the same garage before continuing on to Joseph’s office. I continue working on my presentation, then when I’ve run out of time, head down to the Moscone Center for our session. Jeanne and Les are already there. We set up for the session, and I continue working on my talk while Les, and then Jeanne present. Finally, about 10 minutes before it’s time for me to present, I call a halt.

We are amazed when our session peaks out at about 200 people, halfway through Les’ talk. However, after Les’ talk, people begin leaving, and by the time I’m presenting there are only about 30 people left! So much for our 15 minutes of fame! It appears that we have seriously miscalculated our audience, because we have come prepared to impress the positivists and Powers That Be with all our statistics, only to run into a large audience of practitioners, Our audience is bored out of their minds by all our Science and as a result leave in droves once it becomes clear that we are Not On Their Wavelength. We have been away from APA for a long time, never really got into its culture, and have forgotten that in spite of the pretensions to science in its upper echelons, it is primarily made up of practitioners. Maybe next year we will do better!

Old friends. After this session, I look up my former colleague Wes at his poster session and have a very nice visit with him before he packs up and ends for Yosemite for a California Experience. I try to find the Humanistic Psychology hospitality suite but end up crashing the Gay & Lesbian Psychologists instead, so I give up and go look at the book room. However, my heart is not in it, I am delighted to run into Bill Stiles and persuade him to go off for a beer and some lunch. After this, I head back to Joseph’s office and after some retail therapy before taking BART back to Pleasanton to join my family.

Pleasanton. We spend the rest of our California visit hanging out in Pleasanton, going on long runs with Kenneth, going out to dinner or making dinner, celebrating anniversary and birthdays, catching up with my other brother Willy and his partner Katie and pretty much vegging out. I find myself in need of a BBC Radio 3 fix, catching up on Composer of the Week and Late Junction. Kenneth is absorbed by Go studies, having been to meet a Go master in Palo Alto and keeps reporting back excitedly about his latest discoveries. In and around this, I manage to make significant headway with my email, so that I won’t be hopelessly behind when I return (I hope!). Finally, tonight, after an obligatory visit to Diane’s beloved pizza restaurant, we say goodbye to her mom and head back to the airport and Ohio.

Northern California is our Third Home, along with Ohio and now Glasgow, and closer to my heart than either, but we only get brief visits, and now it is time to go. When we see it next, it will be December and unless there is a really bad drought, the hills will be green and alive. The air will be crisp or even cold, and our extended families will be waiting there for us to brighten the Dark Time of the Year.

California in August; Humanistic Therapy Conference

Entry for 21 August 2007:

California in August. Although the cross-quarter has passed and we are more than half-way to the autumnal equinox, the August sun is still intense in California. The air is dry; it has been months since the last rain, and the hills are a golden brown. The blue jays screech; the hawks circle the hills, riding the thermals in the late afternoon. The crops – peach, apricot, tomato, watermelon, almond, walnut, grape (all of which have to be watered by great irrigation systems) ripen, one after another, as the late summer advances.

Growing up in the Central Valley of Northern California, I hated the hot, slow summers, and longed for the crisp mornings of Fall and the return of the green. Only when school started in September did I begin to feel alive again, and I always felt as though I was awakening from a long nap. Murray Creek, where my parents moved after I had gone away to university, at least is redeemed by the beauty of the little valley, with its California live oaks, manzanita, black-berry bushes overrunning the banks of the creek, and other foothill vegetation.

Millbrae. After our brief weekend at Murray Creek, we drove back to Pleasanton, a suburban community in the East San Francisco Bay Area. After stopping for just a few minutes at Diane's mother's house, Diane dropped me off at the BART station so I could take the train into San Francisco and beyond, just south of San Francisco Airport. There, the first Humanist Therapy Conference was to take place, sponsored by APA’s Division of Humanistic Psychology and master-minded by David Cain. Just to prove that I could do it, I took the train to the end of the line, Millbrae, and walked the last half mile, over Highway 101 and along the mud flats of the bay at low tide, until I reached the hotel. It was Kenneth who had noted that Millbrae is a Scottish place name, out of place in the midst of all the Spanish names: Palo Alto (where I was born while my dad was in law school at Stanford), Los Altos, San Jose, etc. According to the Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millbrae%2C_California), the name refers to the rolling hills owned by the Mills family. (Apparently, we are not the first to have seen a connection between Scotland and the California Coast Range.)

Old and new friends. Les was waiting for me, had been waiting for me for quite a while owing to a confusion over arrival times, so we immediately left for dinner with David Cain, Ernesto Spinelli, David Rennie, Maurice Friedman, and others. Les and I hadn’t seen each other in a year, and so we failed to fully engage with the others as we tried to quickly catch up with each other. How is Scotland?, he wanted to know. What’s happening at York University (the Canadian one)?, I asked. The meal, at a fake English restaurant, was forgettable, but we had fun figuring out how to share our meals in order to have the widest variety of food.

Process-Experiential Therapy Workshop. The next morning was my big presentation: a three-hour workshop on Process-Experiential/Emotion-Focused Therapy, for which I had rashly promised to do a live demonstration for an unknown audience (“You’re crazy!”, Les had said, when he heard this). I was relieved that David Cain had scheduled Les at the same time as my presentation, because I figured that that would decrease the size of the audience. In the end, about 30 people turned up, a really nice size for a session like this.

I discovered 10 minutes before the session that the sound for my video example would not play through the PA system. (iTunes played, but not the sound for my digitized QuickTime video, even though it played just fine on my speakers. Hm…) Improvising quickly, I pulled up the transcript for the example, and enacted it for the audience, as I had done a couple of times before. When I said something about being a heretic from the Person-centred approach, Natalie Rogers (Carl’s daughter and the developer of an expressive arts approach to PCA), chided me to worrying about such things, and proclaimed my practice to be absolutely person-centred.

We did the live demonstration in the middle of the room for a change, so everyone could hear. The demonstration, a PE two-chair process for a decisional split, went very nicely, and the client and I were able to immerse ourselves in her experience and help her move a bit in the direction of some resolution (a level 4 I would say). It always amazes me how a kind of bubble develops around the client and me when I do one of these demonstrations. It also always amazes me that the person in the client role gets something out of these artificial, spotlighted demonstrations. But in my experience they almost always do!

The three hours seemed to fly by, but I was exhausted at the end of it. And I was very pleased with the appreciative feedback form the audience, including Art Bohart, who said that he was glad that he had been able to see me work, found it really different from Les, and really liked it.

A personal view of the rest of the humanistic therapy conference. The rest of the conference was great: Almost everyone either presented video or did a live demonstation (or both). There were representatives from most of the tribes there: classical person-centred, existential, focused-oriented, transpersonal, expressive arts, gestalt, and lots of process-experiential/emotion-focused. There were great discussions, comparing and contrasting our approaches, but ideology was minimized or put in its place by the constant reversion to actual practice. That’s how I like it! Show me what you actually do; then we can talk about theory!

Les, Jeanne, Rhonda and I had far-ranging discussions about where we think PE-EFT is going, in relation to the domination of CBT. At times, we are tempted to despair, but Jeanne and I in particular found ourselves expressing hope and optimism based on what we’ve all been able to accomplish so far. For a long time, Les has really tried to have a big influence in the larger field of psychotherapy, a very difficult goal, in which I believe he has largely succeeded, even though it is difficult to see the larger picture when you are down in the trenches. Compared to Les, Jeanne and I have had a much smaller goal: really just to be heard and to have a place in the unfolding development of psychotherapy in general and humanistic therapy in particular. This all emerged gradually over several long heart-to-heart discussions, in which Les expressed amazement at our optimism. I guess you could say that our optimism is a victory for low expectations!

This was the first humanistic therapy conference. Without too much promotion, there were still 165 attendees, and for those if us who were there, it was a brilliant success. According to the organizers, the conference did well enough to justify doing it again, maybe even next year. We are looking forward to it. We’ll tell our friends, too!