One Month’s Mind for Ann Elliott

Entry for 22 July 2012:

On 22 June 2012, one month ago, my mother Ann Helena Kearney Elliott died of complications from brain cancer in Paso Robles, California, at the age of 83.  Today I’m marking the one month’s mind of her passing.  I spent the last seven weeks of her life with various combinations of my siblings, helping care for her.  It was a powerful experience, which has left me in a different place psychologically, contemplating what it means for her to be no longer physically present in my life, and what my priorities are this point going forward.

If you are interested in learning more about her, my siblings and I have posted an obituary/account of her life online at: http://www.murraycreek.net/ann_k_elliott.html .

In addition, during her illness, I kept a journal/poem sequence documenting the journey we traveled with her. At more than 80 pages, it’s too long to post on this blog and is currently only available as a Google document at: http://murraycreek.net/robert/conversations_mom.html .

(For best results, you may want to download it.)

Here are the two sections that I used for my talk in Antwerp, the opening section and a later one:

0. Saturday Afternoon, 4 May: Arrival

I arrive, full of grand ideas

about the deep and needed

conversations we’ll have.

But I find you past all that,

With your right brain

In charge of what you say.

Instead, we converse in catch phrases.

Surprisingly, these reveal

Deep and zen-like richness.

11. Thursday 17 May: Follow the Leader

Perplexed and confused,

By the many twists and turns

In this story,

We have given up trying to know

What will happen next

On this journey of yours.

When you were still mobile, every hour or so,

You’d get up from your chair or bed,

Without saying or sometimes even without knowing

Where you were going to go.

“Where are you going?” I asked one day.

“Follow the leader,” you said.

Saturday Adventures in Ayrshire: Crossraguel Abbey & The Bachelors Club

Entry for 21 July 2012:

For this week’s Saturday Adventure we got off to an early start, allowing us to see more than we usually do.   We started at a lovely, underrated Historic Scotland site: Crossraguel Abbey, a ruined abbey mostly from the 13^th and 15^th centuries, miraculously well-preserved from the dissolution of the monasteries and the ravages of the Reformation.  Much of the church, cloister and two impressive tower houses are largely intact.  Sitting right on the A77 about an hour’s drive south and west from Glasgow, the grounds are very well-kept. The fields around it were busy with harvesting.  We happily rambled around the place for a couple of hours, exploring all the nooks and crannies we could find, examining the ancient stonework, tracing the path of the little underground watercourse built for the latrine, and climbing the four story 15^th century gatehouse tower, with wonderful views of the surrounding country side.  The site specializes in information and exhibits about stonework, so we even got to try our hands at some stone carving on a piece of local sandstone, using the maul and (very dull) chisel supplied. 

After that, we borrowed the key from the Historic Scotland woman in charge of the Crossraguel Abbey site and took brief side trip to the remains of Maybole Collegiate Church in the nearby village. It's another ruined church from the 14th century, the most puzzling feature is which is the presence of a wall, a much later addition, that half-blocks one of the church's two doors.   

At this point it was not yet even 3pm, so on the way back to Glasgow we are stopped at the Bachelor’s Club in Tarbolton, where Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns took dancing lessons, started a debating club, and generally hung out with other unmarried men from the area.  The docent, a cheery and intense old fellow, was very pleased to see us, reminded us that 21 July was the anniversary of Robert Burns’ death, and happily showed us around the place, which is remarkably small and well-kept.  The family of the owner lived downstairs in two small rooms (which also housed their two cows), but upstairs was a largish room that passed for the Tarbolton town hall.  This room is about the size of our bedroom in Hyndland and is filled with original chairs, all 300 and 400 years old, as well as other pieces of period furniture and lots of Burns memorabilia.  The docent was full of useful and entertaining stories and gladly chattered at us until we ran out of time and had to excuse ourselves.  We complimented him on his story-telling and noted that he probably had many more things he could tell us.  As we left, he told us he planned to retired by the end of the year and said, “You’ve made my day.”  Later, at dinner with our friends Franny and Robert, we toasted Robert Burns on the occasion 216^th anniversary of his death at the age of 37.

Tenth World PCE Conference in Antwerp

Entry for 16 July 2012:

I’d not been back in Scotland for more than 10 days before I was off again, this time to the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy.  First I went to Veldhoven for another EFT Level 3 supervision day, then it was back to Antwerp for the Tenth Conference of the World Association for Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and Counselling.  This was like a return to the beginning, because the very first of the these conferences was also in Belgium (1988, Leuven), and many of the same players were present: Among them were: Greet Vanaerschot (who gave the plenary lecture on the first night), Mia Leijssen (who made several brief appearances), Germain Lietaer (who was in charge of the first conference), Paul Dierick (a PhD student at the time) among others.

My keynote address was at midday the next day.  I had found myself unable to work on it while I was in California helping care for my mother, so I didn’t start working on my slides until I returned to Scotland.  I finished it two days before we left, but started coming down with a cold after I arrived in Belgium and was not feeling too well by the time I gave it.  We spent the two hours before my talk fighting with the equipment, so I was quite nervous by the time I started.  I’d never been a World PCE conference keynote speaker before, and these talks are often of historical importance, or controversial, or both.  And of course I had way too much material and didn’t have a clear strategy for dealing with this.  I’d also been struggling with the need to somehow integrate what I’d been through with my mother for 7 weeks with my work as a researcher and therapist.  So the night before I added sections of the Conversations Journal Poem Sequence to the beginning and end of my talk.  In the event this was both personally satisfying and also fit well with my talk, underscoring the fundamentally Person-centred nature of the work I do as an EFT therapist.  The abstract for my talk is given at the end of this entry, and I’ll soon do an entry here on the Conversations piece.

Then Brian Rodgers and I did a thematically-linked panel of outcome results and case studies in the late afternoon on the same day as my keynote.  After that, first thing the next morning Graham Westwell, Beth Friere and I did a panel on our person-centred-experiential therapy competence scale, which turned out to be a lot of fun. 

By this time, however, I was pretty wiped out from my cold and lack of sleep.   I dragged myself through the rest of the conference.  I had to miss the last half day of the conference of the final plenary panel in order to fly to Italy to make up training I’d had to cancel last May in Florence and Rome.  However, I did catch interesting and stimulating EFT presentations by Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman, and Laco Timulak, including Jeanne and Laco’s new work developing EFT for Generalised Anxiety Difficulties, which I found very promising.  And Rhonda reported further details on the Self-soothing task. 

The conference banquet was one of the best I’ve even attended, in “Horta House”, an art noveaux event space near Rubens’ House in Antwerp.  I let myself relax in the company of Germain and Greet sitting on either side of me, while the jazz washed over us as we talked and ate an excellent conference meal.  For the occasion, Nele Stinckins wrote a song parody of Funicula, Funiculi, satirising the keynote speeches (including mine) and minor conference glitches; this was performed by a chorus of conference organisers, while Nele and some of the other Belgian women did the can-can.  Amazing!

Here is the Abstract of my keynote talk: Working with anxiety difficulties in Person-Centered-Experiential psychotherapies: Theory, research and practice

Anxiety difficulties are common in clinical and nonclinical populations and are a clinically and theoretically important recent focus for Person-Centered-Experiential (PCE) psychotherapies.  In this presentation I summarize current and emerging theory, research and practice with clinical anxiety, focusing particularly on social anxiety and emotion-focused therapy (EFT, also known as process-experiential therapy).

First, I summarize three current theories of anxiety: (a) person-centered, which emphasizes conditions of worth and incongruence; (b) focusing-oriented, which points to difficulties accessing immediate experiencing and maintaining working distance; and (c) EFT, which locates the source of anxiety difficulties in early experiences of rejection, neglect, abuse or bullying by significant others, resulting in a harsh internal critic.  This generates primary maladaptive shame and fear, which turn motivates behavioral and emotional avoidance or self-interruption. 

Second, I report the results of a meta-analysis of 19 outcome studies of PCE therapies for range of anxiety difficulties, most commonly supportive or person-centered therapies carried out by CBT researchers.  Results indicate large amounts of pre-post change (d = .94), medium-sized controlled effects (d = .5), but a medium-sized negative comparative effect vs. CBT (d = -.39).  I then summarize highly promising results from an ongoing study of PCE for social anxiety, which points to the possibility of developing more effective PCE approaches for anxiety.

Finally, using the results of this study, I describe a general therapeutic approach for working with this client group, including: (a) establishing a genuine, empathic, caring relationship; (b) explicating anxiety-generating processing by careful unfolding or re-experiencing of anxiety-provoking situations coupled with work on the client’s internal critic and self-interruption processes; (c) focusing, empathic affirmation and emotion regulation work to strengthen the sense of self; (d) work to transform core emotions that generate anxiety into new, more adaptive emotional responses; and (e) consolidation of client change.

The Return of Saturday Adventures: Skelmorlie Aisle

After seven weeks in California helping care for my mother in her final illness, I finally returned to Scotland this week.  Today, after a long break, Diane and I took the train to the seaside town of Largs, on the Firth of Clyde, where we were finally able to see the Skelmorlie Aisle.  Apparently, in Scots, the word "Aisle" refers to the transept or side-arm of a cruciform church.  In this case the nave was torn down more than 200 years ago, leaving this lovely chapel, with unusual painted wooden ceiling, in primitive allegorical style, from 1638, along with an ornate carved stone tomb, both in amazingly good shape.  To get in, you have to sign in and borrow the key from the Largs Museum, which is only open 2-5pm in the summer months.  The ceiling panels depict Largs through the 4 seasons of the year.  Above and between these are allegorical paintings depicting Biblical stories like Adam & Eve and packed packed with obscure symbols.  Another hidden gem!  I'm looking forward to more Saturday Adventures this summer.  And of course its good to be back to my normal life again!

Emotion-Focused Therapy Level 2 Workshop Series for 2012-13

Facilitated by Robert Elliott & Colleagues

Professor of Counselling, University of Strathclyde

Six Friday-Saturday Sessions, 9.30-16.30:

9-10 November 2012; 8-9 February 2013; 3-4 May 2013

John Anderson Campus (Glasgow City Centre)

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.  This series has been restructured from its previous format and will now follow a schedule of three two-day Friday-Saturday sessions spread over the 2012-13 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 case formulation and modes of engagement

·      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 and self-damaging behaviour

·      Compassionate Self-soothing for painful self states

·      Empty chair work for unfinished business

This series is scheduled for the following dates:

Autumn 2012:

9-10 November

Winter-Spring 2013:

8-9 February

3-4 May

• Enrolment is set for a minimum of 15, with variable staffing to accommodate up to 30. 

• Course fee: Until 15 Oct: £395; after 15 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. Online booking and payments can be made at the following link:  http://onlineshop.strath.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?catid=45&modid=2&compid=1

• 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).

Emotion-Focused Psychotherapy: 2012 Level One Training

Facilitated by Robert Elliott, Lorna Carrick, and Anja Rutten

Tuesday 28th – Friday 31st August 2012, 9.30 – 17.00

University of Strathclyde, 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, Antonio Pascual-Leone 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 seventh 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

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

Afternoon: Accessing Primary Adaptive Emotions & Restructuring Emotion Schemes; Empirical support

• 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

• Summary of Research evidence

Thursday:

Morning: Active Expression Processes - I

• Dialectical constructivist models of self

• Two chair dialogue and splits

• Accessing adaptive and problematic emotional responses

• Skills practice

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; Open marker work

• Review of tasks

• Strategies for identifying and selecting tasks

• Skills practice

Afternoon: Personalized Applications

• 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.

Anja Rutten, MSc

Anja is an experienced and practising counsellor and supervisor and works as a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Counselling at Staffordshire University. She is director of the final year of the MSc Psychotherapeutic Counselling. She also teaches undergraduate psychology modules on psychological interventions, counselling and autism. Before she joined Staffordshire University, Anja worked for the National Autistic Society, where she was responsible for leading and developing two UK-wide national services schemes, offering nation-wide befriending and social opportunities to people on the autism spectrum. She is currently combining her research interests in counselling and autism by studying for a part-time PhD at Strathclyde University under the supervision of Professor Robert Elliott, investigating therapy experiences of clients with Asperger syndrome and working towards the evaluation of person-centred/emotion-focused therapy for this group of clients.

Application Information

If you would like to reserve a place on this training course, please complete and return the application form overleaf. Places are strictly limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

The fee for this four-day event is has been set at £495. 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 2012.  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).

Please also contact Jan Bissett for other events and courses on our advanced professional training and psychological therapies knowledge exchange programmes.

Reflections on Review in PsycCritiques of Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature

Entry for 13 April 2012:

See: http://psyccritiquesblog.apa.org/2012/04/it-seems-so-counterintuitive.html

This is a really interesting book review and it sounds like an even more interesting book, by Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature.  Pinker argues that contrary to what we commonly believe, human beings are actually becoming not more violent but less violent over historical time, and especially over the past several centuries, including the most recent 100 years. 

The APA blog folks are asking for comments on why Pinker’s point seems so counter-intuitive.  It seems to me to be obvious and implicit in Pinker's point about the role of the mass media in overall violence reduction: that learning in detail about others’ lives through accounts in books and newspapers enables us to find empathy and compassion instead of demonizing or dismissing others who appear to be very different from us.  It seems to me that the flip side of this is perceiving violence as more prevalent than it actually is: We recognize ourselves in the Other's suffering, accessing both compassion for the Other and fear for ourselves.

In the 1990's I did a treatment development study comparing CBT to Process-Experiential therapy for crime-related PTSD.   Given how high profile criminal victimization is in the media, and how preoccupied people in our culture are with crime, we were very surprised at how hard it was to recruit participants.  We ended up concluding that there is an exaggerated cultural preoccupation with crime, fed by the news accounts continually boosting criminal victimization into our awareness, making it psychologically more available than would be expected from actual frequency.  And that was before the CSI and NCIS franchise really took off after the 9/11 attack! 

And then there is the very human tendency to experience things as generally going to hell.  This is nothing new: it dates back to our ancient myths about the Garden of Eden and the lost Golden Age.  It seems that we have been convinced that things are getting worse for a very long time!