Drawing the Ideal Self (Personal Construct Psychology - PCP)

This episode introduces a new technique to explore the impact of physical health problems through the exploration of personal construing. Concerns about our bodies can be persistent and may be very distressing so understanding what lies behind the distress is important if we want to help someone. The steps of the process are described here but there is also a more detailed video example on my You Tube channel.

This month’s episode will be focussed on time.  I listened to a few things on the radio about time and read some articles which were all very interesting and sparked this episode. I summarise the information from them and think about what Dorothy Rowe had to say about it and a few ideas for exploring a person’s personal constructions. 

References

All in the mind(Why it is hard to recall 2021)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001scxf

A sense of time(Can we learn a sense of time?)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0003qxf

Do we have a sense of time?(Connections between body signals and time perception)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct4y3w

A stopwatch on the brain's perception of time(Emotions affect awareness of time passing)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/01/psychology-time-perception-awareness-research

Rowe, D. (1995). Dorothy Rowe’s Guide to Life.

This episode has an idea you can experiment with as an exploration of yourself. Miller Mair’s Community of Self is an interesting and rather playful way to take a look at yourself as a number of characters engaged in ‘producing’ you. I have taken some excepts from a paper by Mair and if you are interested, it would be worth reading the whole paper for more about the background to it.

References:

The Community of Self. Ch.8 in Towards a Radical Redefinition of Psychology. The selected works of Miller Mair, by Winter, D. & Reed, N. (2015).  

Cummins, P., & Moran, H. (2023). The PCP Pocketbook of Personal Construct Psychology Techniques. Available on Amazon only.

Grieg, A. & MacKay, T. (2023). The Homunculi Approach To Social And Emotional Wellbeing. 2nd Edition. 

Happy New Year! This month I have been thinking about the way we might experience being construed by teachers. This is meaningful throughout our lives and can affect the way we construe ourselves. It was sparked by listening to the BBC Radio 4 Life Changing programme which reminded me how important that is:. The episode was from May 2023: Overheard. The programme blub says, “Dr Sian Williams talks to people who have lived through extraordinary events that have reshaped their lives in the most unpredictable ways.”

In response to that programme, I thought I would explore how I was construed by teachers. I re-read my secondary school reports and could see connections between how I was construed, how my construing developed and the links with my professional interests. 

For this month’s episode, I am reading a chapter from a lovely book by Trevor Butt and Vivien Burr, Invitation to Personal Construct Psychology (2004). This is about the fact that we might all do things that make us unhappy, unhealthy or unfulfilled. They explain why we need to understand construing when we wonder why people continue with behaviours which seem so obviously to their detriment.

Quite a number of us will be working with adults or children and young people who are referred because they have difficulty containing their angry feelings. A PCP approach has an emphasis on understanding the person’s construing so I am using a chapter by Peter Cummins to provide a concise explanation of a PCP approach to working with anger. It is a book worth reading for a good variety of authors, group and individual approaches and for all age groups.

Reference: Cummins, P. (Ed.). Working with Anger. A Constructivist Approach. Wiley. 

Have you wondered about whether there is a PCP construction of addiction? Butt and Burr have a useful chapter which I will read for this podcast. People are complex beings, with a tendency to make connections between experiences, and then to develop rituals and routines so they can anticipate them more efficiently. In terms of PCP, the issue is described as a dependency rather than addiction, a factual rather than critical label because we all have dependencies.  This description directs our attention to understanding the meaning of their dependency, and looking out for the losses associated with giving it up. 

You might want to listen at a slightly faster speed. I am aware that I read rather slowly in order to make fewer mistakes. 

Butt, T. & Burr, V. (2004). Invitation to Personal Construct Psychology, 2nd Edition. 

Often it can be helpful to go back to the basics of PCP theory and get a clearer understanding than you had first time around. I found a really nice explanation of a construct in Richard Butler’s book. I think he provides a  good summary and I wanted to share it with you. If you already feel secure in your understanding, you might like to hear the way he expresses it and then take some time to consider the way you explain constructs to other people.

References

Butler, R. (2009). Coming to terms with personal construct theory. Ch. 1 in Butler, R., Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Wiley-Blackwell

Ravenette, T. (1999). Personal Construct Theory in Educational Psychology. A Practitioner’s View. 

This episode is about exploring what the client expects from their counselling sessions. Fay Fransella and Peggy Dalton remind us how important it is to do this early in the counselling relationship and they provide a description of a first session in PCP counselling. I hope you find it useful.

Reference

Fransella, F., and Dalton, P. (1990). Personal Construct Counselling in Action. Sage. 

Watching the news has been pretty miserable over the last year or so with so many people trying to flee awful situations. I have been thinking a lot about the people who are traumatised by experiences, and about the people who seem to recover well from similar experiences. This is unrelated to an objective assessment of the experience’s awfulness and closely related to their personal construing. Similarly, people can be devastated by common experiences, or by experiences which are not dangerous. The danger lies in the psychological threat of the experience. This month’s podcast is is about Kenneth Sewell’s model for understanding post-traumatic stress and for the components of PCP psychotherapy. 

Reference

Sewell, K. (2003) An Approach to Post-Traumatic Stress. In F. Fransella (Ed.) The Essential Practitioner’s Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. John Wiley & Sons. 

Dorothy Rowe is famous for her popular best seller on depression, Depression: The way out of your Prison. You may not know that she was fan of Personal Construct Psychology because she does not highlight this in her books. I thought I would read a chapter from her Guide to Life, a short, very readable book which is a great introduction for people who are new to PCP.

Rowe D. (1995). Dorothy Rowe’s Guide to Life.

Rowe, D. (2003). Depression: The way out of your Prison.

This month the episode is about laddering, which came as a request from a listener. A great request because it is an extremely powerful technique so should be used with great care and full attention being paid to the person you are working with. Laddering can very quickly get to aspects of a person’s construing they may not have expressed in words, so the experience can be surprising to them - for good or bad reasons. Learning to use laddering is very important for PCP practitioners because it is a way to explore how the person’s choices in their daily life are connected to their core constructs.

This episode looks at two papers on laddering, one by Fransella and one by Walker and Crittenden. Laddering is something that looks and sounds very easy but it requires theoretical understanding to use it well. Kelly proposed that a person has many, many constructs and that they are organised in a hierarchical system. Some constructs will be extremely important to the person - their core constructs. Having an awareness of a person’s core constructs will be very important if we want to understand them better. The authors here describe laddering and pick up some of the common questions about process.

Fransella, F. (2003). Some Skills and Tools for Personal Construct Practitioners. Ch. 10 in Fransella, F. (Ed). International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology.

Walker, B., and Crittenden, N. (2012). The use of Laddering: Techniques, Applications and Problems. Ch. 3 in Caputi, P., Viney, L.L., Walker, B., and Crittenden, N. Personal Construct Methodology.

I am sending this message now in case anyone is just about to print and make the ESP cards!

I have been able to re-order cards, making it easier to see what is in each category and to print the sets. I have also added a few more cards, based on my work with children in the last couple of weeks. I will be adding the new document to my website by the end of 12/11/22. In future, if I add new cards, I will add them at the end of the document so you can easily find them and just print the new cards.

I am also making the same ordered set without the word labels in case you want to use the cards without them and elicit both poles of the construct. You could also add labels in a different language. I know there are people in the PCP therapy schools in Serbia and Italy who might find them useful.

I am aware that this set of cards do not show people with visible disabilities. I will address that in future when I have worked out the best way to do it.

This month’s episode is about slot ratting or slot movement. Have you wondered why you haven’t been able to keep up with a desired change in yourself? Have you tried to help someone who wants to make changes, knows what to do/how to be in their new self, and yet they cannot sustain them. Slot rattling is a really useful concept that can help us to understand one reason this might happen.

April’s episode is about holidays, from a PCP perspective. I thought it might be interesting to have a think about this is case you want a little light PCP thinking to consider whilst you are away. If you haven’t decided on a holiday yet, you might find it useful to think about some of this before you make your arrangements. I reference an interesting paper by Beverley Walker: Travelling: “We don’t call it travelling; we call it living.” If you do try to order the book this paper is in, take care to get the right one for your own language - it is also in German.

Reference

Walker, B. (2003). Travelling: “We don’t call it travelling; we call it living.” in Scheer, Jorn. W. (Ed.) Crossing Borders - Going Places. Personal Constructions of Otherness. ISBN: 9783898062961

This episode is an answer to a question I hear often, "How can I use PCP approach in work with children and young people?" I thought I would talk about my own approach but please remember that other practitioners will have a completely different and equally successful approach. This is one of the great benefits of PCP - there is no prescribed way, so it is about gradually working out your own way of doing things.  This means that the approach is accessible to all professionals working with children and young people. Although I am a psychologist, I hope this explanation could be useful to people of all those professions. 

Ian is a PCP psychotherapist and a social worker who has been using a PCP approach throughout his career. He talks about his journey to date and how he uses PCP in his daily work.

Ian’s contact details are Ian Gillman-Smith, Independent Social Work Consultant, UKCP Registered Psychotherapist, Registered Social Worker

Email: ian@gillmansmith.com

Website: www.iangillmansmith.co.uk

References

Peggy Dalton & Gavin Dunnett (2005) A Psychology for Living ISBN 0-471-93549-2

Miller Mair (2014) Another Way of Knowing: The Poetry of Psychological Inquiry.

Winter & Reed (Eds.) (2014) Towards a Radical Redefinition of Psychology: The selected works of Miller Mair (World Library of Mental Health).

Fay Fransella (2021) Inquiring Man: The Psychology of Personal Constructs. (3rd Edition)

We all have roles to play, some more comfortably than others. This new technique is a variation on Drawing the Ideal Self for use with adults, children and young people. It explores a role (e.g. sister, parent, athlete, teacher, reader) and can be used to find ways to move forward in the role or to set personal targets. It may be useful to professionals to explore with people they try to help but it can also be used by an individual in their personal development.

This month’s episode is about a paper by Tom Ravenette, Educational Psychologist and PCP interventionist. The paper presents a challenge to those of us who are in roles where people seek advice from us. The paper is ‘Never, never, never give advice’: an essay in professional practice (1980). If you work in a situation where you might be asked for your advice, Tom urges caution and has some suggestions for alternatives.

December’s (slightly late) episode is focussed on Finn Tschudi’s ABC. This is a great tool for exploring change to a preferred pole of a construct and elaborating some of the barriers to change. I use two examples from my own life and talk through them in the podcast.

An interview with Diane Allen, Counselling Psychologist and PCP Psychotherapist.about her career path and her love of PCP.

October’s episode of the podcast is about the importance of the choice of a bag and its contents. This was inspired by an episode of Thinking Allowed (BBC Radio 4) where a paper  was discussed about handbags and identity in dementia, and I give an outline of what they had to say. It made me think more about the bag in Drawing the Ideal Self and the way a bag and its contents illustrate the construing of self - both non-ideal and ideal. The references are in the show notes available on my website: drawingtheidealself.co.uk

August 2020's edition is in in a better podcast style. It tells the story of how the technique came out of a session with a young person at a time when I was stuck in my work with him. On the day it emerged, I had no idea that it would be so successful. I hope you will find it useful and it will encourage you to design your own techniques. The references are in the show notes available on my website: drawingtheidealself.co.uk

This month's episode is thinking about PCP and why it is useful for thinking about and as a therapeutic approach to use with young people (and adults) with autism.

The idea for this came from someone on my mailing list who was asking about a PCP take on the adjustments we are making in ways of working in the pandemic.