PESI Proposal for Workshop

                                          Audrey E. Ellenwood, Ph.D.; L.J.M.Brok, MD

 What is the problem the seminar is solving:

All therapists, no matter how experienced, will encounter clients which they perceive to be more difficult and resistant to change or suggestions.

As a result the client’s therapeutic progress is either halted or slowed. When this happens the therapeutic process can be easily led into an impasse which can result in either:

(a) Early termination of the therapy process or

(b) Clients just disappearing never to return to a session. 

Does my brochure narrative, objectives and outline clearly identify the problem? 

Yes

 What are the techniques/solutions that the seminar will show the seminar attendees?

I will introduce eighteen professional therapeutic roles that therapists mostly play in their sessions with families and individual clients.

Each of these roles can be employed to create change during sessions with difficult clients or when an impasse develops in a session.

I will present and clarify through role plays and /or videos a schema of the various eighteen professional therapeutic roles. This schema includes:

            1. The description of each role and the therapeutic techniques mostly used when playing this role.                                                                                                   

                        2. The positive use of each role

                        3. The description of the way how the therapist is seduced to play this role by the      roles the family members play and the personal life experiences of the therapist.

                       4. An explanation how this process of seduction can lead to a stagnation in the flexibility of the behaviour of the therapist and an impasse in the therapeutic process.

                       5. A description and explanation of the risks the therapist has to take in order to move beyond a preferred and stagnated professional therapeutic role,.

                       6. An outline of the most effective therapeutic techniques to employ with each professional therapeutic role.

How use of the various professional therapeutic roles can empower and enhance client resources within a multi-contextual context.

I will explain how different psychotherapeutic models/schools each have a preferred set of used therapeutic techniques and how this will lead to a use of some more preferred therapeutic roles in the sessions and how this can enhance and empower the resources of the client system but also can become a hindrance in the creative use of their resources when the roles are too fixed and rigid. .

I will explain and show through role play how the therapist can open new roads to hidden resources of the family by using different therapeutic roles that make use of different therapeutic techniques.

Clinician’s practice and their client’s be transformed…what will they each “look-like” at the end of the seminar.

Novice and experienced therapists will learn by explanation and experience in the role plays how their (preferred)professional therapeutic role and the therapeutic techniques connected to this role, particularly in periods of more stress during the sessions, can hinder or completely stop client progress. 

This seminar will train a clinician to use more different therapeutic roles and the connected techniques in more different (stressful) situations during the therapeutic process.

This will transform the therapist in a more flexible, creative, and manoeuvrable person during his sessions, especially in difficult client situations.

More precisely:

The intertwining of personal client variables and systemic variables and resulting problematic behaviours and relations and the personal life experiences and systemic contexts of the therapist (“the use of self of the therapist”) will be explained. I will make clear how this can lead to impasses in the therapeutic system.

Clinicians will be taught to focus more consciously on their own “inner programming “which has emanated from their living ecologies, families of origin, training, and other life experiences. 

Clinicians will get clues and techniques that make it possible for them to start  to alter this inner programming.

This learned greater flexibility in the use of more different therapeutic roles when confronted with complex individual and system issues,-for example when working with families with members with serious psychiatric disorders as schizophrenia, ADHD, Bipolar illness, post-traumatic stress disorders etc., -,will prevent the use of a too rigid therapeutic role that can create an impasse in the therapeutic process.

Through the adoption of the various eighteen professional therapeutic roles and the connected techniques, the clinicians will be able to:

 Model for the client’s risk-taking behaviours which will encourage the client’s to alter and change their own stuck patterns and preferred roles in stressful relational situations. 

Creatively help client’s to be more conscious of and get more grip on their seductive behaviours that create rigid relational roles when confronted with stressful life situations..

What in the seminar is different/better than other known approaches?

Abundant empirical justification of more than fifty years, acknowledge that so called common factors, most notably the therapeutic relationship, is more responsible for successful therapeutic outcomes than any specific technique or theory.  Outcome oriented therapists see improvement of the working alliance as the means of achieving better therapeutic outcomes.  From beginning to end this seminar will effectively attend to the complexities of the working alliance between therapists and clients.

 Unavoidable impasses within a therapeutic relationship that result in and vice versa are the result of the use of rigid roles of the members of the therapeutic system, are reframed as opportunities for (role) changes that will lead to more freedom and flexibility in the sessions and from there in the all-day life experiences of the clients and also of the therapists.

This seminar presents a more contemporary way of understanding and explaining human behaviour.  Systemic theory shifts away from the biological and psychoanalytic models which advocated a casual, linear model of understanding human illness, by analysing client’s in their social context.  Rather than endorsing the psychoanalytical viewpoint for the development of an impasse within a session which often blames the client, to analysing the presenting professional therapeutic role of the therapist, impasses are viewed as a product of the therapeutic professional role being employed by the therapist to the client’s seduction. 

This seminar is different: it is presented so that attendees can understand how an impasse in therapy develops and how their behaviours and responses in a session actually contribute to the deadlock or impasse.

Is the material presented from a known, evidence-based methodology?

This seminar is presented from a systemic, cybernetic, structural viewpoint and is distinctive in that it is adaptable by most clinical therapists or mental health workers who work with a wide-range of presenting client issues.