Walter Logeman: Journal
I am excited ant the distinction between Formal and colloquial NVC (Dan mentioned it tody over lunch) & I have followed up on it.
I get into the bind about the formal stuff I teach in the Intentional Dialogue. Of course it can be used colloquially, ionfomally.
I think though that the formal dialogue is needed, perhaps as a guide to a mopre integrated clean communication.
The dialogue is a discipline and I think the psyche needs that structure to go deep. To go fast.
The medium is the message, and language is foul! Marshall Rosenberg calls it Jackal language. Cognitive Behaviour therapy and Rational Emotive therapy, Imago as well as Marshall Rosenberg’s NVC non violent Communication all focus on what I am calling Clean Speech. Both in sending & receiving.
Embedded in our language are the forces of domination! It makes sense. The power structures of domination build a system of ideology to support them and the place for thoise controls to hide are in the cultue in many ways – and almost invisibly in the language. Changing language is potent!
Being non-exclusive in language has made a difference. Look at how we had to deal with the way he meant she in English, I say had, but the fight is not over, but we have come a long way.
Not so with language of love… all day in my work as a relationship therapist I listen to language that attributes blame to the other. The dicipline of the Imago dialogue is great, it handles a lot of it, but there is lots more to develop. This is a science.
What I have not heard anyone say, though they may have, is that “clean speech” is another road to the unconscious. So often the CBT and RET schools deny the efficacy of the relationship as a tool for healing and of the power of the unconscious. Clean speech is essentially to speak from experience, and to uncover its layers. To make the unconscious conscious… in a relationship! Clean speech is a way of working with the transference & counter transference.
Rosenberg Naturally Nonviolent
QUESTION: What is nonviolent communication?
ANSWER: It’s the way of thinking, communicating and using power that helps us connect to one another in a way that we enjoy contributing to one another’s well-being. It’s an attempt to live in harmony with certain values. But since we’ve been educated for about 8,000 years in domination structures, that does not make contributing to one another’s well-being easy.
Great interview with Marshall Rosenberg http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=837
If I’m in conflict with people, I try to hear what needs they have. Now, “needs,” as we define the term, are universal; all human beings have the same needs. So if I connect to what people are needing, I’m one with them. I care about their needs. At the moment that they sense that I am as interested in their needs as my own, we can find a way to get everybody’s needs met.
So more concretely, what would that look like? This man might say, “Our work is not going to harm the environment. Our tests have demonstrated that this is not going to harm the environment.” So, this person shares the same needs that I have. I want to protect the environment. Apparently, he’s concerned about the environment also.
Now, where we might differ is in our ways of measuring whether something is harmful to the environment. But notice our needs are not in conflict. This person doesn’t want to destroy someone’s habitat, and he doesn’t want to be a menace. You see?
More excerpts follow.
For Imago colleagues
Tight Structure
Seamless flow
Recent shift
Four developments in my work:
a – bcr structured couple therapy – no dialogue
b – refining a topic
c – analysis of the dynamics to facilitate dialogue
d – coaching re: thoughts & feelings
Psyberspace Podcast 2008-05015
Note Saturday, June 19, 2010
I’ve made this private as I have moved on a lot since then. I’d prefer to create a better audio.
Click to listen, right-click to download or better still subscribe to this blog in a reader and you can easily see which posts have audio attached, and then put them on your player.
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Friday, 10 September 2021
Removed the password. Yes I have moved on but the history is nice to have. Did I ever make another on this topic?
More notes in the collection of podcasts https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2021/psyberspace-podcasts/
Psyberspace, this blog, occasionally has audio I make. Occasionally. Rarely.
Here is a ten minute one, I called it relationship, but it is about one small sliver of thought about listening to your partner.
Podcast – Psyberspace – Relationship
Right click to download.
60 Percent Of Psychotherapy Clients Felt Therapy Didn’t End On Time
This article makes sense to me from my experience.
Time is such a critical factor in psychotherapy, beginnings, middles and especially endings. People often want to wean off therapy by coming les frequently. I discourage that and suggest we make a focus & work on a good ending. Even so there are false endings! People come back for another go at it.
In Psychotherapy Online my experience is different. I have a more flexible time frame for “appointments”, while I stick to a maximum of one hour sessions for my email responses, the work can also be spread out in smaller exchanges and because I don’t need to make calendar appointments for email work there is a flexibility that finds its way into making a more natural ending as well.
In general, clients who reported that termination was on time were more satisfied with their therapy. Factors contributing to positive feelings about termination included perceiving the experience of termination as an expression of independence, reflection of positive aspects of the therapeutic relationship and a reflection of positive gains experienced in therapy.
“Results suggest that clients find terminating psychotherapy at the right time important and yet difficult to achieve, and that clients experience a wide range of feelings, many positive, during the termination phase, which call for a reconceptualization of the role of the therapist during this important phase of psychotherapy.”
I have been given a copy of the 1980 hard copy and it is on the top of my reading list at last.
I have just updated my psychotherapy online page. Just a tweak here or there, but it is amazing how I want to change it just a little every few months.
I added the words: dream, Jung, Psychodrama and Moreno to my first page. These words sum up my special interests and skill, so the should be there!
George Kelly was influenced by J.L. Moreno Wikipedia. The interesting thing I just learned from my friend Don is that Kelly in turn was an influence on Beck, one of the founders of CBT.
Makes sense, in that the work of Moreno is about the whole person, thoughts, feelings and action, the individual, the collective, the practical, the relational and the cosmic.
In the psychotherapy I do it is useful to move along the continuum of role training on the one hand and the psychological roles and the psychodynamic aspects that Moreno called the psychodramatic.
But what it looked like was something like the Socio site. My image, also on Thousand Sketches is used as the masthead.
The encounter symbol. Nice. It does draw my attention to the difference between up and down as opposed to left & right. Horizontal implies equality, or perhaps more neutrally, it implies similarity. The up/down in this encounter symbol seems like different entities interacting.
Up /down has some power implications, or is that just cultural? Maybe it is OK! Maybe it is always good to know, who is earthy, who is airy. Maybe every encounter is a meeting of earth & sky. The “masculine” aspect is the top one it would seem, but the overvaluing of that is probably cultural.
Intensive Psychotherapy More Effective Than Brief Therapy For Treating Bipolar Depression
I see stuff like this in my custom google psychotherapy news item. It seens thgere is a run of research that says psychotherapy is better when intendive & psychodynamic. More effective than drugs or at least more effective than drugs on their own and so on.
This sort of research is dubious, but I know from so many years of work as a psychotherapy that it fits with my experience.
But there is a danger too, psychotherapy can go badly wrong with a bad therapist, and how do you know?
Easy to know one thing: boundaries. If there is anything other than meetings in the therapists rooms, for a fee then beware.