Walter Logeman: Journal
Relationships
I’m listening to Shane Birkel interview Laura Heck.
017: Using Gottman Interventions to Enhance Intimacy with Laura Heck
[You can listen to all Shane’s podcasts on your phone if you have a podcast app. Search forThe Couple Therapists Couch. I use Pocket Casts.]
I wanted to jot down some bullet points so thought – blog, why not.
Continue reading “Shane Birkel interviews Laura Heck – Gottman approach”
I found this video by Elliott Connie useful! Elliott is a Solution Focussed Couple therapist.
Bud, a psychodrama colleague recommended the video, on Shane Birkel’s Facebook page.
Here a a bit of Bud’s summary:
… the vital importance of the difference between a goal for therapy and a desired outcome. He discuses it in the context of working with a couple who appeared to have mutually opposing or exclusive goals.
What a simple idea, and perhaps something we already know in an illusive way. Elliott’s teaching and examples in the video are just excellent.
$1,000,000 = Goal
Peace of mind = Outcome
*
Gets me thinking… he is showing us an example of assisting people to deeper into their being and sharing more. I like the SF questions.
I wonder if couples themselves using the universal space opening question: “Is there more?” would go from the goal to the outcome?
That way couple can do their own deep listening, with one question: Is there more?
This can be done – partner to partner. If they succeed they may get more confidence and hope for their relationship.
If they don’t… it is good for the therapist to have SFT at the ready.
*
Do watch & listen to the video!
Amazon
I love this book! ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Probably because I’m possessed by all things couple therapy. Though because of that i’d hate it if it was terrible therapy. Most of the therapy in movies is bad. Books are not much better. This one surprises!
I love the bit where a client is about to walk out, and the therapist says “Sit down!”. Sounds terrible, but it’s perfectly timed, authentic, edgy for the therapist, and good for the client as it turns out.
I’m still puzzling how a law professor could write a book with such grasp on the art of therapy.
Get this book if you are interested in relationships!
Later: Sunday, 11 November 2018
A wonderful interview with John Jay Osborn.
The link is to Pocket casts – a great app for iPhone – but I’m sure you can find other ways to listen to it.
A remarkable book and writer! And a good interviewer.
I initiated a submission – a proposal to The Government Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction 2018 Oranga Tāngata,
This is a link to the submission: The Therapeutic Village
There is also a petition on OurActionStation that will be delivered to the Government and again to the Inquiry at the end of November 2018
Please sign and spread the word.
❋
Podcast — Audio
US inmate advocate Ann Jacobs on RNZ – talking about prisoners. Note the post-prison care gap!
As I listen to this interview I was glad to have the proposal and petition for the Therapeutic Village online. I’m determined it will happen! Listen and notice how the Village idea fills the gap.
❋
The is from an article in stuff: Art therapy paints a thousand healing words by Georgia Forrester Jul 10 2016, The photo is by Warwick Smith.
The feature image at the top is one of my sketches.
Just created version another version of the Outline for the course. Here is the link to the whole document and then some excerpts:
PCT Training – current version
About Psychodramatic Couple Therapy Training
I’ve just listened to this episode of The Couples Therapists Couch
In this episode, Emotionally Focused Therapist, Figs O’Sullivan, conceptualizes a case from the standpoint of working from the EFT perspective. Relational Life Therapist, Shane Birkel, talks about how an RLT therapist would work with the same couple. Figs and Shane talk through some of the similarities and differences in the two approaches and how they view couples cases that come in for therapy.
I’m immediately drawn to the conversation, and want to participate. I appreciate the value systems in both models.
Continue reading “EFT, RLT and another perspective – Encounter”
We flee or fight to avoid pain. In psychodrama we call those ways of being the coping roles. The path to the progressive, being fully alive, is to be with the vulnerability of the pain and attend to it. This can’t really be done alone, yet no-one can do it for you.
This is a universal idea and present in many modalities.
*
The title of this post comes from Hedy Schleifer’s ECcT – Encounter Centred Couple Therapy. On her website she says:
“I want them to leave knowing that the “survival dance’ that they have been dancing for such a long time is “not’ who they are in their essence.”
Continue reading “The Survival Dance that gets in the way of the Encounter”
The Hero’s Journey Podcast‘s next effort will be The American President. I’ll watch it and make notes here, hopefully *before* they do the podcast. Watch this space.
This is the guide I use while watching:
Wednesday, 28 February, 2018
I’ve seen the movie and I’ve made some notes. I’m a bit sloppy as I did not like the movie that much.
Ordinary World
Day to day in th Presidents world – his life. His colleagues. The lobbyists. His daughter, dutiful dad.
Then there is a bit of a build up to election stuff – but that is ordiary for the President.
There is a call for the president to do the right environmental thing… he sort of refuses.
Then the soppsed “pitbull” comes on the scene Sydney Ellen Wade. The is on for an adventure and a fight for the environment.
But these are not the calls.
The call to Adventure
The call is that they fall in love. Well Pres. Shepherd falls in love and there is no refusal in sight… For a while. He pursues with gusto.. And she accepts his calls – litterally and as a hero. Both have ftiends alleies and enamies.
Love is the special world and they fall over the threshhold despite the threshold guardians each have. Is the dancing the moment they are truly in? Or the kiss?. Earlier really as the first whif of romance is in the air. So much for the pitbull.
Refusals
Then there is his refusal – he opts for the crime bill and not the environment. This cop out is also one where he refuses love. And his refusal here is matched by hers. “You have lost more than me, you have lost my vote.”
Seizing the Sword
But then in a speech to the world he accepts the call – the environment, even if he might not win her back. But she flies back faster than a speeding bullet. the adventure has gone on for a while so this might be more the seising of the sword.
He finally gets her roses and the elixer is true love prevails
And a big nod to liberal values.
Relationships, Romance and who is the protagonist?
I think they are both heroes, or maybe love is the protagonist. The trouble is that he is the main hero… He has all the power, it is a patriachal story. How might this have played out if it was not partiarchal? The relationship being the protagonist and each of them having a hero’s journey fully matched? It would be nice to speculate. Could it even be a romantic commedy then? I hope a much better one.
Are there any such dramas?
Reflecting on this it is clear that there are three elements in any relationship – each of the lovers, and the relationship. Each has a full life, i.e. the dramatic circle of the hero’s journey. Relationships are not 50/50. They are produced many 100% moments. How well can that be portrayed?
This question of how to put a relationship on the stage is a burning question for me!
I think they nail it here:
“Imago shifts the focus from the self to the relationship and posits “relationship” as fundamental reality of which individuals are derivatives. To embody this paradigm shift, partners must shift their focus from their own need gratification to the needs of the relationship. The paradoxical outcome of that counter-intuitive shift is that such a sacrifice will insure the satisfaction of their needs in a way that was not possible when the focus was on the self. When the couple becomes partners rather than opponents in the project of creating and enacting their dream relationship, they create a thriving relationship. This perspective rests on the assumption that human beings are intrinsically relational, that the human problem is relational rupture, that all emotional symptoms are expressions of relational anxiety and that relational repair is the only and sufficient path to human well being.”
Beauvoir, Francine; Crapuchettes, Bruce. Getting Back The Love We Had: Forty-Two Answers To Real Questions From Couples Who Feared They Were Losing Their Way (pp. 4-5). Kindle Edition.
The concept of medial understanding was the forerunner of what I call today co-conscious and co-unconscious states. Such a technique of reciprocal comprehension and “interpersonal memory” seemed to make possible astonishing matrimonial psychodramas, husband and wife reaching back into their first encounter and reliving, often with astonishing detail, all their moments of love and suffering, their silent tragedies and their moments of great decision
(Moreno, 1923).
Just how to produce such dramas remains somewhat obscure to me. Will experiment – and research!
The quote above is from this article by JL “Interpersonal Therapy and Co-Unconscious States, A Progress Report in Psychodramatic Theory” originally from: Group Psychotherapy, 14 (3-4), 234-241 (Sept-Dec., 1961) See PDF below.
