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n this episode we will think about Kelly’s definition of hostility applied to an aspect of the recent race riots in the UK. On the whole, as we have experiences, we make adjustments to construing, based on fresh evidence. However, there will be times when, despite all the evidence, we hang on to our current construing. Kelly’s professional or transitional constructs offer potential explanations for where our construing is ‘stuck’. Hostility is one of them. As always, Kelly pays particular attention to the fact that changes in our most important (core) constructs will be a major challenge for us because the implications will be far-reaching.
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This episode is a paper by Dr. Dina Pekkala, a clinical psychologist. She describes some of her work with adults referred for anger, reminding us that anger is a symptom of deeper troubles and how important it is not to deal with as an inappropriate behaviour. Dina worked with many angry adults and worked with Peter Cummins (see Ep. 40, Sept. 2023) so she had a great model for her PCP therapy.
Reference:
Dina Pekkala (2009). The icing on the sausage: The emancipation of constructive alternativism. In Butler (Ed.) Reflections in Personal Construct Theory.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Have you considered what lies ahead when you retired from working? Whatever you do now, one day that will happen, so it is better to be prepared for it. This month’s episode is a new technique, Drawing the Ideal Retired Person. This is an exploration of the future, aiming to promote a smoother adjustment to that phase of your life. There will also be a step-by-step video on You Tube so you can see the technique in parts, hopefully making it easier to follow.
https://youtu.be/0z8htw-sO_Q?si=_ASdbxyXJXjC8g3e
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This month’s episode is a reading of Dr Kev Harding’s paper Clinical psychology practice without using psychiatric labels: an alternative approach using Personal Construct Psychology is an interesting read. It invites us to consider PCP as a useful alternative framework from which to practice so that we have a “therapeutic relationship of two equal human beings on a journey to understand the origins of one person’s distress (albeit with one being paid for the encounter)”. The paper is available on the internet.
Reference
Harding, K. (2011). Clinical psychology practice without using psychiatric labels: an alternative approach using Personal Construct Psychology The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, Summer 2011, pp.86-91
http://www.psychiatry.freeuk.com/Harding.pdf
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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.
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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.
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I thought it was time to invite you to have a go at something you could easily use with people you are working with. This involves eliciting constructs, identifying the more important ones and then pyramiding those constructs. You will use fantasy characters or stories that had an impact on you when you were growing up and it does not matter what sort of media they are from - books, TV, film, games etc. The important things is that they are fictional, which I hope will make the exploration suitable for any age. I have given an example of my own construing working through the technique so that you can hear a real example. I hope you will find that you can try it yourself and then that you might find it useful in your work. If you do, I would be interested to hear how you found it. As always, what you will end up with is a range of constructs but these will be more concrete.
The stories I used were:
The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids - Grimm’s Fairytales
https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm005.html
Little Red Riding Hood - Grimm’s Fairy Tales
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Red_Riding_Hood
Snow White - the movie and then the audio version of the film which I had on vinyl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_and_the_Seven_Dwarfs_(1937_film)
The L Shaped Room - Lynne Reid Banks
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0099469634?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_RC7BHHNN58HBPDSWQ7A9
The Singing Ringing Tree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singing_Ringing_Tree
The Famous Five - Enid Blyton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Famous_Five
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This month’s episode will consider how validation is a more useful construct than reinforcement when we wonder why someone made a challenging choice. It also summarises a paper about the impact of wrongful imprisonment on a person. The paper is freely available - details below. A dilemma faced by one such prisoner is used as an example. I have been thinking about that situation ever since I heard about it - it made me think again about my core constructs.
I hope you find it interesting and useful. Please let me know if you do. It helps me to know whether what I am doing makes sense to other people. If you are a regular listener, I would love to know that too. You can email me at [email protected].
Reference
Brooks, S.K, Greenberg, N. (2020). Psychological impact of being wrongfully accused of criminal offences: A systematic literature review. Medicine, Science and the Law. 2021;61(1):44-54. doi:10.1177/0025802420949069
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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.
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You may be thinking about how you might use PCP in research. This episode features an interview with Dr. Emily Strong, Educational Psychologist, whose research has focussed on children who speak selectively. This is one of the tricky issues to get around, especially when we need to explore a child or young person’s views. The interview with Emily you will hear what she did and what she found through her work. Her thesis is available online and I would encourage you to read it for the research and for the literature review. If you would like to follow up and ask Emily for the resources she uses, see the details below.
References
Strong, E.V. (2019). We do have a voice: using a Personal Construct Psychology technique to explore how children and young people with Selective Mutism construct their current and ‘ideal’ selves. Unpublished thesis. School of Education, The University of Birmingham.
https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/9559/13/Strong2019ApEd%26ChildPsyDVolume1_Redacted.pdf
For more information about this technique, please contact Dr Emily Strong:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This episode explores the difficulty of getting some tasks done and refers to an exercise you can download from my website - drawingtheidealself.co.uk.
The exercise follows a process for exploring your personal construing of the admin tasks you have to do. It is not specific to an age for use (even children have their tasks at school and home), nor to a profession (a homemaker also has many admin tasks). So, I hope it can be used with anyone.
Understanding why some tasks are more challenging for you is important to finding your own solutions. The way you construe your work will impact on your construing of the tasks you choose to do first, and those you find more painful. I decided to make this because I know people can feel a lot of guilt (Kelly’s definition is about being aware that you are ‘playing’ a role in a way that makes you feel very uncomfortable - see my podcast episode to learn more about this: Drawing the Ideal Self podcast episode 32).
This exercise is designed for you to try alone, promoting your reflection on persistent issues. Hopefully, you might find something that makes your position make more sense and reduce self-criticism. By then end, hope you will be able to find ways forward to address things in your own way, based on your construing.
It would be even better to use it in a pair, working to support understanding and growth in each other.
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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.
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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.
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