Interacting Selves

Systemic Solutions for Personal and Professional Development in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Arlene Vetere, Peter Stratton, Arlene Vetere, Peter Stratton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415730846
• eBook ISBN: 9781317418696
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The counselling and psychotherapy professions have experienced a rapid growth and expansion throughout Europe, and internationally. State regulation of these professional practices has required personal development hours for those in training, continuing professional development for all qualified practitioners as well as supervision of their practice.

Interacting Selves provides concepts and principles of personal and professional development (PPD) in training and supervision as part of an approach to lifelong learning for all those involved in psychotherapeutic work. Leading European trainers and practitioners draw on their shared background in systemic therapy to articulate a strong theoretical base for PPD. The volume functions not simply as a coherent description of the philosophy and rationale underlying PPD but also as a practice workbook whose chapters contain an array of elegantly crafted exercises, portable across the broad range of disciplines that give life to the social care and mental health fields at the same time as meeting the PPD needs of counsellors and psychotherapists of different theoretical persuasions.

The approaches work through constant attention to PPD as an interpersonal process where thoughts, ideas and emotions need to be nurtured. PPD can involve working at the extremes, and the book provides a secure basis for confronting abuse and violence head on. Each chapter shows how personal and professional development promotes a focus on emotional competence, positive emotion, resilience and ethical practice.

Interacting Selves introduces and develops the concepts and principles of personal and professional development (PPD) in training and supervision as part of an approach to lifelong learning for all psychotherapists undergoing or providing PPD. This pioneering book will appeal to psychotherapy trainees, trainers, practitioners and supervisors in the mental health field and social care professionals.

Chapter 1

Prologue and introduction to the systemic approach to personal and professional development

Arlene Vetere, Peter Stratton, Helga Hanks, Per Jensen, Kyriaki Protopsalti-Polychroni and Jim Sheehan

Why you should use this book

Welcome to our book, which has been a process in which each of us has extended our ideas through our interactions around its content. Our aspiration is that the book will add new dimensions to helping those engaging with personal and professional development (PPD) to create a substantial upgrading of practice at all levels. Although PPD takes different forms in different therapies and contexts of practice, we have tried to engage with this diversity by creating comparable diversity in what we offer. Our intention is that the book will provide practicable help whether you are a trainee wanting to make best use of the PPD content of your course, a therapist deriving maximum benefit from supervision and continuing professional development (CPD) events or a trainer/supervisor wanting to be able to offer the most effective provision.

Although between us we have an enormous variety of therapy practice, and training and supervision experience (see below), we have in common that we operate from a basis in systemic understanding. Our experience has been that the systemic paradigm has allowed us as clients and therapists, as trainers and supervisors, and as consultants to many different kinds of teams and organisations, to comfortably transfer our learning between these contexts. So whatever your own frameworks of understanding and practice, we have been determined to take our most successful PPD experiences into the most useful and generally applicable form that we can. We also have a small agenda of hoping that our readers will experience the benefits of consistency in systemic thinking.

Why we wanted to write this book together

We are a group of friends and colleagues who have known each other for many years and who work together often. We have provided personal and professional development training (PPD) in a range of counselling and psychotherapy contexts. We are based in different countries, including the UK, Ireland, Norway and The Netherlands, and we work and have learned from practices in other countries, such as Greece, Italy, Finland, Malta, Spain, Romania, Iceland, Germany, Turkey, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia, Hungary and Cyprus. We are trainers, supervisors, practitioners and supervisees, and sometimes still we inhabit the role of trainee. We share the view that training, supervision and therapeutic practice are connected through the processes of learning and development, often encapsulated in our PPD activity. Our shared systemic paradigm allows us to understand and enjoy complexity so that we may work with the complexity afforded by our multiple roles. Furthermore, we share a commitment to enhancing practice, at all levels of experience and across all the above roles of trainer, trainee, supervisor, supervisee and practitioner. Each chapter in this book will reflect some aspect of all these positions. Thus, we see PPD as a unifying and integral process in our collective development.

Exercise: What is the meaning of (PPD in your) life?

In keeping with the approaches that unfold in the book, we would like to invite you to step back from your eager process through this chapter and examine the assumptions that you generally apply to PPD. Please come with us through the following steps:

1  Please write down the very first thoughts that come to mind to describe your feelings as you approach PPD.

2  Now write a brief statement about the last PPD event or process that you were part of.

3  Try to imagine a consultant who was looking for indications in your reports of beliefs, attitudes and assumptions that have the potential to limit your PPD operations.

4  Imagine a friendly colleague was encouraging you to be much more constructive about your PPD experiences. What might they say? Write their wise and positive thoughts down.

5  Finally, comparing 3 and 4, write down what for you would be the best possible outcomes from working with this book. You might want to return to and expand this list as you proceed through the book.

What informs our philosophy of PPD?

Our approach to PPD is informed by systemic principles that help us integrate and unify our experiences of learning, development and improvement in the multiple professional roles we inhabit. In this section, we shall outline some of the systemic ideas that underpin the writing in the following chapters.

All the authors work with the central idea that the therapist is part of the therapeutic system, and by definition all roles of supervisor, supervisee, trainee and trainer form part of a complex interconnected system of influence, concern and mutual help. People’s distress, dilemmas and struggles are viewed in the same way as their joys, strengths and triumphs – influencing and influenced by the ecosystem of interpersonal relationships within which we live our lives. We see this as a process of working ‘within’ and ‘between’ (i.e. exploring how the experiences of the individual are interacting with the relational in overlapping contexts that can support change, inhibit change and help create meanings at different levels of experience and relationship). We are interested in intergenerational learning in relational systems and how experiences with difference and diversity inform our positioning. In our work, we identify and track unhelpful patterns of interaction that people wish to change so that we might support and promote more satisfying relational experiences. This involves naming and exploring the connections between thought, emotion, intention, action and consequences in their recursive loops of communication. This attention to pattern and process, and context and meaning, in many ways defines systemic practice. Sometimes, we have been called process consultants in recognition of our curiosity about the connections between content and process in every significant relationship. Within this framework, learning is based in good listening, and is seen as a co-constructed experience that co-evolves over time. Learning has the potential to be transformational, and to promote reflection, reflexivity, trust and effective problem-solving that is capable of creating new possibilities for practice and for life. In this book, we promote a relational, dialogical view of learning because in our experience, PPD becomes part of the self, and is shared in a forward-moving process of giving back. As one perspective on your own history of relational learning, we invite you into our second exercise.

Exercise: Your professional genogram

Gaining a deeper understanding of the many current and historical influences that have shaped the unique counsellors and psychotherapists we are becoming is a central element in the ongoing PPD of all of us – no matter what place we now occupy within our professions. We have made a short version of an exercise first developed by Magnuson (2000) as a way of inviting you, the readers, to become more actively involved in planning aspects of your own PPD through first locating yourself within the historical thread of the significant supervisor/mentor relationships, theoretical and social/political perspectives that have shaped your professional development.

For many years, family therapists have used a tool called the family genogram (McGoldrick and Gerson 1985) as a way of helping couples and families examine the relational patterns and historical events that have shaped their family and constructed its thematic struggles over time. The professional genogram is a way of making a similar type of examination of the multiplicity of relational, theoretical and other factors that shape a professional’s approach to their practice over time.

The exercise can be done with different levels of detail, and we suggest that if you have not done this exercise before, you limit yourself in the first instance to including just the more obvious and central elements/persons in the genogram. You will find that as you do the exercise, you will begin to remember more of your own professional history and the relationships that were central to it. You will also begin to ask more complex questions concerning the relationship between different levels of the genogram.

The exercise involves mapping three levels of data with some straight lines drawing the connections between elements at different levels. The exercise comes in two parts. The first relates to the mapping/drawing of the professional genogram; the second concerns a space of reflective questioning and note-taking as you stand back and observe your own professional genogram.

Part I: Drawing the professional genogram

(a)  Across the bottom of the page – from left to right and in historical sequence – put down the names of the key professional mentors, educators and supervisors who have influenced your professional development from the time you started your professional education until now. Under each name, put the year that your relationship commenced with this person and a single word or phrase that might represent something significant that you learned for your practice through this relationship. An example of an entry on this level of the genogram might be: Sally, 1994, projective identification. This bottom level of the genogram is completed by placing your own name in the middle of the page underneath all these other names and with a series of lines connecting you to each of the names.

(b)  At the top level of the genogram going from left to right, put in sequence the names of the key theoreticians and master practitioners who have shaped your thinking and practice over time. Unlike the bottom level, which signifies real personal/professional relationships, this level will mostly refer to theoreticians/practitioners you have ‘known’ through their publications or perhaps through their videotapes or workshops and conferences. Examples of some entries on this level might be: C. Jung; I. Yalom; M. White. If you became acquainted with any of these masters/theoreticians through one of your supervisory/mentor relationships, draw a line in the genogram connecting the theoretician and supervisor.

(c)  In the middle level of the genogram going from left to right, put the names of influences and general perspectives that shaped your understanding of yourself as a human being and your relationship to the world around you. Examples of entries at this level might be: Buddhism; Feminism; Social Justice; Ecology. If you were introduced to these influences through a relationship with either a mentor or a theoretician, draw a line connecting the perspective to that name on the genogram.

Part II: Observing the genogram and reflecting upon professional ancestry

Stand back and consider the professional ancestry you have just mapped. What do you notice about it? Are there some areas of your history that are richly connected to certain themes? Are there any voids or gaps in the whole picture that now ‘appear’? What possibilities do you now see for further new or different activities that might enrich your PPD? Are there parts of your professional ancestry with which you might now like to re-engage in a deeper way? Make some notes for yourself arising from these and other reflections. You might consider sharing your reflections with a supervisor, a friend or the cat!

What to expect from the chapters in this book

Our book offers a rich variety of perspectives on, aspects of, and practical guidance for, PPD. Apart from cross-references that you will find within the chapters, it might help your orientation to be alert to five themes that are used in a variety of ways in different chapters. In our concluding chapter, we revisit these themes to draw your attention to some of the ways that they have been used most explicitly.

1  We have a continuing focus on the self of the practitioner. We conceptualise the processes we describe as developing both the personal and the professional selves of trainees, practitioners and supervisors. We find it useful to think of every interaction as creating new possibilities (i.e. new possible selves) of all concerned.

2  Supervision is a context of caring. Every chapter offers positive ways of attending to the needs and the intellectual and emotional development of therapists. Beyond this thread, there is an underlying and at times explicit theme of the importance for all practitioners, supervisors and therapists to take care of their own well-being.

3  We have considered in various ways the patterns that connect narratives from our PPD practices and how these have contributed to our development. PPD must always find connections between the therapist’s personal and private life and their narratives of therapy practice. We hope that the experience of this book will provide readers with a basis for achieving coherence of their own personal and professional narratives.

4  We like to think that for all of us authors, the processes in creating this book have involved continuous reflection and reflexivity. You will find examples throughout the book of ways of achieving and maintaining an equable space for yourself and your supervisees. Such space is essential for establishing the conditions for productive reflection on practice and reflexively co-creating better understandings of the PPD processes themselves.

5  Our fifth position is to remember that all training is a process of learning. In places, you are invited into an explicit consideration of your assumptions about how you and other adults learn. But every chapter invites you into your own learning processes with a reflexive follow-through to the learning of your trainees and you and their clients.

How to use this book

It is our hope that you will use this book in many ways. Although we have constructed the book as a coherent sequence, you may well have different ideas about what will be most functional for you. The book has been written for trainers and trainees, for supervisors and supervisees, and for practitioners across the range of counselling and psychotherapy approaches. We draw on tools, techniques and interventions that are common to all approaches and some that are more specific to systemic practice. We hope to be inclusive in our wish to show how systemic thinking can enhance learning and practice for us all. Each chapter offers challenges and possible solutions for different aspects of your PPD work. One suggestion could be that you scan the contents and choose an entry point that offers a manageable degree of challenge for you – between boredom and anxiety, as it has been described by Csikszentmihalyi (2000).

The book could be used as a module on a supervisor or practitioner training programme. It could be a continuing resource as your PPD unfolds. We hope you will be able to extract many different kinds of material to use in supporting the development of your colleagues. Perhaps it might even become a familiar resource that you will return to for different readings as you progress with your profession. The book contains a range of activities and exercises that are adaptable across a range of settings. We hope you enjoy it.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000) Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, Boston, MA: Jossey-Bass.

McGoldrick, M. and Gerson, R. (1985) Genograms in Family Assessment, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Magnuson, S. (2000) ‘The professional genogram: enhancing professional identity and clarity’, The Family Journal: Counselling and Therapy for Couples and Families, 8: 399–401.

Chapter 2

PPD as processes of learning that enable the practitioner to create a self that is equipped for higher levels of professional mastery

Peter Stratton and Helga Hanks

This chapter offers a perspective that all forms of training and personal professional development (PPD) are fundamentally learning. Theories of adult learning converge towards an agreement that learning is achieved through active processes of various kinds. Being consistent with this view and because this book is a resource for the PPD of you, the readers, we make a number of offers of exercises by which you can choose to engage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Prologue and introduction to the systemic approach to personal and professional development
• 2 PPD as processes of learning that enable the practitioner to create a self that is equipped for higher levels of professional mastery
• 3 Mind the map: circular processes between the therapist, the client and the therapist’s personal life
• 4 Supervision: present within movements
• 5 Working at the extremes: the impact on us of doing the work
• 6 A supervisor’s progression: from personal and professional development training in group settings to the inclusion of the self of the therapist in supervision
• 7 Supervision and attachment narratives: using an attachment narrative approach in clinical supervision
• 8 Self and world: narrating experience in the supervisor/supervisee relationship
• 9 Conclusion: consolidation, celebration and momentum
• Index