Invitation To Possibility Land

An Intensive Teaching Seminar With Bill O'Hanlon

Bill O'Hanlon, Robert Bertolino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134869619
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For many years, mental health professionals have attended the seminars of Bill O'Hanlon. The author and co-author of over a dozen books has captivated audiences with his informative, humorous, and interactive teaching style. An Invitation to Possibility Land takes participants a step further. In the context of a week-long training limited to 10 participants, O'Hanlon moves to a new level of experience that cannot be duplicated in his large workshops. The author shares riveting stories, metaphors, interchanges with participants, transcripts of therapy sessions during the week, and many more teaching points that allow this book to read like a novel. The book explores many current issues facing therapists in today's climate such as how to make therapy briefer and how to work with abuse victims. It offers the reader a chance to experience, along with the participants, an in depth training where subjects such as hypnosis, brief, Ericksonian, solution-oriented, and narrative therapies, and the use of language, are explored. Welcome to Possibility-Land.

INVITATION TO POSSIBILITY-LAND

Chapter 1

Welcome to Possibility-Land

This chapter includes the opening of the teaching seminar. Many of the participants have some background in Bill’s work or with similar methods and ideas, but in Bill’s introduction and in themselves the tone for the week is set. Many of the themes and concerns expressed this first day by participants are subsequently woven into the fabric of the seminar.

Introduction by Bill O’Hanlon

Hi. I’m Bill O’Hanlon. I’ve done these intensive trainings a lot before, and I stopped doing them. I got too busy in my life, but I actually love to do them. They’re intense. They’re a bit like those language immersion courses where you go and you speak this language and think this way for a while. In a workshop or a book I have to tie things in little neat packages and make it sequential and organized. In this setting we can put in a lot of the messy, wonderfully human, don’t fit in the box aspects of the model, so you hopefully get the spirit of it rather than the methodology or the dogma. I also get to know people at a different level than I do at workshops, and you get to know each other. I used to call these things supervision groups but they’re really not exactly supervision. I don’t know, maybe advanced training, intensive training, consultation. It’s a combination of a lot of things, and it’s somewhat what you want to make it. I used to have more of an agenda of exactly what I would do and what I would cover, and the people in the groups just bent me in some way so that I stopped doing that. I started to trust that whatever needed to would emerge, would work, and it has. I think there’s a particular way I have of thinking about therapy and doing therapy. Sometimes I do hypnotic things, sometimes I do nonhypnotic things, and sometimes I do brief therapy things and sometimes I don’t do brief therapy things. So, it’s going to be a mixture. I tell a lot of stories and that’s partly how I do my teaching. I hope that’s okay. It will be woven in.

The structure I generally have for the week, although I’m flexible about this and we can make whatever arrangements we want to, is that I’ll do this little introduction that I’m doing now, and then I’ll want everyone to meet each other. Just introduce yourselves, say what brings you here, what you’re interested in, how come you gave up a week of your time. Some of you made extremely great efforts and financial sacrifices to be here. From that I’ll find out what you want for the week and that will somewhat shape what we do. In addition, the week will be a combination of talking about therapy, practicing particular skills that anybody wants to know or all of you want to know, and observing sessions. There’ll also be clients. I think four are scheduled right now. I used to schedule a lot more clients, but then people complained that while it’s really valuable, it takes away from other activities. So, four is the maximum. We can also talk about some of your cases. In addition, every once in a while I’ll check in with all of you and find out what’s coming across and what you still need to know. Near the end of the week what I’d like to do is make individual consultation time available for all of you.

Opening Doors

I play guitar, and I went to a master seminar with a great guitar player. And he said, “What I want to know is: What’s the door for you? Where do you come to and there’s a closed door? You see the door and you know there’s something beyond the door, but you haven’t gotten it open yet.” During this seminar, we’ll at least open the door and probably get you through. Hopefully that’s what the whole week is about, but we can focus more specifically on it during individual times, and/or you can have a personal experience. We’ll be doing some hypnosis during the week, and some of you will choose to have that experience. For some people that turns out to be the thing that brings the whole week together in a very profound experience, but some people choose not to do anything personal. When you’re having that individual consultation time, other people will be observing, but they won’t be participating in the dialogue until afterward and then we’ll have them comment or ask questions. Usually that turns out to be a pretty profound aspect of the week. So, that’s what I have planned. If you don’t want to participate in that, that’s okay too. You can always opt out. That’s what I have on the agenda.

Mission Statement: Respectful and Effective

I’ll say a little more about what this work is about, because every time I say it it’s a bit different. I think it’s good to set the thinking and the basic sensibility for the week. Some of you may have heard me say this, but I wrote a mission statement for my work a couple years ago. I was extremely surprised, because earlier in my career I went through various phases, of really being excited about a particular kind of therapy, and I went through lots. But for a while, when I first started teaching and writing, I was identified as an Ericksonian¹ therapist because I studied with Milton Erickson.² Then I was identified as a brief therapist or solution-oriented³ therapist. When I wrote my mission statement it had nothing to do with any of those things. I’ve been identified as transpersonal and humanistic and other stuff in the past. The mission statement is, I’m interested in promoting effective and respectful approaches to therapy and really standing against and opposing disrespectful and ineffective approaches … so that means that if someone does an approach to therapy (that is disrespectful or ineffective), even in the name of brief therapy or solution-oriented … things that I’ve been identified with .. or Ericksonian therapy, then I would really be upset by that.

I was at the Therapeutic Conversations⁴ conference in Denver, and there was a cleaning up at the end of the day at this “Co-Creating a Conference.”⁵ This woman spoke up and said, “You know, in my small group I was talking about how I do long-term therapy, and I got a very negative reaction from people because most people here do brief therapy. They were really critical of what I was doing. Now I just feel like maybe this isn’t the place for me and I need to leave.” I was so upset hearing that that I got up and told about how I had been seeing one of my clients for twelve years and I’m a brief therapist, and I’ve written all these books on brief therapy. It just pisses me off that someone would do that. (I said to her) “Tell them to come and talk to me and I’ll set them straight.” I spent so many years trying to get respect for brief therapy and I was often attacked by people who thought it was shallow and disrespectful to do brief therapy, so I don’t want to see it go the other way. I think there are times when brief therapy is appropriate and not used because someone hasn’t updated their beliefs yet, and times when it’s disrespectful to do that. Both. So that’s what I hope happens this week. This sense of flexibility comes across. The other thing is that the kind of approaches that I’ve been writing about and talking about are very directive in some ways. They’re leading, they’re change oriented, so it’s important to balance that with acknowledgment and validation of people and really staying with people. The MRI⁶ people that do brief therapy used to say, “If you want to do brief therapy, you’ve got to remember the first principle of brief therapy; go slowly.” It’s a weird thing to say, but you have to be, I think, much better at developing relationships if you do briefer therapies. You really have to be in there with people or they’re going to feel dismissed, unheard, and invalidated, or maybe they will go along with you but probably not. They may actually be pretty uncooperative or just leave, assuming that you can’t get it. It’s really important to balance those two aspects, the acknowledgment and validation with the possibilities for change. Both. At Therapeutic Conversations, sometimes the dogma is, “The client is always the expert, and you’ve got to tap into their expertise.” Yes, and the therapist is also the expert. We know a lot of stuff. We have studied. So, we’re going to be talking about how to bring your personal expertise, your life expertise, as well as your professional expertise in a way that doesn’t impose on clients, and in a way that tends to make therapy brief and solution-oriented, possibility-oriented, or inclusive.

I’ve done these groups before, and I really have learned to trust the process. In my workshops I have a one, two, three, four, five process, and my handouts are very much like that. I like to teach in a very sequential, structured way, and I’ve absolutely given that up for these groups. Trust me that it will unfold as it does. There’s something that’s going to get into your bones here. So that’s a general introduction. I would like to meet people and find out some basics: What is your name? Where do you work? Where are you from? What kind of work do you do? and, What brought you to this particular room for this particular week? Well go around the North American way, clockwise (points to his left). (laughter) We’ll go around the South American way sometimes! (more laughter)

Group Member Introductions⁷

Lisa: My name is Lisa. I work in children’s services as a family therapist for a home-based family preservation program. I got introduced to solution-oriented work through Steffanie.⁸ She was coming in to do seminars and we really liked it a lot, and started to use it about two years ago with the families that we work with. So that’s how I came to be here. I heard wonderful things about you; they were saying, “You have to go!” (laughter) I just had a baby four months ago. (congratulations are extended from around the room) So I’m having a hard time not thinking about him because this is the longest I have been away from him. Forgive me if sometimes I’m wanting to call to see if he’s rolling over or doing something! (laughter) I’m trying to get into being myself, and rediscovering “Me,” as opposed to “Mom,” that role that I’ve been focusing on for almost a year now. This is a new thing to take time for myself, my career, and my own interests.

Bill: Thanks for making that sacrifice. I have to tell you a story. A guy came up to me at a presentation that I did some years ago. It was the first ever on solution-oriented therapy and it was called, “A Megatrend in Psychotherapy.”⁹ It was at the Erickson conference in 1986, and he was a psychodynamic therapist who had an interest in Erickson, so he was going that direction. He heard the presentation in which I laid out the ideas of, “Focus much more on what people are good at, and their resources, and their abilities, and you create that kind of sense with people when you do that.” He came up afterward and said, “You know, I’ve just got to tell you I listened to your talk and I’m very disturbed.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, I have a sense that what you’re saying is right, and if it’s right, what I know is wrong. The way I’ve been trained is wrong and I have to make a big change. That’s really upsetting!” I said, “Well, I don’t think you have to make that big a change!” I was kind of minimizing it. And he said, “No, no, it’s really a big change and I have a sense that this is the direction I’ve got to go, but I’m really upset.” Through the years I kept in touch with him and he really did convert. He went to Milwaukee and spent some weeks in a supervision group with Steve de Shazer and Insoo Berg.¹⁰ He came back and said, “That stuff is really great, but the problem is I’ve got this private practice, it’s in the suburbs of Cleveland and it’s kind of yuppie, middle class. They want analytic and psychodynamic stuff. And here, I’m moving in this direction and they’re not going with it. I just don’t think this stuff works with that population. It works great with that population that de Shazer and Insoo Berg work with, the homeless, the Title 19 folks, the family preservation folks. It doesn’t work well with the folks I see.” And I said, “Do you know where I work? I work in an upper middle class clinic in which people come in voluntarily, most of the time. It’s a private practice.” He said, “This stuff works with them?” I said, “Yeah.” I love to hear that story from people, because what I typically hear is the other side of the story. It’s like, “Oh yeah, this is fine with the yuppies, but I work with the really chronic, difficult families!” (laughter) If you work with that population you need to use this stuff because people are typically not so cooperative in going back to their childhoods and examining everything. Occasionally they are, but I think they really do appreciate this focus, and it becomes much more of a partnership. It’s really taken off in family preservation.

Lisa: I do find that it works well with most of the families I work with.

Bill: Most. And that’s the key. We’re going to be talking about that this week. Good. (looks toward Debbie)

Debbie: My name is Debbie, and this is my sister’s office. I work with kids and adults … low income population. I graduated from Simmons, which is a psychodynamic-oriented program. Laurie (another participant) was also there. So, I’ve just been practicing a couple of years. Before I went into social work, I was an outdoor leader for fifteen years, and ran a program doing outdoor trips for women. I’m finding myself trying to get back there. I’m not sure how solution-oriented fits into that, but I’ll be interested to see if there is some kind of match.

Bill: I had someone come to the group who did that, mostly in management … outward bound, team-building kind of things. He videotaped one of the sessions he did and brought it. We found lots of places where he could move in a more solution-oriented direction.

Debbie: That’s good to know. (Debbie looks to Megan, who is on her left)

Megan: I’m Megan. I won’t be graduating with my master’s degree until next month. I’m working two populations: private practice and court mandated. We call them HRS, which is like family preservation, so I get to see both sides. A professor at my university has been teaching us quite a lot of your stuff. I started playing on the Internet a couple of months ago (looks to Bill) and found all of your information. I just said, “I’ve got to go there!”

Bill: That’s great!

Megan: And I also feel like I just kind of need to get thrown into it. Especially now, since my supervisor has been strategic. I’m kind of really fighting with the opposite stuff that I’ve been seeing and hearing and that I’m disturbed by.

Bill: I’ll just tell you a quick story about that. I did supervision for some years with a guy who was trained by Haley and Madanes,¹¹ very strategic. Then he had another supervisor who was also trained by them, so he was really into that philosophy. He asked me for supervision to learn solution-oriented therapy. We did phone supervision for a couple of years. And in almost every case that he talked about, the parents had some problem that the kid’s symptom was a reflection of. It was a metaphor. This is a typical strategic idea: that kids’ problems are always benevolently protective and they are metaphors for one or both of the parents’ problems or concerns. For example, the kid wasn’t finishing his homework and Dad wasn’t finishing projects that he needed to finish at work and was about to get fired. I said, “It’s uncanny that with every case you could find this issue of the child’s problem being a metaphor for the parents, because it’s not in every case of mine.” He would then of course go about treating it in the strategic therapy way. I told him that if I had this idea about the situation (which I typically wouldn’t), I might say, “You know, Dad, it seems to me that you have some expertise in helping your son get over this problem, because there must be times when even though you haven’t finished a lot of your projects, you’ve finished a project. How have you done that? I’m really interested because that’s one of the things it seems you need to model for your son right now who’s not finishing his homework. Can you articulate what that is? Can you see if you can show it to him a little more? Can you articulate it to your son or even to us while we’re all sitting here?” After many times of refocusing the supervisee like that, he said, “I get it. It’s the metaphorical solution, not the metaphorical problem that we’re going to work on.” That’s right. You go for the metaphorical resources. I think a l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Meet Bill O’Hanlon
• Chapter 1 Welcome to Possibility-Land
• Chapter 2 Language Is a Virus
• Chapter 3 “Cindy”
• Chapter 4 Evolving Conversations
• Chapter 5 Trancepersonally
• Chapter 6 “Jill and Eric”
• Chapter 7 Pathways with Possibilities
• Chapter 8 “Lynn”
• Chapter 9 Stories, Stories, Stories
• Chapter 10 Exploring Doorways
• Chapter 11 Continuing Possibilities
• Afterword
• Bibliography of Bill O’Hanlon
• Reference