Parenting

Praise or Encouragement or Something Else?

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On the National Parenting Education Network listserv (go to: http://npen.org/ to check out their flashy upgraded website), there has been a very interesting recent discussion of the relative merits of praise and encouragement. In keeping with this topic, I’m posting a homework assignment for parents from “How to Talk so Parents will Listen and Listen so Parents will Talk.” (see: http://www.amazon.com/How-Listen-Parents-Will-Talk/dp/1118012968/ref=la_B0030LK6NM_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1370905715&sr=1-5). The following assignment is designed to help parents experience the nuances between praise, mirroring (one form of encouragement), character feedback, and solution-focused questions.

Parenting Homework Assignment 8-2

Exploring the Differences between Praise, Mirroring, Character Feedback, and Solution-Focused Questions

If you’ve been given this homework assignment, you’re probably already using many good parenting techniques with your child. This assignment will help you refine your parenting approach to intentionally include even more ways of being positive with your child.

Imagine that a father is busy taking care of household chores while he’s parenting his 5-year-old daughter. She’s creating some excellent 5-year-old crayon art and approaches her daddy with a finished product and a beaming smile. Dad looks up and takes a break from his chores to admire his daughter’s artwork. He returns her grin and says one of the following:

  • “This is beautiful!” (An example of praise—a form of direct power)
  • “Thanks for showing me your drawing. You look very happy with your picture.” (An example of emotional mirroring or encouragement—a form of indirect power)
  • “You love doing artwork!” (An example of character feedback—another form of indirect power)
  • “How did you manage to create this beautiful drawing?” (An example of a solution-focused question—a form of problem-solving power)

If you can increase your awareness of these different strategies, you’ll feel more capable of being intentional and positive when interacting with your children. The result usually includes fewer power struggles and more positive parent–child relationship dynamics.

Using Praise

Using praise is simple. For example, praise includes statements like: “Great work,”  “I’m proud of you,” and “Look at what a good job you’ve done cleaning the bathroom!” When you use praise, you are clearly communicating your expectations and your approval to your child.

Think about how much praise you use with your children. Are you being clear enough with them about what you want and are you letting them know when they’ve done well? As a part of this homework assignment, consider increasing how much you praise your child and then see how your child reacts.

Using Mirroring

Sometimes children don’t have a clear sense of how their behaviors look to others (which can also be true for adults). The purpose of mirroring is to help children see themselves through your eyes. After seeing (or hearing) their reflection, your child becomes more aware of his or her behavior and may choose to make changes.

For now, we recommend that you practice using mirroring only to reflect your child’s positive behaviors. For example, if your daughter has a play date and shares her toys with her friend, you could say, “I noticed you were sharing your toys.” Or if your son got home on time instead of breaking his curfew, you might say, “I noticed you were on time last night.” The hard part about using mirroring is to stay neutral, but staying neutral is important because mirroring allows your children to be the judge of their own behaviors. If you want to be the judge, you can use praise.

Using Character Feedback

Character feedback works well for helping your children see themselves as having positive character traits. For example, you might say, “You’re very honest with us,” or “You can really focus on and get your homework done quickly when you want to,” or “You’re very smart.”

Usually, as parents, instead of using character feedback to focus on our children’s positive qualities, we use it in a very negative way. Examples include: “Can’t you keep your hands to yourself?” “You’re always such a big baby,” and “You never do your homework.”

For your homework assignment, try using character feedback to comment on your children’s positive behaviors, while ignoring the negative. You can even use character feedback to encourage a new behavior—all you have to do is wait for a tiny sign of the new behavior to occur and then make a positive character feedback statement: “You’re really starting to pay attention to keeping your room clean.”

Using Solution-Focused Questions

Problem-focused questions include: “What’s wrong with you?” and “What were you thinking when you hit that other boy at school?” In contrast, solution-focused questions encourage children to focus on what they’re doing well. For example, “How did you manage to get that puzzle together?” “What were you thinking when you decided to share your toy with your friend?” and “What did you do to get yourself home on time?”

Solution-focused questions require us to look for the positive. For practice, try asking your child questions designed to get him or her to think about successes instead of failures. After all, it’s the successes that you want to see repeated. Of course, when you ask these questions, don’t expect your child to answer them well. Instead, your child will most likely say, “Huh? I don’t know.” The point is that you’re focusing on the positive and eventually these questions get your children to focus on the positive as well.

Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Therapy with Adolescents

Tough Kids, Cool Counseling: Dealing with “Resistance” – Part 1

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Working with challenging, tough, or naturally resistant youth is one of the most difficult situations a counselor or psychotherapist can face. In this excerpt from chapter 3 of “Tough Kids, Cool Counseling” (published by ACA, 2007), we begin discussing strategies for dealing with this difficult situation. Here’s a link to the Amazon page for this book: http://www.amazon.com/Tough-Kids-Cool-Counseling-User-Friendly/dp/1556202741/ref=la_B0030LK6NM_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1370790501&sr=1-2

Chapter 3

Resistance Busters: Quick Solutions and Longer-Term Strategies

As noted in preceding chapters, adolescents are well-known for their general distrust of adults and their striving for autonomy (Erikson, 1963; Saginak, 2003). Despite this distrust and independence-striving, in most cases, by using the strategies and techniques discussed in Chapter 2, counselors can manage resistance and initiate therapy with clients and their parents. However, upon entering a counseling situation, some young people will display extreme, provocative, or puzzling resistance behaviors that require more specialized approaches (Amatea, 1988; Richardson, 2001).

Imagine the following scenario:

You’re an intern scheduled to meet with a 15-year-old girl referred to a community clinic from a local group home. You’ve been in graduate school for about 18 months and so you’re not completely naïve, but because you’re only 23 years old yourself (and you went through a fair bit of emotional turmoil during your teen years), you’re especially excited about the opportunity to help a teenager who is obviously in a challenging life situation.

When you meet your client, Maya, in the waiting room, your enthusiasm begins to wane. Her jet-black and pink fringed hair hangs over her eyes and she reeks of cigarette smoke. When you greet her, she sneers, causing her lip-ring to flip upward. Her eyes (or at least what you can see of them) roll back as if she is disgusted at the sight of you.

Her first spoken words to you are: “This is a fucking waste of my time.”

You’re not sure what to say and so the Carl Rogers voice inside of you says gently, “It sounds like you’re not very happy to be here.”

Maya’s response is to slip into a stony silence, a silence only occasionally broken with deep dramatic sighs. Eventually, when she finally speaks again, she says, “Oh my fucking God. And you’re supposed to help me?  That’s a joke.”

Some teenagers have a special talent for destroying their counselor’s confidence. Not surprisingly, our graduate students, when facing a client like Maya for the first time, are often stunned. They complain of having a blank-mind and not knowing what to say. Other common reactions to the Maya-prototype include overwhelming feelings of inadequacy (usually accompanied by anxiety) or strong impulses to retaliate with anger.

This chapter focuses on strategies and techniques for dealing with some of the most provocative behaviors you’re likely to see in counseling situations. Our belief is that counselors should prepare, plan, and look forward to aggressive resistance from teenage clients or students. Again, we emphasize that aggressive resistance is best viewed as a coping style brought into the counseling situation and directed towards anyone in authority—in Sullivan’s terms, a parataxic distortion (Sullivan, 1953). Therefore, when working with challenging youth, keep one key fact clearly in mind: Your client’s insults, disgust, and aggressive behavior, although aimed at you, have virtually nothing to do with you. There’s no point in taking your client’s comments personally, and in fact, if you can side-step the onslaught, it will provide you with all sorts of important diagnostic and clinical information about your client’s pain and defenses.

Getting Your Buttons Pushed

Despite our great advice about not taking your client’s degrading comments personally, in the real world, we all get our buttons pushed sometimes. A graphic example of counselor over-reaction to provocative client behavior was captured in the feature film, Good Will Hunting (Van Sant, 1997).

As a fan of counseling, you may recall the scene. The main character, Will, played by Matt Damon, is an extremely intelligent but emotionally disturbed young man with mathematical genius. His would-be mentor, in an effort to help Will fulfill his potential, sends him to several different counselors, none of whom are able to help Will. Finally, Will ends up in the office of Sean McGuire, played by Robin Williams.

During his initial session with McGuire, Will is his provocative and nasty self. He eventually, either accidentally, or via great intuition, begins insulting McGuire’s deceased wife and because he is still unresolved about his wife’s premature death, McGuire gets his emotional buttons pushed. The result: the counselor grabs Will around the neck and slams him up against the wall. Of course, McGuire also decides to take on Will as a client and successfully helps Will move forward in his life.

We would like to emphasize two key points related to this excellent example of resistance and countertransference from Good Will Hunting. First, be aware of your emotional buttons, seeking the support and counseling you need to be an effective and ethical counselor. Second, no matter how provocative your young clients may act, avoid using Robin Williams’s “Choking the client” technique.  It may play well in Hollywood, but physical contact with resistant, aggressive, and/or angry clients is highly ill-advised.

If you find you’re having your emotional buttons pushed occasionally by teenage clients or students, consider yourself normal. On the other hand, if the button pushing begins to cause you to contemplate acting on destructive impulses, it’s time to get therapy for yourself, and/or support from a collegial supervision group. Many psychoanalytically-oriented writers have warned about the powerful regressive countransference impulses that young clients can ignite in their counselors (Dass-Brailsford, 2003; Horne, 2001).

Pause for Reflection: How do you usually respond when you get your buttons pushed by someone? Do you instantly feel angry? Or, are you more likely to scrutinize yourself and decide that you really are just an inadequate and worthless piece of furniture? Of course, there’s no “right” response to these questions. The best guideline is to continually work at looking at yourself and your reactions to clients so that you are consistently cultivating your self-awareness.

[End of Pause for Reflection]

To work ethically and professionally with provocative clients requires general skill, personal insight, and a particular knowledge base that includes a range of potentially constructive automatic or formula responses.

Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice

Sara Pranks John During the Theories Video Production

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When the psychoanalytically-oriented demo session begins and Sara starts talking about a repeating dream she had that involved some ferns, a cave, and a pickle, he quickly realizes he’s in trouble. Somehow an earlier version of this video was cut short on this website and so I’m trying to post this again.

Boys and Men, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Therapy with Adolescents

A Call Out to Anyone with an Opinion on How to Raise Emotionally Healthy Boys who are Capable of Excellent Intimate Relationships

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Hello Blog Followers:

Over the past twenty years I’ve grown increasingly concerned about the developmental challenges and pitfalls that boys and young men face. My concerns arise partly due to my professional work with young males and their parents and partly due to recent news about the “Boy crisis” in the U.S.

For a long time I’ve wanted to write a book that would be helpful to young men and to the parents, teachers, coaches, and others who care about them and their development. I finally have some time for this project and would like to invite people to contribute thoughts and stories that will help me shape and enrich what I want to say.

This is not a research project. I have no intent to generalize any findings or build a theory. The purpose is journalistic in that I intend to listen to individuals who share thoughts and stories with me and then report some of this information within the frame I’ve already established for the book.

I’m looking for people who might want to share a story, an experience, or an opinion about boys and their development, particularly their sexual development. If you’re interested, here’s the plan:

  1. Email me at drjohnsproject@gmail.com; You’re welcome to do this anonymously.
  2. In response, I’ll send you an email with about 10 questions, some general and some specific.
  3. After you receive the email with the questions, you can choose to email me back (or not). And you can respond to any or all of the questions (or you can even make up your own questions that you feel are important). I won’t quote anyone without permission.

Thanks very much for considering sharing your thoughts or stories. I appreciate your time. I hope this project helps boys and their caretakers overcome some of the more destructive and misguided messages about maleness in our current culture. Boys deserve our help as they strive to become productive, mature, and compassionate men.

Sincerely,

John Sommers-Flanagan, Ph.D.

Clinical Interviewing, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice

Recommendations for Developing and Using a Positive Working Alliance

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Although Freud started the conversation, he might not recognize contemporary models of the working alliance. This is because Freud advocated analyst emotional distance and a detached psychoanalytic stance, whereas today’s working alliance involves therapists initiating a process of collaborative engagement with clients.

Therapists who want to develop a positive working alliance (and that should include all therapists) will integrate strategies for doing so during initial interviews and beyond. Based on Bordin’s (1979) model, alliance-building strategies would focus on (a) collaborative goal setting; (b) engaging clients on mutual therapy-related tasks; and (c) development of a positive emotional bond. Additionally, feedback monitoring within clinical interviews is recommended.

Initial interviews and early sessions appear especially important to developing a working alliance. Many clients who enter your office will be naïve about what will be happening in their work with you. This makes including role inductions or explanations of how you work with clients essential. Here’s an example from a cognitive-behavioral perspective:

For the rest of today’s session, we are going to be doing a structured clinical interview. This interview assesses a range of different psychological difficulties. It is a way to make sure that we “cover all of our bases.” We want to see if social anxiety is the best explanation for your problems and also whether you are having any other difficulties that we should be aware of. (Ledley, Marx, & Heimberg, 2010, p. 36)

Asking direct questions about what clients want from counseling and then listening to them and integrating that information into your treatment plan is also important: In cognitive therapy this is often referred to as making a problem list (J. Beck, 2011).

Therapist:    What brings you to counseling and how can I be of help?

Client:         I’ve just been super down lately. You know. Tough to get up in the morning and face the world. Just feeling pretty crappy.

Therapist:    Then we definitely want to put that on our list of goals. Can I write that down? [Client nods assent] How about for now we write, “Find ways to help you start feeling more up?”

Client:         Sounds good to me.

Engaging in a collaborative goal-setting process—and not proceeding with therapy tasks until it’s clear that mutual goals (even temporary mutual goals) have been established

Therapist:    So far I’ve got three goals written down: (1) Find ways to help you start feeling more up, (2) Help you deal with the stress of having your sister living with you and your family, and (3) Improving your attitude about exercising. Does that sound about right?

Client:         Absolutely yes. If we can climb those three mountains it will be great.

Soliciting feedback from clients during the initial session and ongoing in an effort to monitor the quality and direction of the working alliance. Although there are a number of instruments you can use for this, you can also just ask directly:

We’ve been talking for 20 minutes now and so I just want to check in with you on how you’re feeling about talking with my today. How are you doing with this process?

Making sure you’re able to respond to client anger or hostility without becoming defensive or launching a counterattack is essential to establishing and maintaining a positive working relationship. In our work with challenging young adults, we apply Linehan’s (1993) “radical acceptance” concept. For example, an initial session with an 18-year-old male started like this:

Therapist:    I want to welcome you to therapy with me and I hope we can work together in ways you find helpful.

Client:         You talk just like a shrink. I punched my last therapist in the nose (client glares at therapist and awaits a response) (J. Sommers-Flanagan & Bequette, 2013, p. 15).

Therapist:    Thanks for telling me about that. I definitely want to avoid getting punched in the nose. And so if I accidentally say anything that offends you I hope you’ll tell me, and I’ll try my best to stop.

In this case the therapist accepted the client’s aggressive message and tried to transform it into a working concept in the session.

Having specific therapy tasks (no matter your theoretical orientation) that fit well with the mutually identified therapy goals. For example, if illuminating unconscious processes is a mutually identified goal, then using free association can be a task that makes sense to the client. On the other hand, if you’ve agreed to work toward greater self-acceptance and greater acceptance of frustrating people in the client’s life, then engaging in intermittent mindfulness tasks will feel like a reasonable approach.

 

Clinical Interviewing, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice

Why Therapists Should Never Say, “I know how you feel”

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The following excerpt is adapted from the fifth edition of the text, Clinical Interviewing (John Wiley & Sons, 6th edition forthcoming in October).

**********************************************************************

Many writers have tried operationalizing Carl Rogers’s core conditions. However, efforts to transform person-centered therapy core conditions into specific behavioral skills always seem to fall short. As Natalie Rogers (J. Sommers-Flanagan, 2007) emphasized, trying to translate the core conditions into concrete behaviors is usually a sign that the writer or therapist simply doesn’t understand person-centered principles.

This lack of understanding occurs principally because core Rogerian attitudes are attitudes, not behaviors. This is a basic conceptual principle that has proven difficult to understand—perhaps especially for behaviorists. The point Rogers was making then (in the 1950s), and that still holds today, is that therapists should enter the consulting room with (a) deep belief in the potential of the client; (b) sincere desire to be open, honest, and authentic; (c) palpable respect for the individual self of the client; and (d) a gentle focus on the client’s inner thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Further complicating this process is the fact that the therapist must rely primarily on indirectly communicating these attitudes because efforts to directly communicate trust, congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding is nearly always contradictory to each of the attitudes.

A counselor educator friend of ours, Kurt Kraus, articulated why trying to directly communicate understanding is problematic. He wrote:

When a supervisee errantly says, “I know how you feel” in response to a client’s disclosure, I twitch and contort. I believe that one of the great gifts of multicultural awareness is for me accepting the limitations to the felt-experience of empathy. I can only imagine how another feels, and sometimes the reach of my experience is so short as to only approximate what another feels. This is a good thing to learn. I’ll upright myself in my chair and say, “I used to think that I knew how others felt too. May I teach you a lesson that has served me well?” (J. Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2012) (p. 146)

Kraus’s lesson is an excellent one for all of us. The phrases, “I know how you feel” and “I understand” should be stricken from the vocabulary of counselors and psychotherapists.

Clinical Interviewing

The DSM-5 as Poetry

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This morning I was trying to make fun of the DSM-5. My strategy was to read passages from the DSM-5 Introduction to Rita after breakfast. Somehow, I must have read them slowly and poetically because Rita really liked the passages . . . which I didn’t expect.

Rita’s response inspired me to place the DSM passages into an appropriate poetry format. And so although I’ve taken the liberty to title and format the words based on my own judgments, the words themselves are taken directly from the DSM-5 (with page numbers cited, so you can find them yourselves).

 Diagnosing Peter Piper

The symptoms in our diagnostic criteria

are part

of

the relatively limited repertoire

of

human emotional responses to

internal

and

external stresses

that are generally maintained in a

homeostatic balance

without a disruption in normal functioning.

It requires clinical training to recognize

when the combination

of

predisposing,

precipitating,

perpetuating,

and

protective

factors

has resulted in a

psychopathological

condition in which

physical signs and symptoms exceed

normal

ranges. [From the DSM-5, p. 19]

 

Shifting Boundaries and Thresholds

The boundaries between normality and pathology

vary

across cultures

for specific types

of behaviors.

Thresholds of tolerance

for specific symptoms

or behaviors

differ

across cultures,

social settings,

and families.

Hence,

the level at which an experience becomes problematic

or pathological

will differ. (DSM-5, p. 14)

 

Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Parenting

Practicing Cultural Humility with Parents

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Alfred Adler (1958) claimed that every child is born into a new and different family. He believed that with every additional member, family dynamics automatically shift and therefore a new family is born (J. Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2004a). If we extend Adler’s thinking into the cultural domain, it might be appropriate to conclude: “Every family is born into a new and different culture.”

[This is an excerpt from “How to Listen so Parents will Talk and Talk so Parents will Listen.” It’s at: http://www.amazon.com/How-Listen-Parents-Will-Talk/dp/1118012968/ref=la_B0030LK6NM_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1369460232&sr=1-5%5D

To be sure, culture is not a static condition; it’s a malleable and powerfully influential force in the lives of parents and children. Vargas (2004) stated,

“Culture is not about outcome. Culture is an ever-changing process.  One cannot get a firm grip of it just as one cannot get a good grasp of water.  As an educator, what I try to do is to teach about the process of culture—how we will never obtain enough cultural content, how important it is to understand the cultural context in which we are working, and how crucial it is to understand our role in the interactions with the people with whom we want to work or the communities in which we seek to intervene. . . .  I do not want to enter the intervention arena (whether in family therapy or in implementing a community-based intervention) as an “expert” who has the answers and knows what needs to be done.  I am not a conquistador, intent on supplanting my culture on others.  I have a certain expertise that, when connected with the knowledge and experience of my clients, can be helpful and meaningful to my clients.” (p. 429)

In part, Vargas was making the point that it’s more important for professionals to practice cultural humility than it is to view ourselves as culturally competent.

A Cultural Dialectic

All professionals should strive to be culturally sensitive and humble, seeking to respect and prize human diversity for the richness, variety, and surprises it brings to life.  But while embracing culture, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no perfect culture, and sometimes cultural practices need to change or evolve for the sake of a given child, parent, or family.  Therefore, although we value divergent cultural perspectives, it’s also reasonable  to question whether specific cultural beliefs and rituals are useful or healthy to individuals, families, and communities. This is a cultural dialectic—similar to the radical acceptance dialectic discussed in Chapter 1.

When working with parents, it’s the professional’s job to do the cultural accepting and the parents’ job to do the cultural questioning. You should accept the parents’ cultural background, heritage, and parenting practices. However, if in the process of examining cultural influences on parenting, parents take the lead in questioning their culturally influenced parenting practices, you can and should remain open to helping parents push against cultural forces to make positive changes. For example, parents may want to discuss any of the following topics with you:

  • Whether or not to have their infant son circumcised
  • Their daughter’s body-image issues as they relate to American cultural values toward thinness
  • Whether it’s acceptable for their Muslim daughter to attend school or pursue higher education
  • Traditional Native American values and their children’s potential tobacco use

Helping parents determine whether their own cultural values clash with individual and/or family well-being is a delicate and potentially explosive process.  The challenge is to remain relatively neutral while helping parents evaluate cultural practices using their own parent-child-family health and well-being standards.

Case: Tobacco, Culture, and Addiction

Parent: I’m worried about my son and whether he’s started smoking. I use tobacco, in traditional Indian ceremonies, but I usually end up smoking more than I want to, and I see it as a bad habit, too. I’m not sure how to approach this with him because I don’t want to be a hypocrite.

Consultant: Tell me some ideas you’ve had, from your cultural perspective, about how to get the message you want to get to your son.

Parent: I want him to know that tobacco use should beceremonial or sacred, even though I use it more often than that. I know regular smoking is very unhealthy and so I don’t want him to have it as a habit, but I don’t know how to tell him that.

Consultant: If you think about someone from your tribe whom you really respect, how do you think that person would handle it?

Parent: In my tribe it’s really important to respect your elders. I’m my son’s mother and he should respect me, but you know how that goes. Maybe if I asked someone else, someone older and with even more respect than me, maybe that would help.

Consultant: Whom would you pick to help you talk with your son about this?

Parent: My older brother, his uncle, is pretty high up in the Tribal Government and maybe I could ask him to tell my son it would be better not to smoke, even though lots of Indian people smoke.

Consultant: Do you think your brother would be willing to give your son that message?

Parent: Yes. He’s traditional in some ways, but he’s very much against all smoking and drinking.

Consultant: You and your brother are both right about the dangers of regular tobacco use. As I imagine this discussion, I can see the two of you having a big impact on your son. But I guess there’s also the issue of your smoking and your son’s knowledge of that. Can you have your brother talk about that with your son, too? Or maybe both of you should do this together. How do you think this might work best?

In this case example, for the most part, the consultant is remaining neutral and respectful of the parent’s cultural traditions and yet, at the same time, helping her explore how to get her son a strong and clear message about not smoking tobacco.

Following the Parents’ Lead in Cultural Identity and Cultural Understanding

For most of us, culture is so deeply woven into our lives that it travels below awareness. From time to time we may glimpse it and wonder how it came to be that we choose to engage in specific cultural behaviors, such as:

  • Sitting on the couch with our children watching The Simpsons
  • Getting eggs from the store rather than directly from backyard chickens
  • Going to church on Palm Sunday where a processional, complete with a donkey, waits quietly in the sanctuary
  • Deferring to one’s husband
  • Expecting our oldest son to take care of us
  • Gathering with friends to overeat and watch the Super Bowl
  • Wearing a yarmulke, burkha, or other garments or pieces of cloth to cover our bodies or heads

Culture carries with it many questions, answers, and mysteries. As you can see from the preceding list, culture is ubiquitous; it’s impossible to escape its influence. It’s also impossible to accurately judge someone else’s cultural identity on the basis of physical appearance or initial impressions (Hays, 2008).

When working with parents, you shouldn’t assume parents’ cultural attitudes and experiences in advance. This is true no matter how similar or dissimilar to you the parents appear.  It’s best to begin with a clearly stated attitude of openness and then follow the parents’ lead.

Consultant: So, you grew up in Malawi?

Parent: Yes. I came to the United States when I was twenty-four.

Consultant: I don’t know how much of your Malawi tradition influences your parenting and so I hope it will be okay with you if, on occasion, I ask you about that.

Parent:  That’s no problem at all.

Consultant: And, as we talk, I hope you’ll feel free to tell me about anything that comes up or seems important about your particular cultural approach to parenting.

Parent: Yes. I’m comfortable with that.

Whether the parent is Laotian, Belizean, Argentine, French Canadian, or from any other cultural tradition, you should remain open to his or her particular and potentially diverse parenting approaches. However, you should also be open to helping parents question whether their own approaches to parenting are bringing them the results they desire. This is your professional duty. Again, the basic principle is to follow the parents’ lead in questioning cultural parenting practices and not become a cultural conquistador who tells all parents the one right way to be a parent.

Clinical Interviewing

The Exciting New Preface from Clinical Interviewing (5th edition)

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It’s hard to adequately express the excitement surrounding the upcoming publication of the DSM-5. Oops. I meant to write: “the 5th edition of Clinical Interviewing.” I knew there was a 5 in there somewhere.

To help the many world citizens eagerly anticipating this 5th edition, I’m including, hot off of my computer, the first part of the preface. I know . . . it really couldn’t get much more exciting than this.

Who knows, soon I might even be releasing the second part of the preface to this long-awaited masterpiece. [I hope you all can recognize the sarcasm I’m directing toward myself when you read this. It’s just that I’m working on the preface right now and I felt the need to post something on my blog . . . and these two things suddenly merged in space and time.]

Here it is.

Preface

Clinical interviewing is the cornerstone for virtually all mental health work. It involves integrating varying degrees of psychological or psychiatric assessment and treatment. The origins of clinical interviewing long precede the first edition of this text (published in 1993).

The term interview dates back to the 1500s, originally referring to a face-to-face meeting or formal conference. The term clinical originated around 1780; it was used to describe a dispassionate, supposedly objective bedside manner in the treatment of hospital patients. Although difficult to determine precisely when clinical and interview were joined in modern use, it appears that Jean Piaget used a variant of the term clinical interview in 1920 to describe his approach to exploring the nature and richness of children’s thinking. Piaget referred to his procedure as a semi-clinical interview (see Sommers-Flanagan, Zeleke, & Hood, in press).

Our initial exposure to clinical interviewing was in the early 1980s in a graduate course at the University of Montana. Our professor was highly observant and intuitive. We would huddle together around an old cassette player and listen to fresh new recordings of graduate students interviewing perfect strangers. Typically, after listening to about two sentences our professor would hit the pause button and prompt us: “Tell me about this person.”

We didn’t know anything, but would offer limited descriptions like “She sounds perky” or “He says he’s from West Virginia.” He would then regale us with predictions. “Listen to her voice,” he would say, “she’s had rough times.” “She’s depressed, she’s been traumatized, and she’s come to Montana to escape.”

The eerie thing about this process was that our professor was often correct in what seemed like wild predictions. These sessions taught us to respect the role of astute observations, experience, and intuition in clinical interviewing.

Good intuition is grounded on theoretical and practical knowledge, close observation, clinical experience, and scientific mindedness. Bad intuition involves personalized conclusions that typically end up being a disservice to clients. Upon reflection, perhaps one reason we ended up writing and revising this book is to provide a foundation for intuition. In fact, it’s interesting that we rarely mention intuition in this text. Although one of us likes to make wild predictions of the future (including predictions of the weather on a particular day in Missoula, Montana, about three months in advance), we still recognize our limitations and encourage you to learn the science of clinical interviewing before you start practicing the art.

Language Choices

We live in a postmodern world in which language is frequently used to construct and frame arguments. The words we choose to express ourselves cannot help but influence the message. Because language can be used to manipulate (as in advertising and politics), we want to take this opportunity to explain a few of our language choices so you can have insight into our biases and perspectives.

Patients or Clients or Visitor

Clinical interviewing is a cross-disciplinary phenomenon. While revising this text we sought feedback from physicians, psychologists, social workers, and professional counselors. Not surprisingly, physicians and psychologists suggested we stick with the term patient, whereas social workers and counselors expressed strong preferences for client. As a third option, in the Mandarin Chinese translation of the second edition of this text, the term used was visitor.

After briefly grappling with this dilemma, we decided to primarily use the word client in this text, except for cases in which patient is used in previously quoted material. Just as Carl Rogers drifted in his terminology from patient to client to person, we find ourselves moving away from some parts and pieces of the medical model. This doesn’t mean we don’t respect the medical model, but that we’re intentionally choosing to use more inclusive language that emphasizes wellness. We unanimously voted against using visitor—although thinking about the challenges of translating this text to Mandarin made us smile.

Sex and Gender

Consistent with Alfred Adler, Betty Freidan, contemporary feminist theorists, and American Psychological Association (APA) style, we like to think of ourselves as promoting an egalitarian world. As a consequence, we’ve dealt with gender in one of two ways: (1) when appropriate, we use the plural clients and their when referring to case examples; and (2) when necessary, we alternate our use between she and he.

Interviewer, Psychotherapist, Counselor or Therapist

While working at a psychiatric hospital in 1980, John once noticed that if you break down the word therapist it could be transformed into the-rapist. Shocked by his linguistic discovery, he pointed it out to the hospital social worker, who quipped back, “That’s why I always call myself a counselor!”

This is a confusing issue and difficult choice. For the preceding four editions of this text we used the word interviewer because it fit so perfectly with the text’s title, Clinical Interviewing. However, we’ve started getting negative feedback about the term. One reviewer noted that he “hated it.” Others complained “It’s too formal” and “It’s just a weird term to use in a text that’s really about counseling and psychotherapy.”

Given the preceding story, you might think that we’d choose the term counselor, but instead we’ve decided that exclusively choosing counselor or psychotherapist might inadvertently align us with one professional discipline over another. The conclusion: Mostly we use therapist and occasionally we leave in the term interviewer and also allow ourselves the freedom to occasionally use counselor, psychotherapist, and clinician.

Parenting

Building a Therapeutic Relationship with Parents: Part III – Collaboration

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Collaboration, as an attitude, requires that at least to some extent, parenting professionals come from a position of “not knowing” (Anderson, 1993; Anderson & Goolishian, 1992). As Anderson (1993) stated: “The not knowing position is empathic and is most often characterized by questions that come from an honest continuous therapeutic posture of not understanding too quickly” (p. 331).

[This excerpt is from How to Listen so Parents will Talk . . . http://www.amazon.com/How-Listen-Parents-Will-Talk/dp/1118012968/ref=la_B0030LK6NM_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1368845509&sr=1-5%5D

Not knowing requires professionals to resist the ubiquitous impulse to be all-knowing experts. Resisting the impulse to demonstrate one’s expertise is especially important when initially meeting with and working with parents.

It can be very difficult for parenting professionals to  establish and maintain a collaborative attitude. This is partly because human services providers who work with parents also need to be experts and must demonstrate their expertise. Similar to radical acceptance, collaboration between professionals and parents is a dialectic where the professional embraces both the parents’ expertness and his or her own expertise.

Some writers have emphasized that true collaboration between professionals and parents requires a form of leaderlessness (Brown, Pryzwansky, & Schulte, 2006; Kampwirth, 2006). In contrast, our position is that professionals who work with parents can and should bring the following knowledge, skills, and expertise to the consulting office:

  • How to lead or direct a counseling or consultation meeting
  • How to quickly form collaborative relationships and a working alliance with parents
  • Knowledge of what contemporary research says about child development and child psychopathology
  • A wide range of theoretically diverse and research-informed strategies and interventions to use with parents
  • A wide range of theoretically diverse and research-informed strategies and techniques for parents to implement with their children

At the same time, parents are also experts who bring the following knowledge and expertise into your office:

  • Their own personal memories and experiences of being parented
  • Knowledge and experience of their children’s unique temperament and behavior patterns
  • Awareness of their personal parenting style and efforts to parent more competently
  • Knowledge of their existing parenting strategies as well as the history of many other parenting ideas they have tried and found to be more or less helpful
  • An understanding of their limits and abilities to use new or different parenting strategies and techniques

In a very practical sense, it would be inappropriate (and probably ineffective) to ignore the fact that parents come to human services professionals expecting advice and guidance about how to be and become better parents. This is the frame from which virtually all parenting interventions flow. Consequently, if the consultant or therapist behaves too much like an equal and doesn’t act at all like an expert who offers concrete and straightforward advice, the meeting will likely fail because the basic assumption that the therapist is a helpful expert will be violated.

On the other hand, for many reasons, parents are in a vulnerable state and consequently, if they feel their parenting consultant  is acting like a judgmental or condescending expert, they will usually become defensive and antagonistic. To counter this possibility, the professional  needs to hold a collaborative attitude that honors the parents’ knowledge and experience. This collaborative attitude will help parents see themselves as respected and relatively equal partners in the therapeutic and/or educational consultation process.

Overall, the model we describe in this book (How to Listen so Parents will Talk and Talk so Parents will Listen) emphasizes that, from a position of respect, interest, and curiosity, parenting consultants, counselors, and therapists work to quickly establish a partnership with parents. When therapeutic or educational work with parents is most successful, parents will likely perceive you as an empathic, accepting, and collaborative expert willing to offer a wide range of theoretically divergent, practical, meaningful, and simple suggestions for how to parent more effectively.

 

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