I keep getting a steady stream of requests for the “long version” of our Theoretical Orientation Test. The TOT-Long is from our Study Guide, pictured here:
When taking our TOT-Long, keep some or all of the following in the back (or front) of your mind.
This questionnaire is for self-exploration; it’s not an “assessment” with established psychometrics. What that means–in the spirit of Adler–is that this so-called test is an idiographic assessment process.
I’m not a big fan of counselors and psychotherapists pigeon-holing themselves into strict theoretical positions. Instead, finding a compatible theory can help you align with ways you can transform your ideas into practical ways of being and ways of working with clients. Don’t let your theoretical orientation stop you from flexibly providing clients with the services they need and want.
All theory-based approaches work best from a relational foundation. If you question this basic assumption, try doing cold CBT with ambivalent or reluctant teenagers. . . or just imagining how that would go might be enough.
I hope you enjoy contemplating where our theoretical “sorting hat” sends you. As with all assessments, you’re the final authority of whether the shoe (or hat) fits.
Please let me know what you think of the test and, if you’re so inclined, post your theoretical orientation as a comment here. I look forward to hearing and seeing your reactions and results.
Recently someone mistook me for an Adlerian. This got me thinking, “Maybe I am an Adlerian?” Then again, if you look at the history of counseling and psychotherapy, most of us are Adlerians. At one presentation I attended back when we attended those things, the presenters started with, “In the beginning, there was Adler.”
As a Happy Birthday tribute to Alfred Adler, below is an excerpt from our Adlerian theories chapter. There’s much more, of course, like, for example, what Adlerian theory would have to say about the Super Bowl.
Happy Birthday Dr. Adler.
Historical Context
Freud and Adler met in 1902. According to Mosak and Maniacci (1999), Adler published a strong defense of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and consequently Freud invited Adler over “on a Wednesday evening” for a discussion of psychological issues. “The Wednesday Night Meetings, as they became known, led to the development of the Psychoanalytic Society” (p. 3).
Adler was his own man with his own ideas before he met Freud. Prior to their meeting he’d published his first book, Healthbook for the Tailor’s Trade (Adler, 1898). In contrast to Freud, much of Adler’s medical practice was with the working poor. Early in his career, he worked extensively with tailors and circus performers.
In February 1911, Adler did the unthinkable (Bankart, 1997). As president of Vienna’s Psychoanalytic Society, he read a highly controversial paper, “The Masculine Protest,” at the group’s monthly meeting. It was at odds with Freudian theory. Instead of focusing on biological and psychological factors and their influence on excessively masculine behaviors in males and females, Adler emphasized culture and socialization (Carlson & Englar-Carlson, 2017). He claimed that women occupied a less privileged social and political position because of social coercion, not physical inferiority. Further, he noted that some women who reacted to this cultural situation by choosing to dress and act like men were suffering, not from penis envy, but from a social-psychological condition he referred to as the masculine protest. The masculine protest involved overvaluing masculinity to the point where it drove men and boys to give up and become passive or to engage in excessive aggressive behavior. In extreme cases, males who suffered from the masculine protest began dressing and acting like girls or women.
The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society members’ response to Adler was dramatic. Bankart (1997) described the scene:
After Adler’s address, the members of the society were in an uproar. There were pointed heckling and shouted abuse. Some were even threatening to come to blows. And then, almost majestically, Freud rose from his seat. He surveyed the room with his penetrating eyes. He told them there was no reason to brawl in the streets like uncivilized hooligans. The choice was simple. Either he or Dr. Adler would remain to guide the future of psychoanalysis. The choice was the members’ to make. He trusted them to do the right thing. (p. 130)
Freud likely anticipated the outcome. The group voted for Freud to lead them. Adler left the building quietly, joined by the Society’s vice president, William Stekel, and five other members. They moved their meeting to a local café and established the Society for Free Psychoanalytic Research. The Society soon changed its name to the Society for Individual Psychology. This group believed that social, familial, and cultural forces are dominant in shaping human behavior. Bankart (1997) summarized their perspective: “Their response to human problems was characteristically ethical and practical—an orientation that stood in dramatic contrast to the biological and theoretical focus of psychoanalysis” (p. 130).
Adler’s break from Freud gives an initial glimpse into his theoretical approach. Adler identified with common people. He was a feminist. These leanings reflect the influences of his upbringing and marriage. They reveal his compassion for the sick, oppressed, and downtrodden. Before examining Adlerian theoretical principles, let’s note what he had to say about gender politics well over 90 years ago:
All our institutions, our traditional attitudes, our laws, our morals, our customs, give evidence of the fact that they are determined and maintained by privileged males for the glory of male domination. (Adler, 1927, p. 123)
Raissa Epstein may have had a few discussions with her husband, exerting substantial influence on his thinking (Santiago-Valles, 2009).
Just for fun, here’s a photo of a page from our Suicide Assessment and Treatment Planning book. This page is the lead in to a section that focuses in on how to work with clients who are suicidal, but whom also may be naturally also experiencing irritability, hostility, and hopelessness. For info, go to the publisher, ACA: https://imis.counseling.org/store/detail.aspx?id=78174
Working with parents in counseling can be terribly frightening or splendidly gratifying. Having more knowledge and skills is likely to up your odds of having a gratifying experience.
Next Friday and Saturday (January 29 and 30) I’ll be doing a two-day class/workshop on working effectively with parents. If you want more knowledge and skills in this important area, the workshop is a good start. You’ll learn about grandma’s rule, special time, mutual problem-solving, and many other “interventions” with parents. You’ll also learn a bunch of principles and strategies for connecting with parents, deepening rapport, and making the most of limited time.
Signing up for the workshop is easy. Just go to this website,
Then scroll down to Session II, for more info, and go to the bottom of the webpage to enroll. Be forewarned, unfortunately, it’s not free.
I hope to see you there. Of course, “there” will be on Zoom, because that’s what we’re doing now. Nevertheless, it will be fun and engaging and informative . . . and you just might get a chance to role play with me for a demonstration. . . which is pretty much always a good time.
In the Department of Counseling at the University of Montana we offer regular workshops for our students and for counseling, social work, and psychology professionals. This “Spring semester” (even though spring semester starts in January, at the U of MT we still call it spring, probably because we start wishing very hard for spring at some point in January), we’ve got a three-part workshop series. You can sign up for one, or two, or all three sessions.
I’m posting this because I’m doing my workshop completely online in the beautiful spring month of January. That means you can come—even from a very long distance. Although there’s a fee involved (sorry about that; we use the fees to support our departmental operations budget), you can also get 13.0 hours of professional continuing education credit. My plan is to make the workshop as engaging, practical, and fun as humanly possible.
Here are the details (I’m doing Session II, meaning it will be even more “springy” than session I):
Session II: Friday, January 29 – Saturday, January 30, 2021, 9:00am – 5:00pm
Working Effectively with Parents with John Sommers-Flanagan, Ph.D.
Parenting has always been challenging, but now, with ubiquitous social media influences, the global pandemic, and increasing rates of children’s mental health disorders, parenting in the 21st century is more stressful and demanding than ever before. As a consequence, many parents turn to mental health, healthcare, and school professionals for help with their family problems. However, partly because parents can be selective or picky consumers and partly because children’s problems can be complex and overwhelming, many professionals feel ill-prepared to work effectively with parents. This class will teach participants a model for working effectively with parents. The model, which has supporting research, can be used for brief individual consultations or longer-term parent counseling. Practitioners who want to work with parents will learn methods for quick rapport, collaborative problem formulation, initial interventions, and optional follow-up strategies.
Learning Objectives:
Understand a consultation model, with supporting research, for working effectively with parents.
Learn skills for brief individual consultations or longer-term parent counseling.
Utilize methods for quick rapport, collaborative problem formulation, initial interventions, and optional follow-up strategies.
Presenter Bio:
John Sommers-Flanagan is a professor of counseling at the University of Montana, a clinical psychologist, and author or coauthor of over 100 publications, including nine books and numerous professional training videos. His books, co-written with his wife Rita, include Tough Kids, Cool Counseling, How to Listen so Parents will Talk and Talk so Parents will Listen, Clinical Interviewing, the forthcoming Suicide Assessment and Treatment Planning: A Strengths-Based Approach, and more. John is a sought out keynote speaker and professional workshop trainer in the areas of (a) counseling youth, (b) working with parents, (c) suicide assessment, and (d) happiness. He has published many newspaper columns, Op-Ed pieces, and an article in Slate Magazine. He is also co-host of the Practically Perfect Parenting Podcast and is renowned for his dancing skills (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fippweztcwg) and his performance as Dwight, in the Counseling Department’s parody of The Office (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM8-I8_1CqQ&t=19s).
Course Number and Title: COUN 595: Working Effectively with Parents
Instructor: John Sommers-Flanagan, Ph.D.
Meeting Dates and Times: Friday, January 29, 2021 and Saturday, January 30, 2021, from 9:00am to 5:00pm
Instructional Modality: This is a synchronous online course. Attendance, participation, homework, and short quizzes are required for course credit.
Recommended Book: Sommers-Flanagan, J., & Sommers-Flanagan, R. (2011). How to listen so parents will talk and talk so parents will listen. John Wiley & Sons.
Let’s say you want to practice reality therapy. Maybe more than any other approach, you’ll need to use reality therapy on yourself to become a reality therapist. Here’s what I mean.
You could consider channeling a little William Glasser, because he’s the developer of reality therapy. Then again, you might not want to channel Glasser, because, as Robert Wubbolding has written, to become a reality therapist, “You need not imitate the style of anyone else.”
The point is that you get to do the choosing . . . and a great start is to choose to use Wubbolding’s summary of the delivery system of reality therapy. Wubbolding used the letters, WDEP to summarize reality therapy, and these letters also happen to appear on Wubbolding’s car license plate. If you’re getting the feeling that Wubbolding is committed to reality therapy principles, you would be absolutely right. WDEP stands for Wants, Doing, Evaluation, and Planning. The following four questions capture WDEP:
What do you want?
What are you doing?
Is what you’re doing working? [Evaluation]
Should you make a new plan?
Before enacting reality therapy, you’ll need to adopt a positive, engaged, courteous, enthusiastic, counselor demeanor. You also need to be ready to use your excellent active listening skills. Avoiding toxic relational strategies like arguing, blaming, and criticizing is crucial. Think of yourself as a mentor or coach, and then practice the following strategies to see if they fit for you.
Begin by helping your client (or role-play partner) identify what he/she/they want. You could use any of the following questions:
If we could work on something that feels important to you, what would that be?
What do you want from our meeting today?
This is a big question, but I’m going to ask it anyway: What do you want from life?
If we have a good session and accomplish something that feels good to you, what will we have accomplished?
After you’ve gotten a sense of what your client is wants, you can move onto an inquiry about how your client is currently trying to get those wants. Questions like the following might help:
How are you currently trying to get what you want?
What have you tried?
I imagine you’ve tried various strategies for getting what you want to happen in your life. Tell me about all those things you’ve tried and how they’ve worked.
You can see from this last question, that asking about what clients are doing naturally leads to what Wubbolding considers to be the most important step in reality therapy: Evaluation. Wubbolding hypothesizes that many clients don’t get taught how to self-evaluate and/or may not have much practice at self-evaluation. He uses questions like the following to prompt client self-evaluation.
Is what you’re doing helping or hurting?
Is want you want realistic and attainable?
Does your self-talk help or hinder you in your efforts to get what you want?
Wubbolding has many additional questions about how to help clients self-evaluate in his book, Reality Therapy for the 21st Century. Check it out.
This brings us to the final question: Should you make a new plan? I think one of the most important insights that reality therapy brings to the counseling table is its emphasis on active and smart planning. Although SMART plans originated in the business world, Wubbolding has an extensive guide for how to help clients make effective plans. In my experiences doing counseling and psychotherapy, I’ve been astonished at how often clients go off in search of goals with either no plans or bad plans. For Wubbolding, client plans should be: Simple, Attainable, Measurable, Immediate, Involved, Controlled, Committed, and Continuous (Wubbolding’s acronym for planning is SAMI2C3). For more information on how to create SAMI2C3 plans, see Wubbolding’s book or the chapter in our Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice textbook.
All planning that happens in counseling should be collaborative planning. Your job, as you engage in this important planning step, is to come alongside clients, brainstorm small tweaks or big changes in how clients might attain their goals, and to give them constructive feedback about whether their plan is a smart plan while providing encouragement and collaboratively evaluating the plan’s effectiveness. I have no doubt that reality therapy can be effective, partly because the first three reality therapy questions are so central to human functioning, but also because a good plan is a beautiful thing.
Note: the content of this blog is primarily adapted from the section that Robert Wubbolding wrote for our theories textbook.
A good summary is a beautiful thing. But summaries are always unfair and limited representations of that which is bigger. Nevertheless, below, I’ve tried to summarize the primary listening focus and the primary change mechanisms for each of 13 theoretical orientations included in our textbook, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice (John Wiley & Sons, 2018). In addition, yesterday I filmed myself using a memory-palace strategy while describing all 13 perspectives below. You can read the summary below and/or watch me try to pull off this 15 minute theories overview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VJFK6cCHCU8
Theory
What to Listen For. . .
Change Mechanisms
PsychoanalyticPsychodynamic
Old maladaptive intrapersonal conflicts and repetitive, unconscious, and dysfunctional interpersonal patterns.
Make unconscious conscious, catharsis, and working through new intra- and interpersonal dynamics.
Adlerian
Basic mistakes imbedded in the style of life, including excess self-interest and inferiority/superiority.
Awareness, insight, and encouragement (courage) to face the tasks of life.
Existential
Anxiety over and avoidance of core existential life dynamics like death, isolation, meaninglessness, and freedom.
Feedback and confrontation to help clients gain awareness and face life’s ultimate existential demands.
Person-Centered
Emotional distress, incongruence (discrepancies between real and ideal selves), and conditions of worth.
A relationship characterized by congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding.
Gestalt
Unfinished emotional and behavioral baggage from the past that blocks awareness or disturbs self-other boundaries.
Guidance on using here-and-now experiments to deal with unfinished emotional and behavioral experiences.
Behavioral
Disturbing emotions (e.g., anxiety), maladaptive behavior patterns, and environmental contingencies.
New learning or re-learning via operant, classical, and social processes.
In a surprising turn of events, this semester, I’ve decided to make a series of unprofessional theories videos to accompany my counseling and psychotherapy theories course (and text). When I say surprising, I mean surprising in that I’m surprised about feeling open to spontaneously video recording myself and making it available via YouTube. Could it be that as I grow older, I care less about how I look and sound, and care more about showing myself openly to others as an imperfect being who’s just trying to offer up something that might be educational? Alternatively, maybe I just caught the narcissistically-leaning, reality television, constantly-make-videos-of-myself, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, virus that’s infecting so many people. We may never know.
And I say unprofessional because I’m filming these all by myself, not using a script, and making side comments and using props that might involve embarrassing myself as I talk about counseling and psychotherapy theories. One form of these unprofessional videos includes me doing “dramatic readings” and commentary from the works of Freud, Adler, and other original theories thinkers and writers. Although I intended these readings to be dramatic, I can see how they also might just be dull.
With my explanations and caveats out of the way, here are the offerings, thus far, for this semester.
Week 1 – An Intro to Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories
Week 4 – Existential Theory and Therapy . . . coming soon!
Although this post focuses on my unprofessional videos, that doesn’t mean I’ve completely stopped behaving professionally. For example, recently, I was a guest on the podcast, “A New Angle” hosted by Justin Angle and Bryce Ward (both of the University of Montana College of Business). In this podcast, we talk about COVID, suicide in Montana, happiness, and why the College of Business supports the teaching “Essential” interpersonal and psychological skills. It’s a pretty cool (and professional) podcast, even if I do say so myself. You can find “A New Angle” on Apple Podcasts at:
As a resource to complement the panel discussion, I’m posting some information on suicide assessment. Below is the opening from the suicide assessment chapter in our forthcoming book with the American Counseling Association. We emphasize that suicide assessment isn’t purely data collection. Instead, professionals need to simultaneously keep their eye on how to be therapeutic. Here’s the excerpt:
Suicide assessment integrates science and art. Assessment science helps practitioners determine what information is most important during a clinical interview and how to best obtain reliable and valid assessment data (Sommers-Flanagan et al., 2020; Wygant et al., 2020). The art of assessment includes how and when to ask questions, relational methods for offering empathy, and how clinicians can partner with clients to explore symptoms and strengths in ways that facilitate trust and stimulate honesty (Ganzini et al., 2013). Because suicide is a painful and provocative topic, advanced assessment skills are essential.
When clients or students experience suicidality, exposure to an assessment process can feel threatening. As a consequence, we believe counselors should embrace principles of therapeutic assessment (Fischer, 1970, 1985). Therapeutic assessment originated in the late 1960’s, when Constance Fischer began practicing and publishing about a radical new assessment approach. Unlike traditional objective and unilateral approaches to assessment, Fischer (1969, 1970) began viewing clients as “co-evaluators.” Stephen Finn has extended Fischer’s ideas; the approach is now called therapeutic assessment (Finn et al., 2012).
Therapeutic assessment principles are consistent with the professional counseling paradigm (Capuzzi & Stauffer, 2016); they include collaboration, compassion, openness, honesty, and a commitment to valuing clients as ultimate experts on their lived experiences. Although information gathering remains important, relationship connection during assessment interviews takes priority. Every assessment finding needs to be validated and understood within each client’s unique personal context. Collaboration is the cornerstone; assessments are done with clients, not on clients (Martin, 2020; Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2017). As Flemons and Gralnik (2013) wrote, when conducting suicide assessments, “Our goal is not to remain objectively removed but, rather, to become empathically connected” (p. 6).
Obviously, there’s not enough time and space to go into great depth on suicide assessment in a little blog like this. And so, if you looking for depth, check out the video series I did with Victor Yalom and Psychotherapy.net. You can even watch a short demonstration video clip: https://www.psychotherapy.net/video/suicidal-clients-series
I wish you all the best as you face the challenge of engaging with and treating clients who are suicidal with the therapeutic respect they deserve.
Giving and receiving feedback is a huge topic. In this blog post the focus is on giving and receiving feedback in classroom settings or in counseling/psychotherapy supervision. The following guidelines are far from perfect, but they offer ideas that instructors and students can use to structure the feedback giving and receiving process. Check them out, and feel free to improve on what’s here.
Before you do anything, remember that feedback can feel threatening. Hearing about how we sound and what we look like is pretty much a trigger for self-consciousness and vulnerability. Sometimes, when we look in the mirror, we don’t like what we see, and so obviously, when someone else holds up a mirror, the feedback we experience may be . . . uncomfortable. . . to say the least. To help everyone feel a bit safer, the following can be helpful:
Acknowledge that feedback is scary.
Emphasize that feedback is essential to counseling skill development.
Share the feedback process you’ll be using
Make recommendations and give examples of what kind of feedback is most useful.
Acknowledge that Feedback is Scary: You can talk about mirrors (see above), or about how unpleasant it is for most people to hear their own voices or see their own images, or tell a story of difficult and helpful feedback. I encourage you to find your own way to acknowledge that feedback triggers vulnerability.
Feedback is Essential: Encourage students to lean into their vulnerability and be open to feedback—but don’t pressure them. Explain: “The reason you’re in a counseling class is to improve your skills. Though hard to hear, constructive feedback is useful for skill development. Don’t think of it as criticism, but as an opportunity to learn from mistakes and improve your counseling skills.” What’s important is to norm the value of giving and getting feedback.
Share the Process You’ll be Using: Before starting a role play or in-class practice scenario, describe the guidelines you’ll be using for giving and receiving feedback (and then generate additional rules from students in the class). Here are some guidelines I’ve used:
Everyone who volunteers (or does a demonstration or is being observed) gets appreciation. Saying, “Thanks for volunteering” is essential. I like it when my classes established a norm where whoever does the role-playing or volunteers gets a round of applause.
After being appreciated, the role-player starts the process with a self-evaluation. You might say something like, “After every role play or presentation, the first thing we’ll do is have the person or people who were role-playing share their own thoughts about what they did well and what they think they didn’t do so well.”
After the volunteer self-evaluates, they’re asked whether they’d like feedback from others. If they say no, then no feedback should be given. Occasionally students will feel so vulnerable about a performance that they don’t want feedback. We need to accept their preference for no feedback and also encourage them to solicit and accept feedback at some later point in time.
Giving Useful Feedback: Feedback should be specific, concrete, and focused on things that can be modified. For example, you can offer a positive or non-facilitative behavioral observation (e.g., “I noticed you leaned back and crossed your arms when the client started talking about their sexuality.”). After making an observation, the feedback giver can offer a hypothesis (e.g., “Your client might interpret you leaning back and crossing your arms as judgmental”). The feedback giver can also offer an alternative (“Instead, you might want to lean forward and focus on some of your excellent nonverbal listening skills.”). BTW: General and positive comments (e.g., “Good job!”) are pleasant and encouraging, but should be used in combination with more specific feedback; it’s important to know what was good about your job.
Constructive or corrective feedback shouldn’t focus so much on what was done poorly, but emphasize what could be done to perform the skill correctly. Constructive or corrective feedback might sound like this: “I noticed you asked several closed questions that seemed to slow down the counseling process. Closed questions aren’t bad questions, but sometimes it’s easier to keep clients talking about important content if you replace your closed questions with open questions or with a paraphrase. Let’s try that.”
Other examples: Instead of saying, “Your body was stiff as a board,” try saying, “I think you’d be more effective if you relaxed your arms and shoulders more.” Or you could take some of the evaluation out of the comment by just noticing or observing, rather than judging, “I noticed you said the word, ‘Gotcha’ several times.” You can also ask what else they might say instead, “To vary how you’re responding to your client, what might you say instead of ‘Gotcha’?”
General negative comments such as “That was poorly done.” should be avoided. To be constructive, provide feedback that’s specific, concrete, and holds out the potential for positive change. Also, feedback should never be uniformly negative. Everyone engages in counseling behaviors that are more or less facilitative. If you happen to be the type who easily sees what’s wrong, but you have trouble offering praise, impose the following rule on yourself: If you can’t offer positive feedback, don’t offer any at all. Another alternative is to use the sandwich feedback technique when appropriate (i.e., say something positive, say something constructive, then say another positive thing).
IMHO, significant constructive feedback is the responsibility of the instructor and should be given during a private, individual supervision session. The general rule of: “Give positive feedback in public and constructive feedback in private” can be useful.
Finally, students should be reminded of the disappointing fact that no one performs perfectly, including the teacher or professor. Also, when you do demonstrations, be sure to model the process by doing a self-evaluation (including things you might have done better), and then asking students for observations and feedback.
The place to click if you want to learn about psychotherapy, counseling, or whatever John SF is thinking about.
