Drawing the Ideal Self (Personal Construct Psychology - PCP)

This month’s episode will be focussed on time.  I listened to a few things on the radio about time and read some articles which were all very interesting and sparked this episode. I summarise the information from them and think about what Dorothy Rowe had to say about it and a few ideas for exploring a person’s personal constructions. 

References

All in the mind(Why it is hard to recall 2021)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001scxf

A sense of time(Can we learn a sense of time?)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0003qxf

Do we have a sense of time?(Connections between body signals and time perception)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct4y3w

A stopwatch on the brain's perception of time(Emotions affect awareness of time passing)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/01/psychology-time-perception-awareness-research

Rowe, D. (1995). Dorothy Rowe’s Guide to Life.

I thought it was time to invite you to have a go at something you could easily use with people you are working with. This involves eliciting constructs, identifying the more important ones and then pyramiding those constructs. You will use fantasy characters or stories that had an impact on you when you were growing up and it does not matter what sort of media they are from - books, TV, film, games etc. The important things is that they are fictional, which I hope will make the exploration suitable for any age.  I have given an example of my own construing working through the technique so that you can hear a real example. I hope you will find that you can try it yourself and then that you might find it useful in your work. If you do, I would be interested to hear how you found it. As always, what you will end up with is a range of constructs but these will be more concrete.

The stories I used were:

The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids - Grimm’s Fairytales

https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm005.html

Little Red Riding Hood - Grimm’s Fairy Tales

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Red_Riding_Hood

Snow White - the movie and then the audio version of the film which I had on vinyl.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_and_the_Seven_Dwarfs_(1937_film)

The L Shaped Room - Lynne Reid Banks

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0099469634?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_RC7BHHNN58HBPDSWQ7A9

The Singing Ringing Tree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singing_Ringing_Tree

The Famous Five - Enid Blyton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Famous_Five

This episode has an idea you can experiment with as an exploration of yourself. Miller Mair’s Community of Self is an interesting and rather playful way to take a look at yourself as a number of characters engaged in ‘producing’ you. I have taken some excepts from a paper by Mair and if you are interested, it would be worth reading the whole paper for more about the background to it.

References:

The Community of Self. Ch.8 in Towards a Radical Redefinition of Psychology. The selected works of Miller Mair, by Winter, D. & Reed, N. (2015).  

Cummins, P., & Moran, H. (2023). The PCP Pocketbook of Personal Construct Psychology Techniques. Available on Amazon only.

Grieg, A. & MacKay, T. (2023). The Homunculi Approach To Social And Emotional Wellbeing. 2nd Edition. 

Happy New Year! This month I have been thinking about the way we might experience being construed by teachers. This is meaningful throughout our lives and can affect the way we construe ourselves. It was sparked by listening to the BBC Radio 4 Life Changing programme which reminded me how important that is:. The episode was from May 2023: Overheard. The programme blub says, “Dr Sian Williams talks to people who have lived through extraordinary events that have reshaped their lives in the most unpredictable ways.”

In response to that programme, I thought I would explore how I was construed by teachers. I re-read my secondary school reports and could see connections between how I was construed, how my construing developed and the links with my professional interests. 

For this month’s episode, I am reading a chapter from a lovely book by Trevor Butt and Vivien Burr, Invitation to Personal Construct Psychology (2004). This is about the fact that we might all do things that make us unhappy, unhealthy or unfulfilled. They explain why we need to understand construing when we wonder why people continue with behaviours which seem so obviously to their detriment.

This month’s episode will consider how validation is a more useful construct than reinforcement when we wonder why someone made a challenging choice. It also summarises a paper about the impact of wrongful imprisonment on a person. The paper is freely available - details below. A dilemma faced by one such prisoner is used as an example. I have been thinking about that situation ever since I heard about it - it made me think again about my core constructs. 

I hope you find it interesting and useful. Please let me know if you do. It helps me to know whether what I am doing makes sense to other people. If you are a regular listener, I would love to know that too. You can email me at [email protected]. 

Reference

Brooks, S.K, Greenberg, N. (2020). Psychological impact of being wrongfully accused of criminal offences: A systematic literature review. Medicine, Science and the Law. 2021;61(1):44-54. doi:10.1177/0025802420949069 

Quite a number of us will be working with adults or children and young people who are referred because they have difficulty containing their angry feelings. A PCP approach has an emphasis on understanding the person’s construing so I am using a chapter by Peter Cummins to provide a concise explanation of a PCP approach to working with anger. It is a book worth reading for a good variety of authors, group and individual approaches and for all age groups.

Reference: Cummins, P. (Ed.). Working with Anger. A Constructivist Approach. Wiley. 

You may be thinking about how you might use PCP in research. This episode features an interview with Dr. Emily Strong, Educational Psychologist, whose research has focussed on children who speak selectively. This is one of the tricky issues to get around, especially when we need to explore a child or young person’s views. The interview with Emily you will hear what she did and what she found through her work. Her thesis is available online and I would encourage you to read it for the research and for the literature review. If you would like to follow up and ask Emily for the resources she uses, see the details below.

References

Strong, E.V. (2019). We do have a voice: using a Personal Construct Psychology technique to explore how children and young people with Selective Mutism construct their current and ‘ideal’ selves. Unpublished thesis. School of Education, The University of Birmingham.

https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/9559/13/Strong2019ApEd%26ChildPsyDVolume1_Redacted.pdf

For more information about this technique, please contact Dr Emily Strong:

[email protected]

[email protected]

Have you wondered about whether there is a PCP construction of addiction? Butt and Burr have a useful chapter which I will read for this podcast. People are complex beings, with a tendency to make connections between experiences, and then to develop rituals and routines so they can anticipate them more efficiently. In terms of PCP, the issue is described as a dependency rather than addiction, a factual rather than critical label because we all have dependencies.  This description directs our attention to understanding the meaning of their dependency, and looking out for the losses associated with giving it up. 

You might want to listen at a slightly faster speed. I am aware that I read rather slowly in order to make fewer mistakes. 

Butt, T. & Burr, V. (2004). Invitation to Personal Construct Psychology, 2nd Edition. 

Often it can be helpful to go back to the basics of PCP theory and get a clearer understanding than you had first time around. I found a really nice explanation of a construct in Richard Butler’s book. I think he provides a  good summary and I wanted to share it with you. If you already feel secure in your understanding, you might like to hear the way he expresses it and then take some time to consider the way you explain constructs to other people.

References

Butler, R. (2009). Coming to terms with personal construct theory. Ch. 1 in Butler, R., Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Wiley-Blackwell

Ravenette, T. (1999). Personal Construct Theory in Educational Psychology. A Practitioner’s View.