Drawing the Ideal Self (Personal Construct Psychology - PCP)

This episode is about exploring what the client expects from their counselling sessions. Fay Fransella and Peggy Dalton remind us how important it is to do this early in the counselling relationship and they provide a description of a first session in PCP counselling. I hope you find it useful.

Reference

Fransella, F., and Dalton, P. (1990). Personal Construct Counselling in Action. Sage. 

Watching the news has been pretty miserable over the last year or so with so many people trying to flee awful situations. I have been thinking a lot about the people who are traumatised by experiences, and about the people who seem to recover well from similar experiences. This is unrelated to an objective assessment of the experience’s awfulness and closely related to their personal construing. Similarly, people can be devastated by common experiences, or by experiences which are not dangerous. The danger lies in the psychological threat of the experience. This month’s podcast is is about Kenneth Sewell’s model for understanding post-traumatic stress and for the components of PCP psychotherapy. 

Reference

Sewell, K. (2003) An Approach to Post-Traumatic Stress. In F. Fransella (Ed.) The Essential Practitioner’s Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. John Wiley & Sons. 

This episode explores the difficulty of getting some tasks done and refers to an exercise you can download from my website - drawingtheidealself.co.uk. 

The exercise follows a process for exploring your personal construing of the admin tasks you have to do. It is not specific to an age for use (even children have their tasks at school and home), nor to a profession (a homemaker also has many admin tasks). So, I hope it can be used with anyone.

Understanding why some tasks are more challenging for you is important to finding your own solutions. The way you construe your work will impact on your construing of the tasks you choose to do first, and those you find more painful. I decided to make this because I know people can feel a lot of guilt (Kelly’s definition is about being aware that you are ‘playing’ a role in a way that makes you feel very uncomfortable - see my podcast episode to learn more about this: Drawing the Ideal Self podcast episode 32).

This exercise is designed for you to try alone, promoting your reflection on persistent issues. Hopefully, you might find something that makes your position make more sense and reduce self-criticism. By then end, hope you will be able to find ways forward to address things in your own way, based on your construing.

It would be even better to use it in a pair, working to support understanding and growth in each other. 

Dorothy Rowe is famous for her popular best seller on depression, Depression: The way out of your Prison. You may not know that she was fan of Personal Construct Psychology because she does not highlight this in her books. I thought I would read a chapter from her Guide to Life, a short, very readable book which is a great introduction for people who are new to PCP.

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

Rowe, D. (2003). Depression: The way out of your Prison.

If you are enjoying learning about Personal Construct Psychology, you may be interested to take it further. This episode has information about some of the possibilities available, some paid and some for free.

References

Foundation courses

Coventry Constructivist Centre

Cathy Sparkes and Adele Pile 

Claire Morris 

Masters course

Padua masters course (taught in English) 

Quarterly study sessions

Coventry Constructivist Centre

Constructivist Meet Up videos

The George Kelly Society

Useful videos

Viv Burr - PCP research methods

https://youtu.be/SeRv62ugJFc

https://youtu.be/YFlwtIaSxjo

Dusan Stojnov Using PCP in coaching - 2 videos

https://youtu.be/0HDPf2xvZdA

https://youtu.be/c7tWbGjpTT4

PCP Education and Training videos

https://www.youtube.com/@pcpaeducationandtraining1097/

Journals

Personal Construct Theory and Practice

Journal of Constructivist Psychology

Costruttivismi

Rivista Italiana Di Costruttivismo

I thought it might be useful to see how a PCP approach might be useful in exploring the menopause. I found a paper by Foster and Viney describing a group approach. They developed a model of menopause based on a personal construct account of change and informed by women’s meanings and then a brief intervention aimed at tackling the psychological impact of the menopause. Their study is a nice example of how PCP techniques can be used to facilitate reflection, loosening and tightening, resulting in improvements in the way the women felt across a number of measures of wellbeing.

References

Foster, H. & Viney, L.L. (2006) Ch. 18 in Menopause: The start of a change. Caputi, P., Foster, H. And Viney, L.L. (Eds.) (2006). Personal Construct Psychology: New Ideas.

Ravenette, A.T. (1980). A drawing and its opposite: an application of the notion of the ‘construct’ in the elicitation of children’s drawings. Ch. 9 in Ravenette, T. (1999). Personal Construct Theory in Educational Psychology. A Practitioner’s View. 

Linda L. Viney & Mary T. Westbrook (1976) Cognitive Anxiety: A Method of Conent Analysis for Verbal Samples, Journal of Personality Assessment, 40:2, 140-150, DOI: 10.1207/s15327752jpa4002_5

Mary T. Westbrook & Linda L. Viney (1980) Scales Measuring People's Perception of themselves as Origins and Pawns, Journal of Personality Assessment, 44:2, 167-174, DOI: 10.1207/s15327752jpa4402_7

I am sending this message now in case anyone is just about to print and make the ESP cards!

I have been able to re-order cards, making it easier to see what is in each category and to print the sets. I have also added a few more cards, based on my work with children in the last couple of weeks. I will be adding the new document to my website by the end of 12/11/22. In future, if I add new cards, I will add them at the end of the document so you can easily find them and just print the new cards.

I am also making the same ordered set without the word labels in case you want to use the cards without them and elicit both poles of the construct. You could also add labels in a different language. I know there are people in the PCP therapy schools in Serbia and Italy who might find them useful.

I am aware that this set of cards do not show people with visible disabilities. I will address that in future when I have worked out the best way to do it.

The Exploring Situations and Problems (ESP) cards are a new tool for exploring construing in children. They might be useful if your time with a child is very limited, or you need something to use with children with poor attention or are not easy to engage. The cards can be the beginning of a PCP elaboration and an in-depth exploration of the constructs.

The ESP cards are used to create a storyboard of a child’s day, in order to help them to explain which parts of the day they find difficult, and to help them to reflect on what happens at those moments. The images and text provide an emergent pole of a construct to get the discussion going. These cards may be particularly useful for working with children who find it difficult to tell you how they construe situations, or to explain what happens when things go wrong for them. There are some rating scales included, so you can use the cards in the most accessible way.

The ESP cards are available from my website: drawingtheidealself.co.uk.

This month is an interview with Sam Beasley, Educational Psychologist, working in Hampshire, UK. It is not only for educational psychologists because there will practitioners in lots of services that work in similar ways to EPs - professionals who have very limited time in their contact with children and young people. Sam talks about how her interest in PCP began and how she uses PCP within her work as an educational psychologist with children, adolescents and adults. If you know any educational psychologists, or any trainee or assistant EPs, please tell them about this month’s episode.

There are a number of things Sam mentioned which I have linked to below. You can listen to the podcast interview with Abi and Cleo about the CEDS for this podcast - episode 15, August 2021.

References

The Children’s Exploratory Drawings: http://theceds.co.uk/

Self Image Profile: https://www.pearsonclinical.co.uk/store/ukassessments/en/Store/Professional-Assessments/Personality-%26-Biopsychosocial/Normal/Self-Image-Profiles/p/P100009227.html

Blob Trees: https://www.blobtree.com

Gogos (by Crazy Bones): do a Google search (they are available second hand)

Using Personal Construct Psychology in Practice with Children and Adolescents:

https://www.drawingtheidealself.co.uk/using-pcp-in-practice

Salmon Lines: Salmon (1995) Psychology in the Classroom: Reconstructing Teachers and Learners

https://www.tes.com/news/find-yourself-salmon-line

Hampshire and Isle of Wight Educational Psychology Service https://www.hants.gov.uk/educationandlearning/educationalpsychology/aboutus

Southampton University Educational Psychology Doctorate course https://www.southampton.ac.uk/psychology/postgraduate/research_degrees/courses/doctorate_in_educational_psychology_pgr.page

This month’s episode is about the impact on our construing of having a of physical illness or injury. I found a really PCP model in a paper by Linda Viney (1990): Constructivist Model of Psychological Reactions to Physical Illness and Injury. Everyone will have experience of illness and injury so I hope this will have universal appeal.

If you would like a written copy of the model, it can be downloaded from the RESOURCES page of my website: drawingtheidealself.co.uk .