Drawing the Ideal Self (Personal Construct Psychology - PCP)

This month's episode is rather seasonal: as the new school year starts, this episode is about Kelly's definition of anxiety and transition.

References:

Inquiring Man. The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Bannister and Fransella.

Ruby Tandoh Breaking Eggs Audio Guide

An interview with Abi Cohman and Cleo Timney, Trainee Educational Psychologists at Southampton University about The Children’s Exploratory Drawings (CEDS), their PCP technique to use in conversations and therapy with children and young people. This builds upon the work of Tom Ravenette, modernising and expanding the resources so they are suited to today’s world. We also talk about the process of the developing a new technique. You can download the materials their website for free: http://theceds.co.uk/

You can also email Abi and Cleo: [email protected]

You can come and meet Abi and Cleo at their workshop at the Coventry Constructivist Centre’s next CPD session on September 17th. It is a Zoom session and the cost is £5 to support the Zoom licence cost. Contact Sally Robbins to book a place: [email protected].

Linking back to June’s episode about understanding violent offenders, I think that the BBC Radio 4 series Prison Break is really worth listening to:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v9t5 

This month’s episode is an interview with Cathy Sparkes, Speech and Language Therapist and PCP Counsellor/Psychotherapist. Cathy works with people with brain injury and talks about how she uses PCP in her work and the impact of brain injury on identity. Cathy offers supervision and coaching: https://cathysparkes.co.uk. The details for things she highlighted as useful are:

Dependency grid - Helen Jones: https://youtu.be/J0bNBP5tH4g

Peggy Dalton’s book A Psychology for Living ISBN 0-471-93549-2

Cathy’s paper A personal construct approach to aphasia is published in Psychotherapy and Aphasia. Interventions for Emotional Wellbeing and Relationships, Eds Meredith and Yeates.

This month’s episode is about a PCP approach to understanding violent offending. I watched a programme called Time by Jimmy McGovern on BBC TV and it got me thinking about this. I had read James Horley book some years ago and I re-read the chapter by David Winter because it made me think a great deal about the issues around it.

This month I have an interview with Adele Pile, a speech and language therapist and PCP psychotherapist with many years’ experience of using PCP in her work. She talks about the value PCP has brought and the influences on her PCP journey. Adele is part of the Personal Construct Psychology Association, a UK association to promote and educate about PCP.  She works with Cathy Sparkes running a foundation course and PCP taster days through Cathy's website - CathySparkes.co.uk. You can view Adele’s profile on UKCP and email her on [email protected] if you are wondering about supervision or training.

I realised that we have not had a podcast session on learning, so today’s is focussed on learning and reading. Tom Ravenette’s paper, Reading difficulties and what else? (1969). Although it is an old paper, this is a good one because he emphasises the need to spend time in assessing the person’s views of reading, the self and learning. Of course, everything Tom has to say about reading would also apply to learning other subjects.

References:

Harry Procter’s Systemic Bow Tie can be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270271552_Developments_in_Personal_and_Relational_Construct_Psychology_Qualitative_Grids_and_the_Levels_of_Interpersonal_Construing

Drawing the Ideal Self is on my website: www.drawingtheidealself.co.uk

Reading difficulties and what else? (1969) Ch. 1 in Ravenette, T. (1999). Personal Construct Theory in Educational Psychology. A Practitioner’s View. 

This month’s podcast episode is an interview with Sally Robbins. You may know Sally as the organiser of the events at the Coventry Constructivist Centre (CCC) but you might not know much about how she came to PCP. Sally talks about her career path and her work with older people. Sally is the key contact for the CCC www.covpcp.com.

Sally and Diane Allen are facilitating the next quarterly study day on June 18th, on Zoom, 2-4pm: Who cares, and how? Construing the transition to caring roles. The session will include a workshop element, as normal, to give participants a chance to apply PCP techniques and to have some discussion. As with our recent sessions, this will be held on Zoom, and we ask participants for a £5 contribution to our running costs. Please contact Sally on [email protected] to book a place.

The books mentioned in this episode are Diane Allen and Peter Cummins’ new book, A Beginners’s Guide to Personal Construct Therapy with Adults and Couples (2021) and A Beginner’s Guide to Personal Construct Therapy with Young People by me! You can buy it through most online book sellers. The ebook can also be bought via my website which means Amazon don’t take a cut and you get a discount! https://drawingtheidealself.co.uk/index.php?p=1_13

This month’s podcast has a focus on experience. Experience is vital to our construing of ourselves and I thought a lot about this as I read Matt Haig’s novel, The Midnight Library. The other book mentioned in this episode is Diane Allen and Peter Cummins’ new book, A Beginners’s Guide to Personal Construct Therapy with Adults and Couples (2021). 

This month’s episode is about a paper by Tom Ravenette, Educational Psychologist and PCP interventionist. The paper presents a challenge to those of us who are in roles where people seek advice from us. The paper is ‘Never, never, never give advice’: an essay in professional practice (1980). If you work in a situation where you might be asked for your advice, Tom urges caution and has some suggestions for alternatives.

December’s (slightly late) episode is focussed on Finn Tschudi’s ABC. This is a great tool for exploring change to a preferred pole of a construct and elaborating some of the barriers to change. I use two examples from my own life and talk through them in the podcast.