Diego Tapia Figueroa, Ph.D. y Maritza Crespo Balderrama, M. A.
October 5, 2018
(NOTE: For the complete table check:
The training or training meetings with psychotherapy professionals in certain contexts of Ecuadorian society show complex, contradictory and paradoxical situations, which we propose to discuss (in this first part) to find alternatives that favor the people with whom they work.
For example:
a) They are professionals, who, although they tend to consider that other people “should” go to therapy, they do not do it; they do not show interest in doing constant therapeutic processes, as a necessary form of self-care and professional ethics.
b) They do not seek spaces for supervision or clinical intervention; being able to have a place to dialogue about the being of the therapist: what is happening with the advisor, facilitator, counselor, social worker, therapist, and team in each process and history?
c) Many work as lonely “saviors”; they do not seek to promote the construction of support networks -for themselves- family, professional, institutional.
d) They are not interested or curious about improving professionally: they get stuck in learned modernist dogmas and from there -in an omnipotent plan- they want to teach others to live. They are anchored in cookbooks and an oppressive and unuseful “must be”. They fear and revile critical and self-critical reflections on their own theoretical and practical certainties, viewing them as a personal attack that threatens their identity.
The result of these ways of carrying out their professional practice is, often, that many “burn out”; they make a comfortable shell of cynicism or indifference to continue with their exhausting routines, made of stereotypical responses, platitudes, and prejudices concealed in a positivist-psychological ideology. They have all the answers – from the expert – to complexity that they neither understand nor respect.
To start a different and continuous process of transformative conversational dialogues; to commit ourselves together in the generation of a context of human and professional well-being- real and consistent- it may be useful to move from that comfort zone, where people are more interested in maintaining power and privileges, rather than generating transformative dialogic processes (which is another way of understanding psychotherapy).
The options could be to start inviting them to participate, contributing in a meaningful way, with their knowledge, experiences, reflections; to change their worldview and co-construct (with consultants, colleagues, networks) and generate a new meeting space, which is relationally enriching: personally, in families, in work, and humanely.
As a sincere and open invitation, to commit ourselves together, consciously and responsibly in a new style of relating at work; to give the best of each one, and learn -without prejudice- from the best of others. To learn to communicate with the question, learn to listen deeply, with genuine human interest, without interrupting; we invite you to ask questions to understand and offer a space for meaningful reflection, for the free and open expression of the multiple voices present at each meeting.
Process Generating Questions
What are we here for? Am I here for …? It is interesting to know the particular reason why each one is here. What would have to happen so that, when this is over, you feel satisfied? How can you contribute, in a meaningful way, so that what happens here is what you expect, and what you would like? How to propose a language with which we invite the other to feel involved? How do we invite a person into a relationship? How do you start this conversation to build something meaningful?
How do we look, listen, and respond? What internal dialogues were you having while listening to me? Can you think of a learning moment, a different reflection, that you are going to get from this meeting? From our initial questions: are they still there; have they been transformed; is there something you want to take up? How do you see a community in which we all feel understood and included? Reflecting on the experience: what is useful to you from this space?
We start from the confidence that there are our own, valuable and respectable resources in all the members of the conversation. We are confident that work can be a meaningful experience that expands -with creativity, imagination, and generosity- the meaning of our own lives.
It is to welcome this new challenge, to commit ourselves and grow together, transform ourselves positively, recognize and value our strengths, and open the possibilities to everything that needs to be different; to enjoy with passion, creativity, intelligence, and relational ethics, what we do together with others, is called therapy or shared life.
(part II)
October 19, 2018
How and what to do differently in therapy, so as not to bore the clients and us too, with the tiresome repetitions of “more of the same”? How do we manage to jointly generate creative dialogues?
It is common to hear in therapy sessions -especially at the beginning- the fatigue with which many clients arrive and how they express their skepticism, tiredness, exhaustion, and hopelessness; imagining that they will find another conventional therapy of intrapsychic archeology, pathologizing diagnoses, and psychological labels; or also, with disqualifying advice, moralizing sermons and an extensive duty to be supposedly perfect.
As we have already mentioned on other occasions, the challenge of co-creating a horizontal, democratic, participatory, and inclusive context in which it is possible to question, -with criteria- the hierarchical forms of the dominant culture, valuing and recognizing the needs of participants, rather than standardized bureaucratic goals continues.
The practices can be seen and understood in different ways, they can be assimilated and given new meanings in relationships with others. What is significant is contextualizing the actions to make it possible to understand the needs of families, communities, and professionals; and the co-construction of alternatives to solve them. Alternatives that are coordinated in a joint process among all participants.
To organize the conversation, we could ask these 3 initial questions:
• What is the context of the dialogue?
• Who are we in this dialogue?
• What is the project that we want, and can share?
What is the sequence of the process like?
(Based on Dora Fried Schnitman, 2017)
Build a foundation for the client to commit. The best results show when there is a relationship: a solid bond based on trust and security between the family and the operator.
Help the consultants imagine in which direction they prefer to live their life. Our work with the client can be significantly enhanced when organized around a vision of possibilities. Developing a proactive vision becomes a process that awakens hope for a better future.
Support the consultant to identify elements that restrict and maintain the direction they prefer to give their life. As these constraining and sustaining elements emerge, we begin to see them as externalized entities, and people as being part of a relationship with them that is constantly evolving and modifying.
Support the clients to change their relationships with elements that restrict and/or enhance the relationship with those who support, to “assume” the life they prefer to live.
Support the consultant to develop communities that support putting into action the life they prefer to live. Thus, the work can focus on helping the consultant to identify, use and sustain this community of allies to give continuity to the transformations.
The Collaborative Process
(Based on Harlene Anderson, 2017):
Some of the values and principles that characterize these services focused on the strengths and resources of the family:
• Be culturally curious and honor the wisdom of the family.
• Believe in possibilities and focus on the family’s resources to get ahead, helping to mobilize their resilience.
• Develop a joint work and adapt the service/process to the families.
• Activate empowerment practices and take responsibility for our work with families.
It is important to hold a reflection (put into conversation) that is capable of questioning the theoretical and practical certainties of the therapists, which tend to homogenize and are functional to social control, the prevailing conformity, and the domestication of subjectivities. May this questioning (this continuous questioning and discerning) generate new meanings for this different dialogical encounter with a transforming purpose.
Good humor as a resource in therapy (part III)
November 4, 2018
Those who have gone to therapy and at some point reflected on what did it bring them, in what they have noticed its usefulness, and how they have felt that they were transformed: their perspectives, discourses, and relational practices; they usually mention a point of a qualitative leap in their therapeutic process has been to be able to dialogue and laugh with their interlocutor (the therapist), understanding things with humor at the complexity, uncertainty and human fragility.
Moreover, from the evaluations of successful therapies, the testimonies mention that they felt and knew that they had gone through their dilemmas and that the process had concluded satisfactorily when they were able to laugh at themselves (without cruelty or self-destructive attitudes) and laugh with the therapists (enjoying, without guilt and fear).
Good humor is a state of joy or satisfaction. The tendency to see the funny or ridiculous side of things. The ability to de-dramatize (without trivializing), through intelligent creativity (which makes you smile) without humiliating anyone. As we experience, feel, learn and know, joy is approval of existence. We’ve already mentioned it over the years: laughing at yourself means breaking out of enslaving conventions, moralizing pomposities, and stereotypical nonsense, out of the routine that oppresses us. We are not talking about faking good humor, which presents a pseudo mask (“all is well”), which is a hypocritical appearance of happiness, which evades the meaningful and which is irresponsible and negligent with relationships.
To say humor is to say joy, which is like a momentary satisfaction of the whole being: an assent to oneself and the world. Joy is the passage to a higher reality, or better, to a higher degree of reality. To rejoice is to exist more: joy is the feeling that accompanies in us an expansion, or an intensification, of our power to exist and to act.
Good humor is antagonistic to any kind of vulgarity, to supposed “objectivity and neutrality” and to prejudices (“that form of non-thought, which is prejudice,” said the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein). Joy is the experience that assertively accepts uncertainty, pleasure, and pain, death, and life.
Humor is smart; it is an opening to the pleasure of becoming more and better. Good humor summons the best in yourself and others. It allows us to face our anguish, to overcome them. Who has it, does not mock or humiliate anyone. Smile, laugh with others. Like children: who know how to laugh with their whole body, fully; with vital spontaneity. It is about generating the maximum of joy, with the minimum cost.
Is joy good humor? A spontaneous “yes” to life that springs from within us, sometimes when we least expect it. A “yes” to what we are -or better- to what we feel we are. It is the acceptance of oneself and of others, which gives you peace, serenity to generate together (with) other, different meanings.
To think of therapy as a place to meet and reconcile with the right to laugh, to have irony with criteria; to reflect critically through intelligent humor also means to trust the process of dialogue and relationships. It is to co-construct a new context to look at one’s own experiences differently (giving them other meanings) and begin to untie the relational knots that cause stagnation, oppression, exploitation, or aggression.
Therapists who use (we insist: judiciously, at the right time, in the right context, and in favor of the consultants’ process) good humor as a therapeutic resource, do so from this position of curiosity, respect, creativity, and acceptance. Being able to spread that attitude of good humor is an act of spiritual greatness, human generosity, and the democratization of the dialogical space. Two or more interlocutors, who share with spontaneity and authenticity the ability to smile with respect, transform together, break routines and give each other (relationally) the best of themselves; what they could be, to be as they would like – fully – and enjoy it with others.
Good humor is mobilized by being creative, which means giving importance to the joint creation of an atmosphere of committed dialogue, acceptance, and well-being, a relational climate of mutual recognition and acceptance, rather than the rigid imposition of rules, norms, and protocols. We need to co-build temperance, which is intelligent friendship with what makes us enjoy. Good humor in therapy entails -in addition to dialoguing from the complexity- the ability and creativity to mobilize the clients’ resources, and trust in those resources.
Humor is generated with creativity (freedom, imagination, and intelligence) and also means:
• Share responsibly.
• Respect when meeting the interlocutor.
• Questions: especially questions, that challenge us and invite us to inhabit words, inhabit actions.
English translation of Bruno Tapia Naranjo