Drawing the Ideal Self (Personal Construct Psychology - PCP‪)‬ Heather Moran

This month’s episode is a reading of Dr Kev Harding’s paper Clinical psychology practice without using psychiatric labels: an alternative approach using Personal Construct Psychology is an interesting read. It invites us to consider PCP as a useful alternative framework from which to practice so that we have a “therapeutic relationship of two equal human beings on a journey to understand the origins of one person’s distress (albeit with one being paid for the encounter)”. The paper is available on the internet. 

Reference

Harding, K. (2011). Clinical psychology practice without using psychiatric labels: an alternative approach using Personal Construct Psychology The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, Summer 2011, pp.86-91



http://www.psychiatry.freeuk.com/Harding.pdf

This episode introduces a new technique to explore the impact of physical health problems through the exploration of personal construing. Concerns about our bodies can be persistent and may be very distressing so understanding what lies behind the distress is important if we want to help someone. The steps of the process are described here but there is also a more detailed video example on my You Tube channel.

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.