From Modalities to Relational Meaning: A Systemic Turn in Integrative Counselling - With Rick Murphy and Lisa Dvorjetz.

I guess, yeah, maybe it would be useful, actually, just to understand, like what is integrative counseling to people who are listening?

Integrative counseling isn't just one modality, and there are lots of different ways to think about what integration means in terms of a psychotherapy.

Some models of integration will take principles from different psychotherapies, like humanism and psychodynamic theory, and they'll combine them into a single approach.

For example, Clara Hill, who is a professor of psychology, uh, has a kind of three-stage, uh, integrative model, and what she does is she starts in a kind of humanistic way on building a relationship with the client.

It's about empathy and acceptance, about walking in the shoes of the client.

After a while, uh, the second phase is then analyzing, perhaps from an unconscious perspective or just thinking about what the client is bringing, what kinds of psychological patterns and habits they're forming.

And then the third part is to then think about behavior change.

So what you have here is an almost step-ladder approach to integrative counseling, where you begin with a person-centered idea, you move to a more analytical model, and then it gets more cognitive behavioral.

So integration in that sense is, is almost like passing on a baton in a relay race, where you're moving through these different counseling stages, ultimately to try and support change with the client.

Now, other, other models, um, will do very different things, such as integrating different psychotherapy approaches, um, w- in the moment.

So another famous example is multimodal therapy from Arnold Lazarus, and he is someone that sees psychotherapy as holistic and that the client's full self, whatever that may mean, so their behavior, uh, their emotions, their physical health, their sensations, their diet, you know, the, the way they think, their social relationships.

Therapy works on all of these things in parallel.

Maybe not all at once and not all in the same session, but thinking about diet in one week and then thinking about, uh, behavior, um, or emotion, let's say, the next week is all a part of seeing the person as a whole.

And so you don't have a, a core-Um, to the, the model.

But what you have is a collection of ideas that helps you see and experience the client from different perspectives.

Now, in the systemic book, I give a, a third example, which is built from John Burnham's AMT model, approach, method, technique.

And what he proposes is that you can take, uh, the approach or, or the theory, the principles of a model, and then you can work your way down through the methods of how you do the therapy towards the techniques, and that each technique can be thought about through a different theoretical lens.

So if I do a genogram with a client, for example, then I can understand that genogram as a way of developing context, thinking about family, belief systems, life cycles, so the theory matches the technique.

But what I did in this book is to s- think about, well, what happens if you change the theory and continue with the same technique or vice versa? You keep the systemic theory in mind, uh, but then you use techniques from other modalities.

So I take ideas and skills or things you do in the room with the client from psychodynamic theory, from gestalt, from humanistic perspectives, and I think about how would they look from a systemic point of view.

Hmm.