This episode is a summary of the corollaries. Knowing about them is essential if you are trying to understand the theory of Personal Construct Psychology. A corollary is an implication of a theory, so if the Fundamental Postulate is accepted this means that people DO anticipate events, these 11 corollaries follow on from this. They are the detail of the theory. You might find that this episode is rather dry but in terms of completeness, any person can get the basics of PCP by listening to all the episodes of this podcast.
References
Kelly (1963) A Theory of Personality. The Psychology of Personal Constructs.
Cummins & Moran (2022). A Foundation Course in Personal Construct Psychology: The Coventry Course handbook (Coventry Constructivist Centre Publications on Personal Construct Psychology).
Kelly, G.A. (1955 and 1991) The Psychology of Personal Constructs.
Kelly’s Psychology of Personal Constructs is his theory of personality and I thought we would have a few sessions about basic PCP theory. The theory may be new to you, or provide a refresher and I will include Kelly’s own explanations. Some of the terms he uses are not so familiar to today’s population so I will do my best clarify and elaborate in everyday language and provide examples. Why does understanding the theory matter? If you want to understand how to apply the theory to a new experience, or if you want to devise new techniques to understand the people you work with, then understanding of the theory will be helpful.
References
Kelly (1963) A Theory of Personality. The Psychology of Personal Constructs.
Cummins & Moran (2022). A Foundation Course in Personal Construct Psychology: The Coventry Course handbook (Coventry Constructivist Centre Publications on Personal Construct Psychology).
This episode provides my own key messages for PCP therapy, using the introductory chapter of my book, A Beginner's Guide to Personal Construct Therapy with Children and Young People. The principles apply to working with any other age group too.
Details of where you can find the book are here: https://drawingtheidealself.co.uk/bookshop.
Creating a timeline is really useful way to explore a problem. Here we think about the kind of questions we might ask a client so we get a better understanding of the development of a problem over time. They key is to be very curious and to ask searching questions gently and the timeline provides a visual guide to that discussion.
Reference
Kelly's seven questions are summarised on p.84-5 in Personal Construct Psychology in Pictures. Key aspects of PCP theory - available free rom my website: drawingtheidealself.co.uk.
This episode has a focus on counselling in schools but the principles will also be useful for other counselling work. Truneckova and Viney’s model is laid out nicely in their paper and I summarise it here.
References:
Deborah Truneckova & Linda L. Viney (2012) Personal construct psychology
model of school counselling delivery, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 40:5, 431-448. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2012.718739
Cummins & Moran (2023) The PCP Pocketbook of Personal Construct Psychology Techniques
Moran (2023) PCP in Pictures. Free via drawingtheidealself.co.uk
This episode focuses on construing in dementia and the challenges that presents to the carer, particularly if they are caring for a parent. I refer to a paper by Mike Bender and Sally Robbins who write about the impact of dementia on construing and on the construing system. The implications of changes in the construing of the person and their child are significant.
If you work with people who would be described as having difficulties with anger, there is a new lost cost book out from Peter Cummins and Diane Allen at the Coventry Constructivist Centre: A Beginner's Guide to Interpreting Anger using Personal Construct Psychology. It is available only on Amazon because that keeps our costs to a minimum level and we don't need to make the book more expensive. You can use this link or do a search on Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/ilpCNc0.
References
Bender, M. and Robbins, S. (2006). Making sense of dementia Ch. 10 in Caputi, P, (Ed.) Personal Construct Psychology: New Ideas.
Mitchell, W. (2009) Somebody I Used to Know.
This episode is about the PCP way of doing a useful therapy session in a one-off session. The evidence for using a single session, or One-at-a-time therapy is that a single session can be helpful. Tom Ravenette has a useful paper on this which I use in this episode but you can also take a look at Windy Dryden’s model.
References:
Personal construct Psychology and the assessment of young people: the ‘one-off’ interview. Ch. 13 in Ravenette, T. (1999). Personal Construct Theory in Educational Psychology. A Practitioner’s View.
Windy Dryden Single Session Therapy on You Tube:
https://youtu.be/wIcuOVOABRw?feature=shared
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT_XmacU83U
The inspiration for this episode came from a BBC Radio 4 programme, The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O'Sullivan. The programme is an abridged version of her book. This episode looks at Kelly's definition of disorder, something quite different from current diagnostic manuals. His version is more likely to help us to understand and help the person because it is focussed on their construing and this is something that could change. Kelly said, "Perhaps the proper question is not what is a disorder but where, and the therapist question is not who needs treatment but what needs treatment" (Kelly 1991).
Reference:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00291y8
This episode looks at De Boeck’s (1981) analysis of Kelly's statements about loose
construing. This is a helpful summary. If you would like to read the paper, it is largely about
grids analysis of construing in schizophrenia, so it may not suit everyone.
Reference
Van den Bergh, O., de Boeck, P., and Claeys. W. (1985) Schizophrenia: What is Loose in
Schizophrenic Construing? Button, E. (Ed.) Personal Construct Theory & Mental Health.
Room Helm,Australia
Kelly’s theory is all about the anticipation of experiences and how we make sense of experiences in the light of our personal construing. A PCP formulation will focus on what is seems to be going on in the person’s construing system. Kelly has six important questions for the therapist to help them to formulate and then uses particular terms to describe what seems to be happening - a reference to the construing system and its constructs. Remember that more than one thing can be going on at a time, and that we would always check out a formulation with the client because we might be missing something. Also note that Kelly does not separate the assessment and intervention because the assessment will always be live - people are likely to offer more relevant information about their construing as they develop a relationship with the therapist. Construing will develop and new constructs and connections will emerge over time, sometimes leading to them being able to explain their experiences and the impact on their construing for the first time.
Reference:
Kelly, G.A. (1955 and reprinted 1991) The Psychology of Personal Constructs.
This episode introduces the DiS podcast navigator booklet which you can get the link below (it is free). The aim is to help you to find past episodes more easily by sorting them by their topic. The booklet has hyperlinks directly to the podcast episodes on You Tube.
The link is: https://BookHip.com/NCWLAVV
This month the episode is about laddering, which came as a request from a listener. A great request because it is an extremely powerful technique so should be used with great care and full attention being paid to the person you are working with. Laddering can very quickly get to aspects of a person’s construing they may not have expressed in words, so the experience can be surprising to them - for good or bad reasons. Learning to use laddering is very important for PCP practitioners because it is a way to explore how the person’s choices in their daily life are connected to their core constructs.
This episode looks at two papers on laddering, one by Fransella and one by Walker and Crittenden. Laddering is something that looks and sounds very easy but it requires theoretical understanding to use it well. Kelly proposed that a person has many, many constructs and that they are organised in a hierarchical system. Some constructs will be extremely important to the person - their core constructs. Having an awareness of a person’s core constructs will be very important if we want to understand them better. The authors here describe laddering and pick up some of the common questions about process.
Fransella, F. (2003). Some Skills and Tools for Personal Construct Practitioners. Ch. 10 in Fransella, F. (Ed). International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology.
Walker, B., and Crittenden, N. (2012). The use of Laddering: Techniques, Applications and Problems. Ch. 3 in Caputi, P., Viney, L.L., Walker, B., and Crittenden, N. Personal Construct Methodology.
Today is not a usual episode but an invitation to tell me know whether you find the podcast useful and what you’d like to hear about in future.
If we want to be able to help people, we will need to understand their personal construing of the problem. Exploring this with them- finding out about their constructs - will enable us to begin this process. This episode includes a typical referral for an anxious child, with three very different possible constructions of the problem. This is a reminder that construing is personal and individual, and is related to what we make of our experiences.
The PCP Pocketbook can be found here: https://amzn.eu/d/7AO5chv
n this episode we will think about Kelly’s definition of hostility applied to an aspect of the recent race riots in the UK. On the whole, as we have experiences, we make adjustments to construing, based on fresh evidence. However, there will be times when, despite all the evidence, we hang on to our current construing. Kelly’s professional or transitional constructs offer potential explanations for where our construing is ‘stuck’. Hostility is one of them. As always, Kelly pays particular attention to the fact that changes in our most important (core) constructs will be a major challenge for us because the implications will be far-reaching.
Have you considered what lies ahead when you retired from working? Whatever you do now, one day that will happen, so it is better to be prepared for it. This month’s episode is a new technique, Drawing the Ideal Retired Person. This is an exploration of the future, aiming to promote a smoother adjustment to that phase of your life. There will also be a step-by-step video on You Tube so you can see the technique in parts, hopefully making it easier to follow.
https://youtu.be/0z8htw-sO_Q?si=_ASdbxyXJXjC8g3e
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
The Singing Ringing Tree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singing_Ringing_Tree
The Famous Five - Enid Blyton
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.