News from San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group, Clinic and Training Center

Instructor: Starr Kelton-Locke, Ph.D.
When: December 5, 2009 and January 16, 2010 (two-part series), 11 am to 2 pm both days Sign-in at 10:30 am
Fee: $25 for ICP members; $35 for non-members (for two-part series)
6 CEUs for the two classes
Location: The Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, Landmark Building C, Room C210. Parking available at the center's garage.
See web site

Description:
This two-part workshop will offer an opportunity to explore the interplay of nonverbal and verbal modes of communication in both the therapist and patient. Clinical material will illustrate the bidirectional process of connecting somatic and sensory processes to imagery and language in order to help a patient whose emotional life is heavily dominated bysomatization. Rather than understand her psychosomatic symptoms as substitution for thought, this perspective treated her bodily complaints as serving a transitional role in the processing and expression of emotional communication.

How the therapeutic dyad constructs emotional meaning will be viewed through the lens of Wilma Bucci's ideas on subsymbolic emotional expression and her model of the referential process. Theory will be applied to case material for the treatment of psychosomatic processes, dissociation, emotional effects on the immune system, disorders in eating, and treatment in general.

To pre-register, please email (click here).

Betsy Wootten, ICP Bay Area Program Administrator

6493 Cooper Street, Felton, CA 95018, 831-335-5526 phone & fax email click here

Cont'd President's Report

    Our Education Committee is organizing and expanding SFPRG's connection to local teaching and training institutions. We are more systematically teaching Control Mastery Theory at different locations around the Bay Area. As part of that effort, we are asking talented teachers who would like to lecture on Control Mastery Theory to join our Speakers' Bureau. It is a win-win situation in that students and practitioners in the Bay Area get to learn more about Control Mastery Theory and our members get the opportunity to teach and get more exposure to professional opportunities, both academic and clinical.

     In addition to more systematically teaching locally in the Bay Area, we would like to organize a more systematic teaching program nationally. There is a demand for good conferences about CMT in Washington, Oregon, Southern California, Texas, Atlanta, Boston, Miami, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. We would love to get people who want to help plan these conferences and teach them. Please call David Auld about how to join the Education Committee's efforts to develop this teaching program.

     Our beautiful new website has been launched, thanks to the tireless efforts of Peter Schumacher. We have tried to register members this year through the new website but unfortunately, sometimes the website has crashed since it is so new. Please don't be discouraged from signing up. If you can't register through the website, register and send in your dues by mail. If you are a member, please renew your membership. If you are not yet a member, but are one of the growing number of readers of this newsletter, please join the membership. Take advantage of the discounted conferences and the opportunity to be listed on the therapist finder at SFPRG.org.

     The Member's Mambo is happening again on October 25 at the Swedenborgian Church. This year, we are not having a town hall meeting. We will do no work and will only socialize so please come and have a good time. Members and non-members are welcome.

     SFPRG is a wonderful group to be part of. We need help from enthusiastic, talented members to teach and supervise in the Clinic. We need people to serve on important committees like the Membership Committee, the Education Committee, and others. We need people who are interested in research to help on present projects and to develop your own. We need volunteers to sit in on conferences and help register participants. Control Mastery Theory and SFPRG has a lot to offer the community. The process of teaching, volunteering, doing research, and helping the clinic helps the careers of those of us who participate. I encourage all of you to come, participate, have fun, and network.

     Have a great month. I hope to see you at the Mambo Sunday, October 25th from 5:30 - 8:30pm.

Steve Foreman

Cont'd Education Committee

Steve Foreman's book: Breaking the Spell: Understanding Why Kids Do The Very Thing That Drives You Crazy, is scheduled for late October release. We are looking forward to a book-launching workshop titled Control Mastery and Child Therapy.

Denny Zeitlin, M.D., is tentatively scheduled on January 30, 2010 to repeat his popular half-day workshop: Couples Therapy from a Control Mastery Perspective (Where Angels Fear to Tread). Ginger Rhodes, Ph.D., is presently working out details for a half-day workshop addressing Trauma and Control Mastery Theory.

Norman Sohn, Ph.D., LCSW, is creating The Saturday Salon at SFPRG, designed to be a less formal meeting hosted in members' homes.

The 23rd Annual International Conference on Control Mastery is scheduled for the first week in March with details to follow in the months to come. Last year we had a very successful event, which was completely sold out. We will be working out the schedule over the next few months. If you are interested in offering a lecture topic, please contact davidauld@sbcglobal.net

We are happy to include two new members to the Education Committee of SFPRG: Milena Esherick, Ph.D., the .A. Program Director for the Wright Institute; and Mia Salaverry, MFT , who is in private practice in Menlo Park. Mia is taking the lead on the more formal creation of a Speakers Bureau. If you are interested in becoming listed as a speaker please contact Mia at: mia.salaverry@gmail.com.

These are just a few of the areas of interest we are presently pursuing. The Education Committee is gratified by the level of enthusiasm of our members, and we look forward to a very productive year.

BREAKING THE SPELL...

If you do get triggered, escalate, and start to believe the worst about your child, he deepens his conviction that he is the devil. If instead, you can step back and ask, "I wonder why my child is doing these weird things and what he is working on right now," he can follow that lead and start to see himself as a child working on something. Your child needs you to see himself as a child with a psychology and not as a demon with a black soul.

Testing parents by provoking them is a poor strategy because it puts parents in the godlike role of infallible, omniscient judges, and misses the obvious fact that parents are flawed humans who often misread their children, may be tired, depressed, or may be repeating mistakes their parents made. If you, as a parent, overreact and fail to maintain your sanity, wisdom, or perspective in response to your child's provocative behavior, then she cannot feel redeemed.

2) Children play out your despairing view of them. In addition to testing you, kids also believe and buy into your negative view of them and then behave in ways that are consistent with that image. Younger kids naively give their parents credit for knowing everything. Surprisingly, even teenagers overvalue the infallibility of their parents. Developmentally, teens are in the process of coming to a more realistic view of their parents' limitations, but have not yet achieved it. When you hold a particular view of your child, at any age, he is extremely vulnerable to believing it, even far into adulthood.

Your child is highly motivated to protect you by making you "right". Buying into and behaving consistently with a parent's negative view is an elegantly disguised way of the child protecting parents by making it look like parents are always right. When a kid complies with a parent's negative view by playing the "bad kid" role, the child sacrifices her integrity and self esteem in the process. When children provoke parents, it is partly a test of, and partly a compliance with the belief that they are powerful and destructive enough to damage you and ruin your relationship with your spouse.

Kids Protect Parents

Instead of profit seeking, power hungry opportunists, this book will show that kids are poor scientists and self-sacrificing altruists. Though it's rarely obvious to their parents, kids feel responsible for all the troubles in their families and would do anything, even sell themselves down the river, to help their families. When the cycle is bad, parents have negative expectations of their kids, become completely angry, despair, and then over-react. In response, kids feel very angry at their parents for underestimating them, losing faith, or treating them badly.

Kids Inhibit Their Anger

Kids hate to be so angry at their parents, something I have learned by talking to hundreds of kids and grownups. Being angry at parents makes kids feel guilty and uncomfortable. This may seem counterintuitive to parents who think your kids have no trouble unleashing anger at you. If you think of the conflicted, guilty feelings and difficulties you have being angry at your own parents, you can start to understand the great difficulties your own kids have being angry toward you.

Kids are so worried and inherently protective toward their parents that they minimize their anger and get easily confused and sidetracked about what makes them angry. They engage in troubling behaviors that distract everyone from the irritating things their parents are doing. Even when kids are partially aware of their anger with their parents, they usually hold back and are only aware of the tip of the iceberg.

Kids desperately try to protect their parents from the extent of their anger. When kids internally buy into the notion that they are bad and play out the bad kid role, they are actually protecting their parents from their own anger at them by making their parents "right". When kids act badly, they are unconsciously giving their parents justification to lose faith in them and treat them punitively.

Cont'd: Research

The instructions are all there. You'll be asked to think of a patient that you know well and complete the rating scales. We ask for very broad information (age, gender, race, etc) on the patient and there is no way that the patient's actual identity could be revealed. Similarly, we do not need to know your identity but you will be asked to provide some kind of code that you use each time you log on. When you do log on, you should complete all of the ratings for the particular patient that you are doing because each time you log on it will be for a new case.

We have been analyzing the data from the self-report study (in which people rated their own pathogenic beliefs) and so far the results look extremely interesting. Obtaining ratings of how clinicians rate their patients is an essential piece of our research on pathogenic beliefs. I am very optimistic that this research will result in a scale that will be used quite widely (clinically as well as in research), and in this way we will be able to export some of the valuable contributions from control-mastery theory. I thank you in advance for your help in this research and please feel free to contact me with any questions, comments, or suggestions.

Cont'd: Initial Exploration CMT and Depth Psychology

"Transference" testing meets "The Power Type"
One of the most common tests, not only in CMT, but in other psychological theories as well, is "transference". In the CMT transference test, the client places himself in the historical role that he played as a child. The therapist thus becomes representative of the parent or other figure of authority. In this test, the client may attempt to discover if the therapist will act in accordance with those early figures of import and re-confirm his pathogenic belief, or, as is hoped, the therapist will act in a better way than that figure and offer a corrective emotional experience to disconfirm that early experience.

In the Depth Psychology therapeutic environment, the therapist may feel strong or subtle pressure to take command of the situation and wield power over the analysand. This is aptly named, "The Power Type" of countertransference. The therapist is put in a "power over" position. Obviously the therapist must be aware of this dynamic and act accordingly so as not to dis-empower the client. In this way, both these two types of testing and countertransference are similar in that the client puts him or herself in the vulnerable role and is hoping to deserve and to obtain the mercy and compassion never received or dispatched from the original situation.

"Passive into Active" testing meets "The Shamanic Type"
The passive-into-active type of testing is just the opposite of the transference type. In this situation the client turns the tables and treats the therapist in a way that mirrors the abusive or rejecting ways the person was treated as a child. In this way, the client wants to see if the therapist will be able to handle the stress that they had felt. The therapist may pass the test by disconfirming, by example, that they do not feel the need to succumb to the negative influence or treatment. Instead of succumbing, the therapist is able to administer healing by showing the client that it is not only possible to weather the storm of the negative experience but also show them compassion throughout while also modeling healthy boundaries.

Likewise in the Shamanic type of countertransference, the analyst becomes "infected" by the analysand's "illness" and then effects a cure by healing themselves and administering the "medicine" to the analysand via influence. It is called "shamanic" as a reference to many indigenous practices of healing. In such cases the shaman goes into the "other" world and finds the cure or the reason for the patient's illness. By taking that illness into the shaman's own body and bringing back a cure, the patient is thus healed. In both cases of this type of CMT testing and Depth Psychology countertransference the analyst becomes like, or is treated like, the client in the original scenario and shows that the situation and feelings can be overcome and worked through successfully, in vivo.

"Pro-plan/Corrective Emotional Experience" meets "The Maieutic Type"
For CMT then, it is the therapist's duty to offer an overall attitude where the client is provided with an atmosphere of safety. The client uses this safe environment to test and disconfirm pathogenic beliefs and move away from pathology and into healing. To allow clients to test and disconfirm pathogenic beliefs and offering a corrective emotional experience in regards to the pathogenic beliefs presented is called being pro-plan. In the same way, the Maieutic type of countertransference is neither an "over" nor "under" place of therapist power, but a co-creating of safe space. In this type of countertransference the analyst sits as midwife to a psychological birthing process. In this process something deeper, fairer and more embracing arises within the analysand. Analysts experience themselves as assistants to a creative process that is taking place within the client. In these two instances, the therapist is called upon to create a trustworthy and reliable environment where the client may safely and openly begin the birthing or correcting of experiences that led to uncomfortable or damaging complexes or outmoded pathogenic beliefs and patterns of behavior.

Conclusion
While working with both CMT and Depth Psychology I have found that these two theories not only complement each other, but actually enhance each other in the practice of psychotherapy. Control-Mastery is an exceptionally user-friendly theory that allows the therapist to enter the room and begin therapy in an instantaneously safe and aware way. Depth Psychology allows the therapist to take that foundation and build upon it to a deeper, more creative and integrated healing and wholeness. The two theories together form a well-rounded embrace of theory and practice that is able to continually provide the client and the therapist with a secure and beneficial base from which to work towards wholeness and health.

Click on the following link to Contact David Martin

Editors note: The views expressed here are the author's.

Thank you readers and members for your support over the three years we have sent out this enewsletter. It is gratifying to us that you are interested. Please consider your renewal and/or new membership in SFPRG. All will benefit!

Sincerely,
Kathie Dunn, MFT

Kathie Dunn MFT, Editor
San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group, Clinic and Training Center