Episodes
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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
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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.
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Missing episodes?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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This month’s episode will consider how validation is a more useful construct than reinforcement when we wonder why someone made a challenging choice. It also summarises a paper about the impact of wrongful imprisonment on a person. The paper is freely available - details below. A dilemma faced by one such prisoner is used as an example. I have been thinking about that situation ever since I heard about it - it made me think again about my core constructs.
I hope you find it interesting and useful. Please let me know if you do. It helps me to know whether what I am doing makes sense to other people. If you are a regular listener, I would love to know that too. You can email me at [email protected].
Reference
Brooks, S.K, Greenberg, N. (2020). Psychological impact of being wrongfully accused of criminal offences: A systematic literature review. Medicine, Science and the Law. 2021;61(1):44-54. doi:10.1177/0025802420949069
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You may be thinking about how you might use PCP in research. This episode features an interview with Dr. Emily Strong, Educational Psychologist, whose research has focussed on children who speak selectively. This is one of the tricky issues to get around, especially when we need to explore a child or young person’s views. The interview with Emily you will hear what she did and what she found through her work. Her thesis is available online and I would encourage you to read it for the research and for the literature review. If you would like to follow up and ask Emily for the resources she uses, see the details below.
References
Strong, E.V. (2019). We do have a voice: using a Personal Construct Psychology technique to explore how children and young people with Selective Mutism construct their current and ‘ideal’ selves. Unpublished thesis. School of Education, The University of Birmingham.
https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/9559/13/Strong2019ApEd%26ChildPsyDVolume1_Redacted.pdf
For more information about this technique, please contact Dr Emily Strong:
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Often it can be helpful to go back to the basics of PCP theory and get a clearer understanding than you had first time around. I found a really nice explanation of a construct in Richard Butler’s book. I think he provides a good summary and I wanted to share it with you. If you already feel secure in your understanding, you might like to hear the way he expresses it and then take some time to consider the way you explain constructs to other people.
References
Butler, R. (2009). Coming to terms with personal construct theory. Ch. 1 in Butler, R., Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Wiley-Blackwell
Ravenette, T. (1999). Personal Construct Theory in Educational Psychology. A Practitioner’s View.
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This episode is about exploring what the client expects from their counselling sessions. Fay Fransella and Peggy Dalton remind us how important it is to do this early in the counselling relationship and they provide a description of a first session in PCP counselling. I hope you find it useful.
Reference
Fransella, F., and Dalton, P. (1990). Personal Construct Counselling in Action. Sage.
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Watching the news has been pretty miserable over the last year or so with so many people trying to flee awful situations. I have been thinking a lot about the people who are traumatised by experiences, and about the people who seem to recover well from similar experiences. This is unrelated to an objective assessment of the experience’s awfulness and closely related to their personal construing. Similarly, people can be devastated by common experiences, or by experiences which are not dangerous. The danger lies in the psychological threat of the experience. This month’s podcast is is about Kenneth Sewell’s model for understanding post-traumatic stress and for the components of PCP psychotherapy.
Reference
Sewell, K. (2003) An Approach to Post-Traumatic Stress. In F. Fransella (Ed.) The Essential Practitioner’s Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. John Wiley & Sons.
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This episode explores the difficulty of getting some tasks done and refers to an exercise you can download from my website - drawingtheidealself.co.uk.
The exercise follows a process for exploring your personal construing of the admin tasks you have to do. It is not specific to an age for use (even children have their tasks at school and home), nor to a profession (a homemaker also has many admin tasks). So, I hope it can be used with anyone.
Understanding why some tasks are more challenging for you is important to finding your own solutions. The way you construe your work will impact on your construing of the tasks you choose to do first, and those you find more painful. I decided to make this because I know people can feel a lot of guilt (Kelly’s definition is about being aware that you are ‘playing’ a role in a way that makes you feel very uncomfortable - see my podcast episode to learn more about this: Drawing the Ideal Self podcast episode 32).
This exercise is designed for you to try alone, promoting your reflection on persistent issues. Hopefully, you might find something that makes your position make more sense and reduce self-criticism. By then end, hope you will be able to find ways forward to address things in your own way, based on your construing.
It would be even better to use it in a pair, working to support understanding and growth in each other.
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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.
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If you are enjoying learning about Personal Construct Psychology, you may be interested to take it further. This episode has information about some of the possibilities available, some paid and some for free.
References
Foundation courses
Coventry Constructivist Centre
Cathy Sparkes and Adele Pile
Claire Morris
Masters course
Padua masters course (taught in English)
Quarterly study sessions
Coventry Constructivist Centre
Constructivist Meet Up videos
The George Kelly Society
Useful videos
Viv Burr - PCP research methods
https://youtu.be/SeRv62ugJFc
https://youtu.be/YFlwtIaSxjo
Dusan Stojnov Using PCP in coaching - 2 videos
https://youtu.be/0HDPf2xvZdA
https://youtu.be/c7tWbGjpTT4
PCP Education and Training videos
https://www.youtube.com/@pcpaeducationandtraining1097/
Journals
Personal Construct Theory and Practice
Journal of Constructivist Psychology
Costruttivismi
Rivista Italiana Di Costruttivismo
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I thought it might be useful to see how a PCP approach might be useful in exploring the menopause. I found a paper by Foster and Viney describing a group approach. They developed a model of menopause based on a personal construct account of change and informed by women’s meanings and then a brief intervention aimed at tackling the psychological impact of the menopause. Their study is a nice example of how PCP techniques can be used to facilitate reflection, loosening and tightening, resulting in improvements in the way the women felt across a number of measures of wellbeing.
References
Foster, H. & Viney, L.L. (2006) Ch. 18 in Menopause: The start of a change. Caputi, P., Foster, H. And Viney, L.L. (Eds.) (2006). Personal Construct Psychology: New Ideas.
Ravenette, A.T. (1980). A drawing and its opposite: an application of the notion of the ‘construct’ in the elicitation of children’s drawings. Ch. 9 in Ravenette, T. (1999). Personal Construct Theory in Educational Psychology. A Practitioner’s View.
Linda L. Viney & Mary T. Westbrook (1976) Cognitive Anxiety: A Method of Conent Analysis for Verbal Samples, Journal of Personality Assessment, 40:2, 140-150, DOI: 10.1207/s15327752jpa4002_5
Mary T. Westbrook & Linda L. Viney (1980) Scales Measuring People's Perception of themselves as Origins and Pawns, Journal of Personality Assessment, 44:2, 167-174, DOI: 10.1207/s15327752jpa4402_7
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I am sending this message now in case anyone is just about to print and make the ESP cards!
I have been able to re-order cards, making it easier to see what is in each category and to print the sets. I have also added a few more cards, based on my work with children in the last couple of weeks. I will be adding the new document to my website by the end of 12/11/22. In future, if I add new cards, I will add them at the end of the document so you can easily find them and just print the new cards.
I am also making the same ordered set without the word labels in case you want to use the cards without them and elicit both poles of the construct. You could also add labels in a different language. I know there are people in the PCP therapy schools in Serbia and Italy who might find them useful.
I am aware that this set of cards do not show people with visible disabilities. I will address that in future when I have worked out the best way to do it.
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The Exploring Situations and Problems (ESP) cards are a new tool for exploring construing in children. They might be useful if your time with a child is very limited, or you need something to use with children with poor attention or are not easy to engage. The cards can be the beginning of a PCP elaboration and an in-depth exploration of the constructs.
The ESP cards are used to create a storyboard of a child’s day, in order to help them to explain which parts of the day they find difficult, and to help them to reflect on what happens at those moments. The images and text provide an emergent pole of a construct to get the discussion going. These cards may be particularly useful for working with children who find it difficult to tell you how they construe situations, or to explain what happens when things go wrong for them. There are some rating scales included, so you can use the cards in the most accessible way.
The ESP cards are available from my website: drawingtheidealself.co.uk.
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This month is an interview with Sam Beasley, Educational Psychologist, working in Hampshire, UK. It is not only for educational psychologists because there will practitioners in lots of services that work in similar ways to EPs - professionals who have very limited time in their contact with children and young people. Sam talks about how her interest in PCP began and how she uses PCP within her work as an educational psychologist with children, adolescents and adults. If you know any educational psychologists, or any trainee or assistant EPs, please tell them about this month’s episode.
There are a number of things Sam mentioned which I have linked to below. You can listen to the podcast interview with Abi and Cleo about the CEDS for this podcast - episode 15, August 2021.
References
The Children’s Exploratory Drawings: http://theceds.co.uk/
Self Image Profile: https://www.pearsonclinical.co.uk/store/ukassessments/en/Store/Professional-Assessments/Personality-%26-Biopsychosocial/Normal/Self-Image-Profiles/p/P100009227.html
Blob Trees: https://www.blobtree.com
Gogos (by Crazy Bones): do a Google search (they are available second hand)
Using Personal Construct Psychology in Practice with Children and Adolescents:
https://www.drawingtheidealself.co.uk/using-pcp-in-practice
Salmon Lines: Salmon (1995) Psychology in the Classroom: Reconstructing Teachers and Learners
https://www.tes.com/news/find-yourself-salmon-line
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Educational Psychology Service https://www.hants.gov.uk/educationandlearning/educationalpsychology/aboutus
Southampton University Educational Psychology Doctorate course https://www.southampton.ac.uk/psychology/postgraduate/research_degrees/courses/doctorate_in_educational_psychology_pgr.page
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