Elegant and Hasty
By Carme Timoneda-Gallart, PhD
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 47 seconds.
Tommy, eight years old, performed poorly at school, though a psychologist deemed him gifted. Using metaphor, the educator helps Tommy find his own resources to control impulsive behavior:
“Well, Tommy, now I’m going to ask you some questions, Ok?”. Tommy nodded, moving a little on his chair. “Tommy, which number is double 15?” Tommy said automatically, without thinking, “20”. I said: “Tommy, sometimes, our brain receives a lot of lightning and it is so overwhelmed that it has to warn us. But how? Because it is our body’s boss, sometimes it can cause headaches, make us answer a question without thinking.” Tommy said: “Yes, my teacher is always complaining! ‘Tommy you always answer without thinking. You must think and then answer’” He looked nervous.
Then, I said: “I’d like to tell you a story about two horses. Once upon a time there were two nice black horses. One, called ‘Hasty’, was always jumping and shouting. He seemed a very nervous horse and he would run and run without knowing where he went.
When his trainer ordered him to be still, or walk gracefully, he didn’t obey, just jumped and ran.
The other horse was called “Elegant”. He was very peaceful and quiet. He also liked to run, and sometimes he jumped the fence, but when his trainer ordered him to walk calmly and gracefully, he always did it.
Tommy, now we are going “to be Hasty” and to do things like him.” Tommy and I stood up and jumped around the room. Tommy even crashed against the table and the door.
Then I said: “Tommy, look, now we are going to be Elegant”. Suddenly, Tommy started walking calmly and gracefully. I congratulated him, saying he acted very much like Elegant. Tommy smiled.
“Tommy, now we’re going to sit down and I’m going to ask you a question. But before answering the question, you will put your hand up. Then, I will ask you if you want to answer like Elegant or like Hasty. After choosing which one, you may answer the question. OK?” Tommy nodded, liking the new game. I asked: “Tommy, which number is double 15?” Tommy raised his arm, closed his lips firmly, and looked up. A few seconds later, he said that he’d like to answer like Hasty. I nodded. He said: “Double 15… double 15… is 30!” I said: “Great job!” He smiled saying that he usually acted like Hasty but prefers Elegant.”
One of our first steps was constructed around the metaphor that the brain receives a lot of ‘lightning’ and is severely overwhelmed. We then use another metaphor as a control mechanism for the impulsive behavior (answering without thinking, a very common behavior in children with learning problems). This metaphor concludes with a seeming alternative: we ask the child to first choose which horse he would like to be and, only afterward, answer the question. Having to make a choice in this fashion makes it impossible for him to continue to answer before thinking.
If child therapy is a work of art, then the educator’s work has some secrets. The first is to establish an emotional connection between the child and the therapist. Although necessary, this rapport is often absent A child may be short and naïve, but he is a person, and as such has an impressive array of resources. If the educator sees a child as short of material, the artist will lose the opportunity to effect a necessary change in the child’s life.
The second secret is that children understand perfectly what they do but not why and how to cope with their behavior. The artist, knowing the quality of the child’s material, demonstrates to him the uses of different parts of the work of art that he is; then, s/he lets the child’s imagination construct, patiently and naturally, a better emotional tool or a new mental procedure.
How many times do adults waste their energy telling the child why a behavior is inappropriate, then trying to convince him to behave in a more suitable manner? When they don’t show the child a way to change, a wall of resistance is being erected.
Nowadays, Tommy can always play with Elegant or Hasty, riding them firmly and commandingly. He normally behaves like Elegant even when he professes to be riding Hasty.
Children have more imagination than there are stars in the sky. Metaphor allows them to discover a new world of emotions in which they feel secure and behave in new, exciting ways. Finally, the shape of the work of art that they are will be balanced, and precious.
You may like…
by Roxanna Erickson Klein, RN, PhD, Ernest Rossi, PhD and Kathryn Rossi, PhD
The papers of this volume are illustrations of Erickson's early work on classical hypnotic phenomena such as amnesia, age regression, automatic writing, and literalness as well as the mental mechanisms involved in Freudian “psychopathology and dual personality.” In this clinical research Erickson frequently was responding to the Zeitgeist that surrounded him in his professional appointments in the 1930s and 1940s. While Erickson was able to use hypnosis to validate certain psychoanalytic conceptions of psychodynamics, he never identified himself as a partisan of any psychoanalytic school. Indeed, he often decried what he felt was a premature limitation and rigidification of our understanding of human nature in the belief system of most “true believers” of any “school.”
The Fundamentals of an Existential-Humanistic Approach
by James F.T. Bugental
Type: Softcover
“This book takes you on a wonderful adventure through the process of psychotherapy, both from the side of the client and the therapist. Although it has brief moments of academic flavor, it is mostly engaging and interesting no matter from where you approach it. Bugental shares his own experience as a therapist and discusses a view on human potential that is beautiful, moving, and inspiring. I highly recommend this book for an enjoyable read (nonfiction) and for insight on what psychotherapy can be.”
Contents include:
Deficiency Levels of Therapeutic Goals
Matching Therapy to Client Needs
Other Contrasts among Therapies
What the Client Brings to the Enterprise
Desirable Qualities in a Therapist
The Fundamental Importance of Concern
An Existential-humanistic Ideal for the Client-therapist Relationship
Phases in the Psychotherapeutic Process
A Client’s Account of Working in Therapy
What the Therapist Does
Changes in Life Experience
Enlarged Sense of Identity
JAMES F. T. BUGENTAL was a leading psychotherapist and a founding father, with Abraham Maslow and others, of humanistic psychology or “the third force” (in contrast to psychoanalysis and behaviorism). He was also the creator, along with Rollo May, of existential-humanistic psychotherapy. Bugental earned his doctorate from the Ohio State University in 1948 where he was influenced by Victor Raimy and George Kelly. After a brief time on the University of California, Los Angeles faculty in psychology, Bugental resigned in 1953 to found the first group practice of psychotherapy, Psychological Service Associates, with Alvin Lasko. The group added Tom Greening in 1958, and subsequently Gerard Haigh, Bill Zielonka, Harris Monosoff, and others. A men’s encounter group evolved from this core, which included Jim Clark, Bob Tannenbaum, and Art Shedlin from UCLA, and this group continued meeting for decades until 2006.
With Abraham Maslow and others, Bugental was a cofounder of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and the Association for Humanistic Psychology in 1961. He was elected a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1955, and was the first recipient of the APA’s Division of Humanistic Psychology Rollo May Award. Bugental also was president of the California State Psychological Association, the Los Angeles Society of Clinical Psychology, and the Association for Humanistic Psychology (serving as its first president in 1962). Among Bugental’s many valuable contributions to psychology and psychotherapy are his other books, Challenges of Humanistic Psychology (1967) (and its updated, co-authored version The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology, 2001), The Search for Existential Identity (1976), Psychotherapy and Process (1978), The Art of the Psychotherapist (1987), and Psychotherapy Isn’t What You Think (1999).
Assessment and Treatment Through a Wide-Angle Lens
by Frank M. Dattilio and Jesus A. Salas-Auvert
Type: Hardcover
"In this age of information overload, it seems that one must move with the speed of light to keep up with new developments in a field. Thus, clinicians and clinical researchers look for one source that succinctly summarizes the most current information. Dattilio and Salas have produced such a book on panic disorder…[Everyone] with an interest in [the topic] will find the information they need in this book.
—David H. Barlow, Ph.D., Professor and Director, Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University.
A compendium of treatment approaches to panic…[that allows readers] to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of various interventions.
—Aaron T. Beck, M.D., University Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Panic disorder is estimated to affect more than 4% of the U.S. population. And the literature on its treatment mirrors that high incidence rate. (The last seven years have produced over 2,500 citations of panic in the professional literature.) Now, in this new one-stop reference, Dattilio and Salas have distilled this wealth of information into a single volume, providing easy access to:
the latest pharmacological agents,
tried-and-true cognitive-behavioral techniques,
and a host of emerging treatments for panic disorder, such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and TFT (Thought Field Therapy).
At the core of this book is the authors’ recognition that “no particular treatment can be all things to all people and, therefore, clinicians must remain open to various treatment options.” Affording rich clinical detail on the different approaches, as well as numerous illustrative vignettes, Panic Disorder provides incomparable access to state-of-the-art treatment strategies and guidance on how to integrate them to effectively meet each client’s distinct treatment needs.
by Roxanna Erickson Klein, RN, PhD, Ernest Rossi, PhD and Kathryn Rossi, PhD
The collected papers of the first section all demonstrate Erickson's utilization approach to a variety of psychological problems. Utilization theory emphasizes that every individual's abilities and inner resources must be accessed in order to determine how they may be evoked and utilized for therapeutic purposes. The next part illustrates a variety of Erickson's indirect approaches to symptom resolution. This is followed by papers on sexually related problems illustrative of the extremely wide range of approaches the hypnotherapist has available. The last section illustrates the facilitation and utilization of the patient’s own inner resources for solving personal problems. In a number of these illustrations, Erickson did not even know the nature of the problem that the patients solved within the privacy of their own trance experience.