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metanymous в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)

  • The parent’s positive intent could be entirely for the child’s benefit—in order to shape their behavior in ways that the parent believes will help the child have a satisfying and productive life. When this is the case, the task is to modify the criticism so that it provides positive guidance and useful feedback to the client. For instance, criticizing a failure, and the unpleasant feelings that result from that, can be replaced with setting an attractive positive goal, and specifying and learning the detailed behaviors that can achieve it.
  • The parent’s criticism could have the intent of making life better for a third party—someone else who would benefit from a change in the child’s behavior. The positive intent in, “You’re too loud” might be for someone else who is resting. In this case, the client needs to carefully acknowledge and consider both their own needs and those of the third party. Usually some rebalancing of the client’s needs with the needs of others will resolve the inevitable differences that arise between people. Being “too loud” is transformed from a universal statement about the child to a choice in certain situations in which someone else is negtively affected by loudness.

    • Of course these three kinds of positive intent are not mutually exclusive; a single critical comment could include two, or all three, kinds of positive intent simultaneously.When this is the case, it is useful to sort out the different aspects of intent, and deal with each appropriately—ignore it, modify it, or rebalance it.

    Most current “parts work” or “internal family systems” work is similar to Gestalt. Either they don’t use positive intent, or they use it imprecisely, limiting its usefulness. Many other approaches either oppose a part, or try to eliminate the part altogether, which is even worse.

    With the understanding that all aspects of a person (feelings, behaviors, thoughts) have positive intent, conflicts can be resolved much faster. Rather than have a client act out the two sides of a conflict overtly by switching chairs, I now often ask clients to close their eyes and have an internal dialogue with someone, or some part of themselves, with only occasional guidance from me. Since the client only needs to reveal the general character of what occurs in the dialogue, they don’t have to report, or act out, aspects of themselves that could prove embarassing, making it much easier to achieve mutual understanding between conflicting parts, and eventual integration.

    Although I have learned many, many specific distinctions, interventions and ideas about therapy since those long-ago days, there are certain core principles from Gestalt that continue to underlie and guide everything I do with a client:

    Every aspect of our experience is a part of ourselves. Any attempt to eliminate or destroy any part of our experience only perpetuates and escalates conflict.

    Since every experience we have is a part of us, attempting to eliminate any aspect of it is doomed to failure—and if it were to be successful, that would make us less whole, less capable, and less human.

    Every aspect of our experience needs to be acknowledged, understood, and utilized in the contexts in which it is most useful, integrating it smoothly into the fabric of our lives.

    After ten years of being deeply involved in Gestalt, I discovered neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Again there was the heady excitement of learning a radically new way of helping people change, with all its challenges, frustrattions, and discoveries. NLP offered very specific ways to elicit and verify a client’s internal experience, as well as a multitude of ways to alter that experience in order to resolve problems. The field continues to evolve, often far beyond its stumbling iconoclastic beginnings in the early 1970s, when Richard Bandler and John Grinder first developed it. What’s next?

     

    An interviewer asked a famous songwriter, “Of all the songs that you have written, what is your favorite?”

             The songwriter replied, “The next one.”