Entry for 16 July 2012:
I’d not been back in Scotland for more than 10 days before I
was off again, this time to the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. First I went to Veldhoven for another EFT
Level 3 supervision day, then it was back to Antwerp for the Tenth Conference
of the World Association for Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and
Counselling. This was like a return to
the beginning, because the very first of the these conferences was also in
Belgium (1988, Leuven), and many of the same players were present: Among them
were: Greet Vanaerschot (who gave the plenary lecture on the first night), Mia
Leijssen (who made several brief appearances), Germain Lietaer (who was in
charge of the first conference), Paul Dierick (a PhD student at the time) among others.
My keynote address was at midday the next day. I had found myself unable to work on it while
I was in California helping care for my mother, so I didn’t start working on my
slides until I returned to Scotland. I
finished it two days before we left, but started coming down with a cold after
I arrived in Belgium and was not feeling too well by the time I gave it. We spent the two hours before my talk
fighting with the equipment, so I was quite nervous by the time I started. I’d never been a World PCE conference keynote
speaker before, and these talks are often of historical importance, or
controversial, or both. And of course I
had way too much material and didn’t have a clear strategy for dealing with
this. I’d also been struggling with the
need to somehow integrate what I’d been through with my mother for 7 weeks with
my work as a researcher and therapist.
So the night before I added sections of the Conversations Journal Poem
Sequence to the beginning and end of my talk.
In the event this was both personally satisfying and also fit well with
my talk, underscoring the fundamentally Person-centred nature of the work I do
as an EFT therapist. The abstract for my
talk is given at the end of this entry, and I’ll soon do an entry here on the
Conversations piece.
Then Brian Rodgers and I did a thematically-linked panel of
outcome results and case studies in the late afternoon on the same day as my
keynote. After that, first thing the
next morning Graham Westwell, Beth Friere and I did a panel on our
person-centred-experiential therapy competence scale, which turned out to be a
lot of fun.
By this time, however, I was pretty wiped out from my cold and
lack of sleep. I dragged myself through
the rest of the conference. I had to
miss the last half day of the conference of the final plenary panel in order to
fly to Italy to make up training I’d had to cancel last May in Florence and
Rome. However, I did catch interesting
and stimulating EFT presentations by Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman, and Laco
Timulak, including Jeanne and Laco’s new work developing EFT for Generalised
Anxiety Difficulties, which I found very promising. And Rhonda reported further details on the
Self-soothing task.
The conference banquet was one of the best I’ve even
attended, in “Horta House”, an art noveaux event space near Rubens’ House in
Antwerp. I let myself relax in the
company of Germain and Greet sitting on either side of me, while the jazz
washed over us as we talked and ate an excellent conference meal. For the occasion, Nele Stinckins wrote a song
parody of Funicula, Funiculi,
satirising the keynote speeches (including mine) and minor conference glitches;
this was performed by a chorus of conference organisers, while Nele and some of
the other Belgian women did the can-can.
Amazing!
Here
is the Abstract of my keynote talk: Working with anxiety difficulties in
Person-Centered-Experiential psychotherapies: Theory, research and practice
Anxiety difficulties are common in
clinical and nonclinical populations and are a clinically and theoretically
important recent focus for Person-Centered-Experiential (PCE)
psychotherapies. In this presentation I
summarize current and emerging theory, research and practice with clinical
anxiety, focusing particularly on social anxiety and emotion-focused therapy
(EFT, also known as process-experiential therapy).
First, I summarize three current
theories of anxiety: (a) person-centered, which emphasizes conditions of worth
and incongruence; (b) focusing-oriented, which points to difficulties accessing
immediate experiencing and maintaining working distance; and (c) EFT, which
locates the source of anxiety difficulties in early experiences of rejection,
neglect, abuse or bullying by significant others, resulting in a harsh internal
critic. This generates primary
maladaptive shame and fear, which turn motivates behavioral and emotional
avoidance or self-interruption.
Second, I report the results of a
meta-analysis of 19 outcome studies of PCE therapies for range of anxiety
difficulties, most commonly supportive or person-centered therapies carried out
by CBT researchers. Results indicate
large amounts of pre-post change (d = .94), medium-sized controlled effects (d
= .5), but a medium-sized negative comparative effect vs. CBT (d = -.39). I then summarize highly promising results
from an ongoing study of PCE for social anxiety, which points to the
possibility of developing more effective PCE approaches for anxiety.
Finally, using the results of this
study, I describe a general therapeutic approach for working with this client
group, including: (a) establishing a genuine, empathic, caring relationship;
(b) explicating anxiety-generating processing by careful unfolding or
re-experiencing of anxiety-provoking situations coupled with work on the
client’s internal critic and self-interruption processes; (c) focusing, empathic
affirmation and emotion regulation work to strengthen the sense of self; (d)
work to transform core emotions that generate anxiety into new, more adaptive
emotional responses; and (e) consolidation of client change.
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