Resilient Self Therapy applies George Kelly’s principles of Personal construct Psychology as its coordinating framework for therapy, because it dovetails with
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The phenomenological findings on meaning and purpose and
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Accumulating knowledge of how the Brain works.
Kelly's Central Proposition
A Different Starting Point
Humans operate through anticipations learned from experience
Implications
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Each person’s Ways of anticipating differs, due to their unique experiences
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Objective reality may exist but individuals anticipate it differently
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Correctly anticipating is a fundamental basis of personal power and competency
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Anticipations are interpretations and therefore open to change
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In healthy functioning anticipations elaborate to correctly predict increasingly complex experience.
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Problems emerge when something stops this elaboration, and there is
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mismatch between expectation and outcome.
Why
PCP matters
in Resilient Self Therapy
RST is not a cookbook of techniques. Èxercises presented come from applying Kellys therapeutic principles. Understanding those principles will enable the therapist to create in-session and homework tasks that arise from individual client presentations. The result is that Clients see their relevance, become highly engaged and typically complete their homework. Applying Kellian principles quickly identifies the underlying anticipations that lead people to therapy and manifest in the symptoms they report. Its principles lead to change that will last and will generalise The therapeutic alliance is collaborative rather than top down because the goal is to great congruence between experience and expectation rather than conformity with a particular view of reality. In RST the therapist teaches the Kellian principles that underlie their treatment plan. This increases client confidence, hope for the therapy and helps equip clients with new ways of independently negotiating life.
The Hierarchical Organisation
of Anticipatory Constructs
We all have constructs for nearly evening in life, most of which operate unconsciously because they are constantly in use in moment to moment life. Walking towards doors, turning on lights, driving a car all involve sets of anticipations that enable successful automatic behaviour. The few times when a step is misjudged or not anticipated illustrates how well this works the rest of the time. With so many constructs, they need to be organised or there would be chaos. Kelly proposed organisation within a hierarchy in which those that define the self and its relationships sit at the apex and control the rest. These constructs initially develop within the early life and reflect actual outcomes that happened there. If caring was attentive and benign the self anticipates that others are dependable. When early life is traumatic, anticipations are loaded with powerful emotions that make them impervious to new circumstances, so the tend to stay in their original form as a tree trunk with branch that gets stronger and fatter without subdividing.
Focus is on Fixing Causes vs Symptoms
Kelly’s theory and RST target underlying causes rather than their manifestations in behaviours, thinking mistakes or emotions. In this, it is closer to schema focused cognitive therapy but more individualised.
Reality is perceived through Predictions learned from past Experience
Resilient self therapy is a constructivist therapy. It begins with the premise that the only reality we know is perceived through anticipatory constructs developed from our past experience.
Thus the therapy task is to make expectations match the experienced world rather than bringing ideas into conformity with Objective reality.
This difference with cognitive therapy leads to a therapist client relationship that is collaborative and to interventions that elaborate the client's perceptions of reality rather than challenging them as in cognitive therapy.
The multimodal nature of Personal constructs
Kelly realised that anticipations involve all the components of human experience, not just thinking. Consequently RST includes the possibility of working for change in any of the modalities of human experience; behavioural, cognitive, emotional or somatic.
A gestalt of summary linguistic labels, their unique definitions, their associated emotions and somatic experience, the outcomes they anticipate and their consequent action tendencies. For example unless some traumatic experience changes it infants learn to anticipate that a door knob will open a door, by observing before it can be reached. This will lead to summary concepts like open and closed, inside and outside, trapped versus free, behaviour aimed as using door knob, feelings and bodily activation associated with the anticipated and experienced outcomes.
The Bipolarity of Anticipations
The door knob example is particularly apt in explaining RST therapeutic principle to clients because it is something with two sides that roughly represent sets of roughly opposite ideas: inside vs outside, open versus closed, trapped vs free, private vs public, safe vs vulnerable.
The Resilient Self Theory of Therapy
Kelly's (1955) Personal Construct Psychology
PCP
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