Drawing the Ideal Self (Personal Construct Psychology - PCP)

We all have roles to play, some more comfortably than others. This new technique is a variation on Drawing the Ideal Self for use with adults, children and young people. It explores a role (e.g. sister, parent, athlete, teacher, reader) and can be used to find ways to move forward in the role or to set personal targets. It may be useful to professionals to explore with people they try to help but...

This month's episode is rather seasonal: as the new school year starts, this episode is about Kelly's definition of anxiety and transition. References: Inquiring Man. The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Bannister and Fransella. Ruby Tandoh Breaking Eggs Audio Guide

An interview with Abi Cohman and Cleo Timney, Trainee Educational Psychologists at Southampton University about The Children’s Exploratory Drawings (CEDS), their PCP technique to use in conversations and therapy with children and young people. This builds upon the work of Tom Ravenette, modernising and expanding the resources so they are suited to today’s world. We also talk about the process of t...

This month’s episode is an interview with Cathy Sparkes, Speech and Language Therapist and PCP Counsellor/Psychotherapist. Cathy works with people with brain injury and talks about how she uses PCP in her work and the impact of brain injury on identity. Cathy offers supervision and coaching: https://cathysparkes.co.uk . The details for things she highlighted as useful are: Dependency grid - Helen...

This month’s episode is about a PCP approach to understanding violent offending. I watched a programme called Time by Jimmy McGovern on BBC TV and it got me thinking about this. I had read James Horley book some years ago and I re-read the chapter by David Winter because it made me think a great deal about the issues around it.

This month I have an interview with Adele Pile, a speech and language therapist and PCP psychotherapist with many years’ experience of using PCP in her work. She talks about the value PCP has brought and the influences on her PCP journey. Adele is part of the Personal Construct Psychology Association , a UK association to promote and educate about PCP.  She works with Cathy Sparkes running a...

I realised that we have not had a podcast session on learning, so today’s is focussed on learning and reading. Tom Ravenette’s paper, Reading difficulties and what else? (1969). Although it is an old paper, this is a good one because he emphasises the need to spend time in assessing the person’s views of reading, the self and learning. Of course, everything Tom has to say about reading would also...

This month’s podcast episode is an interview with Sally Robbins. You may know Sally as the organiser of the events at the Coventry Constructivist Centre (CCC) but you might not know much about how she came to PCP. Sally talks about her career path and her work with older people. Sally is the key contact for the CCC www.covpcp.com . Sally and Diane Allen are facilitating the next quarterly study da...

This month’s podcast has a focus on experience. Experience is vital to our construing of ourselves and I thought a lot about this as I read Matt Haig’s novel, The Midnight Library . The other book mentioned in this episode is Diane Allen and Peter Cummins’ new book, A Beginners’s Guide to Personal Construct Therapy with Adults and Couples (2021). 

This month’s episode is about a paper by Tom Ravenette, Educational Psychologist and PCP interventionist. The paper presents a challenge to those of us who are in roles where people seek advice from us. The paper is ‘Never, never, never give advice’: an essay in professional practice (1980). If you work in a situation where you might be asked for your advice, Tom urges caution and has some suggest...

December’s (slightly late) episode is focussed on Finn Tschudi’s ABC. This is a great tool for exploring change to a preferred pole of a construct and elaborating some of the barriers to change. I use two examples from my own life and talk through them in the podcast.

An interview with Diane Allen, Counselling Psychologist and PCP Psychotherapist.about her career path and her love of PCP.

October’s episode of the podcast is about the importance of the choice of a bag and its contents. This was inspired by an episode of Thinking Allowed (BBC Radio 4) where a paper  was discussed about handbags and identity in dementia, and I give an outline of what they had to say. It made me think more about the bag in Drawing the Ideal Self and the way a bag and its contents illustrate the co...

September's episode is about the way Kelly defines guilt - it is very different from the dictionary definition and is a really useful construct. I give a very personal example of my recent experience of being stuck because of experiencing guilt and how I was able to reconstrue and move on. I hope this helps you to understand what it is about and how you might help someone else or yourself.  T...

August 2020's edition is in in a better podcast style. It tells the story of how the technique came out of a session with a young person at a time when I was stuck in my work with him. On the day it emerged, I had no idea that it would be so successful. I hope you will find it useful and it will encourage you to design your own techniques. The references are in the show notes available on my websi...

This month's episode is thinking about PCP and why it is useful for thinking about and as a therapeutic approach to use with young people (and adults) with autism.

The idea for this came from someone on my mailing list who was asking about a PCP take on the adjustments we are making in ways of working in the pandemic.