 We demystify what goes on behind the therapy room door. Join us on this voyage of discovery and co-creative conversations. This is The Therapy Show, behind closed doors podcast, with Bob Cook and Jackie Jones. Okay, welcome back to the next episode of The Therapy Show, behind closed doors with myself, Jackie Jones and the wonderful Mr. Bob Cook. This is episode 141 now, Bob. 141? 141, if my calculations are correct. Gosh. Yeah, it's total calculations are correct then. Hopefully. It's the day after Valentine's Day as well. Not sure whether you did anything wonderful with your dear wife. Well, I better not go down that path. But we'll not put you on the spot. So the topic of this one, following on from the last podcast, quite nicely, is the importance for the therapist to think developmentally in the therapy process. Okay, so let's do a brief history of psychotherapy. Oh, let's do a brief history, very brief, from Freud to where we are today. Yes. Pull this a hole in context. So if we go back under 20, 30 years ago, let's say Freud was a psychologist, you know, the father's, some of this sort of psychological stuff today. So we have the early psychoanalyst, 1888, you know, 19, you know, 1901, 1930, 1940. So that was where, you know, psychoanalysis was sort of created as a model to deal with, you know, mental health. And that was all about creating awarenesses. The cure was that the client became more aware. And there's very much a one up, one down process. Contracts were unilateral, not bilateral. And psychoanalysis, major methodology for cure was really free associate free association and interpretation by the analyst. Yeah, the aim of furthering awareness, which would lead to cure in the mental health framework we're talking about. Then psychotherapy started to come along. And we had the birth of different types of psychotherapy, whether it be some of the ego, psychotherapists, whether it be some of the drama therapists, Gestalt psychotherapists, early self psychologists, psychodynamic psychotherapy, existential psychotherapy, transaction analysis, many of the different humanistic psychotherapies came along in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Psychodynamic psychodynamic psychotherapy, which came off the birth of psychoanalysis still running along. And we had a lot of creations of self psychologists. And then probably, you know, 1991, two, three, we had the relational turn turn and the birth of relational psychotherapies on the idea that the relationship is the major curative factor. And here we are up to date. Alongside that, we had the, I think the governmental led CBT creation of therapies, where you know, cognitive and behavioral changes are the order of the day, much more quicker in terms of sessions leading to so-called cure than a lot of these longer type of humanistic psychotherapies. So CBT became the vogue of the day in the NHS. And the NHS, which is very funded by governmental processes and money and government's research, for example, was still going along. But you still have the creation of a lot of these other types of psychotherapies. Okay, so depending when you trained, where you were influenced, usually meant the type of psychotherapies you've become. So in all this I've just talked about here, there is a type of therapy that I put myself down for, or I would call myself, and that would be a developmental relational integrative psychotherapist. Now, informed by a lot of transaction analysis theory, or practice, or and practice, because you can have TA, which is not developmental. In other words, if you look at early, sorry, developmentally focused, Eric Burns early TA was adult focused. And what I mean by that was strengthening the adult was the order of the day in terms of cure for the earlier Eric Byrne transaction analysts, not a developmental focus. What I mean by developmental focus is a therapist that thinks primarily that what happens in a person's past informs the present. So what happens in the person's past, the developmental deficits that are met relational needs, their trauma informs how they are today. So a CBT therapist would not be thinking that way. They'd be much more interested in the here and now, they wouldn't take some, they wouldn't be thinking developmentally. The early transaction analysts would not be thinking developmentally. A lot of counseling frameworks would not be thinking developmentally. They'd be much more in the here and now. I find that really hard to comprehend. Well, as for the counselors, maybe listening to you, I'd better be a bit more specific because I don't want to be unfair to them. It depends where you're trained. You'll talk about the counseling world. If you're trained as a therapeutic counselor, you'll certainly be thinking about how the past affected the present. And many of the long, you know, the four or five year training courses in counseling would certainly be thinking about how the past, you know, how the past affects the present and how the developmental stages of the person goes through the infant, infathood, yet to where they are today affects them. They may certainly be thinking that way. However, in the actual practice of the counseling, they may not be proactive in helping the person move back into the past. Okay. So when you say move back into the past to work out where all this stuff comes from, the life scripts and the decisions that they made and how that impacts on them in the here and now. Yeah. And to use methods like inquiry, achievement involvement to help the person to go into their child ego state. Yeah. But a lot of the counseling methodologies is much more about staying in the present moment and going where the client goes rather than leading the client somewhere. Yeah. See, that doesn't mean they don't think developmentally, but the training of counselors, there's so many different types of training of counselors and psychotherapists may not include that focus. Yes. Yeah. Because a lot of it is solution focused as in, this is the problem. What do we do to stop it going forward rather than where does it come from? And what can we do to work that part out? A lot of counseling and maybe a lot of psychotherapy models, by the way, is solution focused. Yeah. And often six to 10 sessions or 10 to 12 sessions or 12 to 24 sessions maybe. Yeah. But it's specifically the way you've just explained it. And for some people, that six to eight sessions or whatever is all that they're willing or happy to commit to. Oh, yes. Yes. This isn't, I don't want you to hear that I'm differentiating, which is the most suitable for, you know, clients because I believe in contracts and bilateral contracts and for some people, they don't want to go back to their different developmental stages. Yeah. Yeah. In here and now and concentrate on just one particular thing and seeing that by changing thinking behaviours, then they can get to their outcome that way and they might well do. Yes. Yes. Yeah. But for me, long term change is knowing all that stuff about why we are the way that we are, why we do what we do and all that sort of stuff, whereas solution focused for me, you don't really need to know all that stuff, just how to stop it going forward. So do you, so given what you have just said about the way you think about psychotherapy, then you are developmentally focused. Yes. Yes, I am. Yeah. Yeah. And I, yeah, I am. And I like that because it makes sense to me. Yeah, certainly not a criticism. It's more, I just wanted to say one of the same pain. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. One of the things that I like a lot and, you know, it goes back to my nursery nurse, that was, you know, one of the first proper jobs that I have, apart from being a hairdresser and then a foster carer is Pamela means ages and stages and the different developmental things that we go through. I like a process like that, you know, that we do go through these individuation and separation stages and if there's a disruption at that point, then that impacts on how we attach to people and our relationships and everything. That just makes sense to me. So we could both call ourselves developmental therapist and there's a difference between me and you, I think. I really don't want you to hear differentiation here. I'd rather hear style or way I think about, you know, the difference is, I think, and you can say I'm completely wrong. I think the difference is is like you've just explained, you think about script analysis, you think about the different stages of power that you've just talked about and you think of developmental stages that impact people from infant to adulthood and you think about a lot of these things and your therapy, I may be wrong, seems more cognitively based than I probably focus on. So it sounds like you think about building up, how can I call it, more psycho education, so you teach them their script or teach them their drivers or teach them how to xxxx, but I don't think it's your style to go back through say supported regressions back to a younger child, you go state, get them talking to their projections. I agree, yes. So I'm somebody who works proactively back in a different time zone. Yes, yeah, yeah, and I get that and I think for me the reason is lack of confidence, I would hazard a guess. Yes, but you may decide, that's why I, yeah, okay, okay, so now, yeah, okay, I was thinking about not differentiating about different ways of doing things because the way that you're talking about and the way that you work can be as successful as the way I work. I'd like to think so. They lack the confidence probably because it may be our confidence, I don't know Jackie, but it might also because you get the results you get without doing that, maybe. Yeah, and I am very logical as we know Bob, I like a structure to follow. So, you know, for me, I do follow a structure. Well, it's a different type of structure though, isn't it? Because I think I have a structure, but my structure is, perhaps it is to do the confidence, I don't know, my structure is much more about going back and helping them be their younger selves and empower themselves and make them more decisions and then, you know, change ego states if you like and are able to integrate those decisions. So, I suppose, I think it might be a philosophical difference then. I suppose what it all comes down to me is that I think that in their younger child ego states, they make decisions about themselves and the world, which isn't helpful for them, it helps them survive at the time, yeah, up to themselves now. So, you need to make the changes back then when the trauma or the dysfunction happened. And if it's changed back there, then they can start integrating it in the presence, but they need to go back there first of all to change it. Yeah, I think that's the bit, yeah. For me, I stop at that point. I don't go back there. For me, it's about having the awareness that that's where it occurred and what decision it was, rather than actually going back there, yeah. So, the bit of therapy I'm talking about, that was not bit, the very eye work, takes a very long time. Yes, yes, quite right, yeah. A long, long time with me. Yeah. The dangers are for that type of therapy I'm talking about. If people were to critique me, they would say one of the dangers could be that the person stays infantilised and repeats history and never moves on. Or, the therapist can keep them young, if you like. Yeah. So, they become, I think, quotes dependent on the therapist, rather than developing a sense of autonomy, if I had to critique. Yes, yeah, yeah. The way of working. Which I think it's always good to critique what we do and reassess it and look at all those things. Because, I suppose I can think of some clients that working developmentally the way that you're talking about would work for them. But I also think that there's other clients that wouldn't enjoy the experience. It would be quite alienating for them. Well, the word enjoy isn't something I think many clients. I'd like to think my clients have an enjoyable experience. Their world of trauma isn't necessarily, but it may be, you know, I think it takes a lot of courage and a lot of guts to be able to go back to their world of trauma. Yes, absolutely. You have to really trust the therapist and the therapist, all those those ways you're talking about. So, I think there's different styles and different focuses when we call ourselves developmental therapists. My sort of focus in developmental therapy, if you like, is to go back into time to where the decisions were first made. I've just explained. Yes. Which yours is more helping than being more aware from a here and now place. Yes. Even though you still think developmentally. Yeah, yeah. And now that impacts on everything, you know, going back to what I was saying before about, you know what I mean, a disruption at a certain age or whatever plays out in relationships. I think, you know, relationships play out the same sort of script stuff as our life to a certain extent. You know, when we become comfortable in a relationship, that's quite healthy for some people. Whereas for other people, that can be seen as abandonment when they're not paying us enough attention. So, the key thing is that we both think developmentally though. Our style or our process may be different. Yeah. Though we both, you know, think developmentally, which is very different. I'm saying a cognitive behavioural therapist who won't go and won't think about someone's history as much. They'll be thinking about cognitive behavioural change in the here and now. Yeah. For example. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think, probably going off track here, but do you think that we as therapists are the way that we are because of our past and our upbringing as well? Oh, I don't think we can escape from that truism. But even if, you know, we're trained at the same place and we go through the same training and we do all the same stuff, that we are unique as therapists and we'll veer towards one way rather than the other. I think our histories play far more a part in this than the training. Yeah. I think I'm not going to discount the training or discount the importance of the training or discount the influence of the training course because I was influenced by all my training is in psychotherapy. I've been influenced by mine, Bob. But how we, what we take from the trainings. Yeah. How we subconsciously or consciously respond to the information of the trainings is the difference. Yes. Yeah. You know, it's just too small a time in this podcast to suddenly start thinking about, you know, what I took from the training. But, you know, I've always, you know, people, and I've always said this, I think that the wounded part of myself as a child, I started to heal through my own training. Yes. Yeah. So the type of therapist I had was a developmentally focused therapist, which would go back in history, just like I talked about. Yeah. So I think the therapist, I might say, which I had to have for four years, which I count on for many, many years after that, by the way, probably influenced me more than the training. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think mine probably did as well because they then become that influential, positive part of our backstory, if you will, don't they? And I also think it was a very, very, very long time, perhaps not just a slow learner, but anyway, a very, very long time before the information from the training made much sense to me. In other words, what I mean, I had to do the therapy first to allow my wounds from my younger self to be healed to grasp enough adult in the here and now to have the autonomy, I think, to take in some of the information from the training. I think that's a really valid point, Bob. Absolutely. And I was probably the same. I would think I'd got it and I'd understood it and then there'd be another level. And it was like, no, I don't understand this at all. Yeah. And even now, I think I'm continually learning about scripts and how they are quite manipulative, in a way, do you know what I mean? And the secretive and everything. And do we ever truly know them? I don't know. I think, though, if we take the definition of a script as a life plan, an unconscious life plan, learning history as a way of surviving, then in essence, they're survival coping plans. Yeah. And out of necessity, they worked, whether it was in a maladaptive way or not, they worked in a survival way. They may well become outdated. And that's why the client comes to you in the first place. No, because they feel that perhaps there's just something wrong or they've got a level of discomfort and it's been going on such a long time, they want to change things. And that might mean changing or updating those coping survival scripts. And that's why they come to you. But you see, for you to be thinking that way, it means you're thinking developmentally, because the scripts are created to deal with the developmental deficits. Yeah. So for you to be thinking about scripts, by definition, you are thinking developmentally. Yeah. Good. I'm pleased about that. We've both come to something good place in there. Yeah. Yeah. And it just fascinates me. Every day, something happens with a client that fascinates me how we do that as a survival mechanism, how we, you know, the decisions that we make, we make them for whatever reason. And we still act on them today. It fascinates me. Well, we do them to survive. You know, children are very resilient. Yeah. They create ways of being and thinking to survive the best they can. Yeah. And that will continue, I think, until the discomfort of the creative scripts that we developed, or the discomfort from them because of the new situation in the present, then that people might come to therapy, but also can many people don't come to therapy. So they carry on in these scripts, the ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, and surrounding themselves with people fit into those same thought patterns. And they carry on that way and never go to therapy. It's only when it becomes, you know, a bit creaky or a bit leaky or they come to a place where the hurt is too difficult to imagine and they want to enhance their lives that they might don't come to therapy. Yeah. And the next days, of course, which you will help them with, or I will help them with, which is to help them be aware of all this, which is really the biggest step, I think. Yeah. So I think psychoanalysis had it right at a certain extent. And the second part, which wasn't really developed until psychotherapy came along, which is how to integrate the new script into their life today. Yeah. And enhance their life and take ownership of their own destiny. Yeah. That's the biggie is to take ownership of how they're living their life now. Yeah. Yeah. Only come with awareness, can't it? Yes. I talk about that all the time. Awareness is key to me. So that's what the early psychoanalyst, that's what Freud thought. Okay, his methods of interpretation and everything else. But he died unhappy because he's realised, I think, that the next stage had to be completed after awareness. And that's where psychotherapy came along. Yeah. It started to complete the second stage. And thank goodness they did. Because where would we all be then, Bob? All I think about in the early stages and the psychoanalytic stuff and Freud and all that is that a lot of it was aimed at women being mental. I think there's a lot of things which were badly wrong in those days. And there were some fundamental aspects, which thank goodness they were least challenged by those early psychological people. In other words, to think of different difficulties. However, it's you're quite right in what you just said. But to at least start thinking about the mind and the brain being an important thing to start considering leading to mental health problems it's massively different from what was before that. Yeah. I see you've got me on, you get me on another topic now, which is the mind-body connection and how to be mental health impacts on us physically is an area that I am becoming increasingly interested in. But yeah, I think women were just seen as being histrionic and everything else. And looking back on it, was that just the menopause and all the things that women tend to go through that were causing those responses? If you look at the period 1876, 1880 and think of the context of culture and that whole framework fits into the culture of the day, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. I'm so pleased that I was born when I was born. Well, we were born in a golden era really. Yes, yes. Long way to go in many fields, but you know, compared to the rest of the lot of areas in history, we haven't had it too bad, especially when we think of what's coming. Now that's a bit more, yeah, different. Yeah, we'll not go, though. Thank you so much. Especially not after Valentine's Day. Not after Valentine's Day. We wanted people to be and hope that everybody had a wonderful evening, whether it was showing love to somebody else or love to themselves, which I think is just as important. Yeah. And of course, love is one of the major prerequisites in a successful psychotherapy procedure. Yes, self-love. I talk about it all the time. So what we're going to be looking at next time, Bob, is the unique self in the therapy process. And what's the second? Oh, the unique self. The unique self. That'll be really interesting. I don't know what made me pick that title, but I must have had some thought process all those months ago, but I'll enjoy talking about that. Because I think the podcast will be about, are we ever our unique self in the psychotherapy process or in life generally? But let's leave that till next week. Oh, so you're talking about authenticity. And the real self, yes. Right, okie dokie until next time. As opposed to the false self. Yeah, which we like to show quite a lot. I'll speak to you soon, Bob. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye. You've been listening to The Therapy Show behind closed doors podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'll be back next week with another episode.