THE HAPINESS BLOG

SOME BITS AND BOBS...

Friday 27^th November 2009 - 8.00am

I had a little lie in (or sleep in) this morning, and got up at 6.30am.  I had a light breakfast, followed by twenty minutes of (Zen) meditation, and thirty minutes of physical exercise: (Zham Zhong and Chi Kung).  This is an important expression of my commitment to CENT (Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy) - because CENT is a holistic therapy, which sees the individual as a historical body and a cumulative mind.  If I do not take care of my body, my mind will become ragged.  If I do not take care of my body-mind every day, it will decline, degenerate and function sub-optimally.

Meditation is not just a "cognitive distraction" - or a diversion from your normal daily concerns.  Done regularly, it is actually a cumulative experience of peace, calm and bliss.  It mounts up, and changes the sense of the "ground upon which you stand".

And regular physical exercise is essential for physical and mental wellbeing.

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Saturday 28^th November 2009 - 5.00pm

This is officially still my (secular) Sabbath, but I have a sense of the need to stay in touch with the readers of this blog.  I don't want to wait until late Sunday, or early Monday to get this written and posted.

Yesterday, at some point, I spotted that my health goals were not specific enough, and so I rewrote one in particular.  Did you know that your can write goals for your physical and emotional wellbeing, just as readily and usefully as you can write goals for your material success?  Once you have written some specific health goals, you will find that you start to think about how to achieve them.  What can I do to shift this condition, and by what date do I want to achieve that result?  What are the implications for my diet, exercise, and anti-stress activities?  Are there any books, websites, or professionals who can help me to achieve these goals?  Try this and see what happens.  Your health is so important.  Without your health, none of your material goals is worthwhile.  You cannot enjoy money from an intensive care bed!

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REBT therapists use the ABC model to track down the causes of their client's emotional and behavioural disturbances. 

A = Activating event, or Stimulus.  What happened?

B = Belief system.  What attitude did you adopt towards what happened?

C = Consequence.  How did you (consequently) feel and act?

CENT therapists use a variation on that model, called the EFR model, as follows:

E = Event or fixation. What happened, or what are you focussing upon?

F = Framing.  What kind of ‘frame' or ‘lens' are you looking through, in order to interpret this event, or to frame what are you are fixated upon?

R = Response.  What is the emotional and behavioural response generated by your body-mind?

Then we have the Debating/Disputing step in REBT:

D = Disputing/debating.  What are you telling yourself to make yourself so upset by the A (or activating event)?

In CENT, this is replaced by the frame challenging step (FC):

FC = Frame challenging.  How many different ways can you think of to frame the E (or event or fixation that is troubling you)?  If only one, then you really don't know how your mind works.  Let's use the Windows Model to show you that there are at least five, and possibly 55 different ways to look at what happened to you.  Then we will consider which of those ways of looking at your situation is going to serve you best, and which you need to dump.  Once you have changed the F that is distressing you, you will get a new (emotional and behavioural) outcome at point R in the CENT model.

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I have recently been describing some of the kinds of frames that people use to discourage themselves from doing their work; which result in procrastination and failure.  In order to succeed, people need to manage their ‘framing process' better, so that they have the motivation to get on with working on their top priorities, so they can achieve their goals.  This is explored in a new Success & Procrastination programme that I have recently begun to distribute, here: Build Success by Getting Things Done.

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Most people who are out and about on the www have most likely come across ‘The Secret' and ‘the Law of Attraction', and some are wondering if it is valid or a self-delusion.  I have recently been writing on that subject, here: The Law of Attraction and the Law of Thrownness.

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If you are exploring social media, why not follow me on the following social media platforms:

http://www.twitter.com/abc4rebt

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/abccoaching 

http://www.youtube.com/AbcCoaching

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I am now offering FREE EMAIL COUNSELLING to individuals who agree to participate in my research project on the narrative aspects of CENT.  You can find a description of this research project here: The First CENT Research Project.

If you want a limited involvement because of time problems, or because you want to check out the value of participation before making a longer term commitment, then you can sign up for just one story, to be written by you, and analyzed by me, and passed back to you.  That story would be the very first in chronological sequence: The Story of Your Origins.

This is an opportunity to get high quality analysis of your story of origins, and advice on how to reframe elements of that story to produce better results in your life.

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Have you seen the latest post to the Business Success Blog?

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The Primary Certificate in REBT is being phased out at the ABC Coaching Academy.   Students on that course will, of course, be able to continue through to completion, and will receive the Primary Cert in the normal way.  However, entry is now closed.  In a few weeks, I will be launching:

The ABC Certificate in Rational Emotive and Cognitive Behavioural Counselling/Therapy.

This course will be in the new Video & Text format, completely online.

Early next year I will launch the Professional Certificate in Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy.  It will comprise four components:

1. The REBT component: This can be satisfied by individuals who hold either a Primary Cert in REBT/REBC, or the new ABC Cert in RE&CBC/T.  In addition, candidates will be required to evidence 25 hours of application of the content of their qualifying course; making a total of 50 hours of REBT training/application.

2. The TA component: This can be satisfied by a TA101 Certificate; or the (soon to be announced) ABC Cert in Transactional Analysis (25 hours).  In addition, they will need evidence of 25 hours of applying these ideas in a real life context.

3. The Object Relations component: This can be satisfied by a portfolio of experience of learning about and/or using the Object Relations model; or the ABC Cert in Object Relations.  Evidence of a total of 50 hours of training/learning/application.

4. The moral philosophy component.  The ABC Cert in Moral Philosophy for Counsellors/Psychotherapists (25 hours).  Plus 25 hours of applications in the real world.

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That's all for this week.

Best wishes,

Jim

Dr Jim Byrne

ABC Coaching and Counselling Services 

Jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com 

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There are seven papers on CENT on the Institute page, at The Institute for CENT.

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If you like this blog, then please consider posting it to your social networking friends:

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THE HAPPINESS BLOG

Why is this called the Happiness Blog?  Because my main aim here, as in my private counselling practice, is to teach people how to become happier by managing their thinking (plus their emotions and behaviours).

This is not about ‘frivolous happiness', nor even about the kind of happiness that depends upon external ‘good things' happening.  I am talking about a durable sense of ‘calm serenity', rising to ‘bliss'.  These emotional states, achieved through profound philosophical mastery of the mind, do not depend upon the world delivering the right kind of ‘goodies'.  It is a form of ‘transcendence' of the dependence on material rewards to raise a smile.

Mainly what I do in my work is to teach others, and to promote learning.  I teach my students to understand counselling models and theories.  And I teach my counselling clients to manage their thoughts, feelings, behaviours and goal directed performances.

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Over the past couple of weeks I have been writing about Frame Theory, and how it underpins certain aspects of Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT).  I hope to return to that subject next week.  However, if you are curious about Frame Theory today, then please read the two posts that follow below, immediately after this one.

There is a way to directly investigate how I use frame theory with my clients and students.  I have now produced a new teaching programme - on Success and Procrastination - based on the theory of CENT.  In that programme I identify some typical frames that cause people to procrastinate their top priority actions, and to fail to achieve their goals in life.  I then teach the students how to 'reverse' those frames; and how to develop positive frames that will help to motivate them to get their important tasks done.  You could take a look at that programme and see how CENT is applied in practice, in a non-therapeutic setting.  Build Success by Getting Things Done, by Dr Jim Byrne.

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I could not work on this blog yesterday (Friday) because I was preparing for a teleseminar with Dr Pam Garcy, in Texas - by telephone, I hasten to add.

Dr Pam Garcy's website can be found at http://www.myinnerguide.com/index.html

Pam has produced and published more than a dozen tele-seminars with interesting psychologists who have something topical and informative to say to her audience of students and former students from universities in Texas.

I was due to speak to that audience at 10.00pm last night, and I prepared some ideas for responses to a range of ten questions in which that audience was likely to be interested.  However, in the event, the first ten to fifteen minutes of the event were disrupted by feedback noise on the line, and so we had just 45 minutes or less to complete the teleseminar.  Pam therefore asked me if we could throw out the set questions, and dive straight into the Windows Model, which we have been discussing here on this blog.  Of course I agreed, and that is what we did.

Pam now has the headache of trying to get the audio recording of the seminar edited and published on her website, here http://www.myinnerguide.com/index.html.  If this proves to be technically possible, I will post a link to that seminar in a future blog.

In the meantime, I have expanded my notes for that seminar - which were originally brief bullet points - into a ten page mini-paper, which you can find at http://www.abc-counselling.com/id180.html.

Please take a look and see what you think.

(And there are more papers on CENT on the Institute for CENT Studies page). 

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All of the REBT and CENT education and training courses in counselling and personal development for this year are now completed, and the plan for next year is new.  Instead of repeating this year's courses, which I had planned to do, I have now decided to offer three courses next year - the Certificate in CENT; the Diploma in CENT; and the Distance Learning ABC Certificate in REBT/CBT.  These will be described on the ABC Coaching Academy page in due course.

~~~

That's all for this week.

Best wishes,

Jim

Dr Jim Byrne

ABC Coaching and Counselling Services 

Jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com

~~~

If you like this blog, please post it to your social networking friends:

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The Happiness Blog

Frame Theory - Further Refinement of Our Definitions

Last week I talked about frame theory, and began to distinguish this concept from related concepts.  This week I want to take that conversation forward.  You might now be wondering how frames compare with scripts and schemas.

Frames, schemas (or schemata) and scripts are all terms used in cognitive science and cognitive psychology to describe the format of stored experiences in long term memory.  (MacLachlan and Reid, 1994[1]; Eysenck and Keane, 2000[2]).  As in any area of academic study, there are different paradigms (or camps and groupings) with different understandings.  For examples:

For Eysenck and Keane (2000): "The term schema is used to refer to well integrated chunks of knowledge about the world, events, people, and actions.  Scripts and frames are relatively specific kinds of schemas.  Scripts deal with knowledge about events and consequences of events.  Thus, for example, Schank and Abelson (1977)[3] referred to a restaurant script, which contains information about the usual sequence of events involved in going to a restaurant to have a meal.  In contrast, frames deal with knowledge about the properties of objects and locations". (Page 352).

Needless to say, I do not agree with this distinction, as I see frames, scripts and schemas as attempts to explain what is going on in the mind of an individual when they use their past experience to comprehend and respond to their current environmental stimuli.  I am also a therapist first and an academic second, and so my aim in life is to identify strategies and perspectives that help to change the world of the client, and not just to understand it.  Frames seem to me to have certain advantages over scripts and schemas in helping to direct the mind of the client towards possibilities of changing perspectives.  One student who piloted my procrastination programme (which is based on frame theory), said he found the use of frames particularly helpful as they clarified for him that he had control over his perceptions, and that he could change his behaviour by changing the frames through which was looking at his world.

As opposed to Eysenck and Keane, I like Eric Lunzer's description of Frame Theory (in Lunzer, 1989[4]): "The concept of cognitive frames and their role in the interpretation of experience is one which was first evolved within the context of artificial intelligence theory as a way of accounting for the fact that a finite system like the brain can recognize an infinite variety of situations by assigning each new complex to some familiar category, which already incorporates a necessary structure and an equally necessary flexibility.  The construct has been fruitfully applied to the interpretation of visual scenes, which change in lawful ways as a function of movements of the viewer and the object (Minsky, 1968[5], 1975[6]), and to the interpretation of spoken and written discourse (Rumelhart and Ortony, 1977[7]; Schank and Abelson, 1977). A frame is a network of related elements (which can be thought of as ideas), which has the added characteristic that not only the elements but also the links among them are distinctive and defined.  If you have a frame, you know what goes with what, and also how".

When Lunzer says our frames allow us to know what goes with what, and how, he is not implying that our frames are ‘accurate representations of reality'.  They are after all results of our subjective and socialized experiences, which means they exist within some social ideology, and are ‘relative takes' rather than ‘absolute facts'.

One of the implications of frames is that they are clusters of inferences, at many different levels - subordinate and superordinate.  When a frame is triggered - e.g. ‘I don't like that person looking at me in this way in a public library' - a whole host of superordinate frames is apparently simultaneously triggered - such as ‘People should not use intrusive eye contact with strangers'; ‘People who look at me like that mean to harm me'; and so on. According to Lunzer, we do not unpack the cluster of inferences.  We simply respond on the basis of our perceptual take indicated in the trigger frame.

In REBT a great deal of effort is put into trying to unpack those clusters of frames - in the process known as ‘inference chaining'.  And in CBT in general, there is a similar process called ‘the vertical arrow technique', whereby the therapist keeps trying to find out: "What's underneath that inference; and under the next one; and under that...".   By contrast, in CENT we do not do any unnecessary unpacking of clusters of inferences.  We find the activating frame and get the client to reverse it.  If appropriate we also encourage the client to develop a positive frame that impacts the same area of the old negative frame.  We then encourage the client to overlearn the reversed-negative frame, and any appropriate new positive frame, with the understanding that in the future, when presented with the problem stimulus - e.g. a stranger stares at them in a public place - the reversed-negative frame (and any new positive frame substitute) will now be activated.  We therefore do not spend time looking for ‘the most noxious' inference in the client's problematic cluster of frames.  (For an illustration of reversing negative frames, and developing positive frames, see my Procrastination Programme, here).

The technical justification for the CENT approach is that, in our daily functioning "...wherever possible, we operate with unanalyzed chunks of information"[8], and that process often works very well to produce good results, and when it produces bad results, the linkage between the stimulus and response is still ‘impressively reliable (even though inaccurate)'.  Since this kind of link is so reliable, why unpack the unnecessary?  We encourage our clients to learn new frames, and over time we assume that those frames will attract to themselves increasingly clustered relevant networks of frames.  In time, the client will have a new cluster of (more positive) frames related to the old, problematical stimulus, and will therefore, automatically, respond with a more functional response.

That's all for this week.

Best wishes,

Jim

Dr Jim Byrne

Doctor of Counselling

ABC Coaching and Counselling Services 

Email address: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com

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There are five papers on CENT Therapy on the following page: the Institute for CENT Studies.

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[1] MacLachlan, G. and Reid, I. (1994) Framing and Interpretation.  Melbourne, Aus: Melbourne University Press. 

[2] Eysenck, M.W. and Keane, M.T. (2000) Cognitive Psychology: A student's Handbook. Fourth edition.  East Sussex: Psychology Press.

[3] Schank, R.C. and Abelson, R.P.  (1977) Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding.  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.

[4] Lunzer, E. (1989) Cognitive development: learning and the mechanisms of change.  In: Murphy, P and Moon, B. (eds) Developments in Learning and Assessment.  London: Hodder and Stoughton/Open University Press.

[5] Minsky, M. (ed) (1968) Semantic Information Processing.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[6] Minsky, M.  (1975) ‘A framework for representing knowledge'.  In P. Winston (ed) The Psychology of Computer Vision. New York: McGraw-Hill.

[7] Rumelhart, D.E. and Ortony, A. (1977) ‘The representation of knowledge in memory'.  In R.C. Anderson, R.J. Spiro and W.E. Montague (eds) Schooling and the Acquisition of Knowledge.  Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp99-135.

[8] Lunzer (1989), page 30.

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The Happiness Blog

Frame Theory - An Initial Attempt at Definition

Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, 2009

"Frame theory" needs to be distinguished from "relational frame theory".  Relational frame theory is a form of re-birth of Skinnerian Behavioural Analysis.  In CENT, we consider that behaviour is driven by cognitive-emotive ‘frames', and we need to take account of the thinking-feeling nature of humans, and not downgrade them to the status of ‘behaving' victims of environmental controllers.  There may be victims, and there may be controllers, but it is arguable that the victimization process is conducted through a set of frames that impinge on the emotions and cognitions of the actors involved.

The first sense in which we could not subscribe to relational frame theory is this:  The human child is born into the arms of its mother/carer, who ‘colonizes' the neonate.  Over the next six months, the dialectical interactions between the ‘it' (or neonate) and the ‘over-I' or mother, creates the dialectical space in which the ‘I' emerges.  The ‘I' is not a pure product of its environment.  It is a product of the dialectical interaction of the environment AND the organism.  And that organism-environment interaction is an interaction between nature and culture.  Increasingly it involves language, which the infant uses to ‘knit' together an emotive emplotment, or cognitive-emotive life story: (a la Theodore Sarbin[1]).  That is quite different from Skinner's view of the organism as merely ‘contingent' upon its environment.

What do you think of this distinction?

When we talk about frames in CENT, and we mention frame theory, we are talking about frames as understood in semiotics (which is about ‘the study of signs and how they are interpreted').

According to MacLachlan and Reid (1994)[2], the general decline of ‘hermeneutics' - which sought to find the ‘true meaning' of historical texts - "...coincides with the rapid rise of semiotics, which regards meaning as constructed by an interpreter on the basis of textual and other signs[3].  ...the prevailing view now is that ‘meanings are not found but made' ...It is within this perspective that terms such as ‘frame' have become particularly attractive".  (Page 12).

Our clients (and we ourselves) do not look outside and find meanings there.  We construct them within, based on our cumulative, interpretative (social ) experience in long term memory, below the level of conscious awareness.

MacLachlan and Reid go on to clarify this point: "Metaphors of framing can aptly indicate that in order to perceive and understand anything we must provisionally distinguish it from other things while also relating it to them.  Exhibition wrestling and literary parody produce their particular meanings by virtue of their difference from and similarity to more serious genres.  Framing is thus the process of demarcating phenomena in a double-edged way that is simultaneously inclusive and exclusive".  (Page 16).

Does this make sense to you?

But what does this have to do with counselling and psychotherapy?  When a client comes to see me, they usually present me with a story of distress or dissatisfaction.  My job is to see beneath the surface of their presentation, and to help them to see that they are not dealing with the actual problem.  For example, most people are naïve realists who think they can ‘look out through their eyes and see what is there'.  My job is to clarify that we do not look out through our eyes, but admit light into our eyes, where it is picked up by nerve endings which send signals to stores frames and schemas which help the brain to interpret the ‘signals in the light', based on past experience, and particularly on past interpretations.

So clients are interpreting organisms who are deluded into thinking they are seeing organisms.  The ‘external event' or stimulus presents itself, and, one second or so later, it appears in the human mind in a completely reformed rearrangement, called ‘an interpretation'.  The client never sees the ‘external event'.  They see the interpretation, but assume it is an external event, and relate to it on the basis of frames and schemas, scripts and stories from the past.

Do you agree with this view?

My job is to help clients to identify the negative frames they are using to interpret their environments, which are currently causing them emotional and behavioural problems.  My job is further to teach them to develop positive frames which will produce more self-helping interpretations, which will then lead on to less emotional distress and less dysfunctional behaviour. 

Next week I hope to present some examples of distorted framing that causes dysfunctional emotions and behaviours.  (For some immediate examples, see my two video clips on Procrastination, at You Tube[4]).  For the moment, here is an example of frame distortion's role in those criminal assaults that go by the euphemism of 'domestic violence':

"Toward a Frame-Based Theory of Abuse: An Ongoing Exploration

Patricia Palmerton
Hamline University

2007

IACM 2007 Meetings Paper

"Abstract:     
"In this paper frame theory is applied to gain further understanding into the dynamics functioning in situations where there is domestic abuse. The communication dynamic evident in abusive situations is one where the abuser enacts control by using frame-shifting to enforce a paradigm that dictates that he control framing. Abusive frame-shifting prevents the target of abuse from being able to respond appropriately to the situation, because the meaning of the situation is changed through the imposition of a new frame. This dynamic has implications for understanding the difficulty targets have determining an appropriate response to the abuser, and for their exercise and sense of agency. Implications for understanding the role of framing in abusive dynamics at the societal level are noted."[5]

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As a final parting share, here is an interesting idea about the instability of frames, and perhaps also an indication of why people fight so tenaciously about ‘ideological issues'.  (S/he who controls the frame controls the minds of the participants in the discourse!)

MacLachlan and Reid (1994) go on to say that "What is apparent throughout Goffman's analysis is the fundamental precariousness of the frame and the various ways in which pre-emptive control over its maintenance may be exerted by the writer/performer in charge of the proceedings.  But frames are also vulnerable to attack ‘from below', the most obvious examples of which are heckling or similar acts of disattention or disturbance from the audience". 

When I read this statement, I was reminded of the way in which Dr Albert Ellis, the creator of REBT, would "dispute" the client's framing of their situation, by challenging their ‘beliefs', and making a plausible case for reframing the problem in new terms which reduced the client's distress.  This is carried forward in CENT in the form of ‘frame debates'.  We look for evidence to support or invalidate particular frames, and to identify frames that are self-helping and those that are self-sabotaging.  We encourage the client to re-frame their life circumstances using the Windows Model, and other processes which will be discussed later.

What do you think of this approach?

That's all for this week.  Have a good week.

Best wishes,

Jim

Dr Jim Byrne

ABC Coaching and Counselling Services

Email address: Jim.Byrne@Abc-Counselling.com

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[1] Sarbin, T. R. (1989). Emotions as narrative emplotments. In M. J. Packer, & R. B. Addison (Eds.), Entering the circle: Hermeneutic investigations in psychology (pp. 185-201). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Sarbin, T. R. (1993). The narrative as the root metaphor for contextualism. In S. C. Hayes, L. J. Hayes, H. W. Reese, & T. R. Sarbin (Eds.), Varieties of scientific contextualism (pp. 51-65). Reno, NV: Context Press.

Sarbin, T. R. (1998). The social construction of truth. Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Psychology, 18, 144-150.

Sarbin, T. R. (2001). Embodiment and the narrative structure of emotional life. Narrative Inquiry, 11, 217-225.

[2] MacLachlan, G. and Reid, I. (1994) Framing and Interpretation.  Melbourne, Aus: Melbourne University Press. 

[3] In terms of counselling, a ‘sign' could be a statement by a client, a sigh, a crestfallen look, a non-attendance at an appointment, and so on. 

[4] Getting Things Done Using CENT - Part 1, by Dr Jim Byrne: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crbBjYT2BZU.  Getting Things Done Using CENT - Part 2, by Dr Jim Byrne: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-o5gU0l4rQ.

[5] Palmerton, P. (2007) Toward a Frame-Based Theory of Abuse: An Ongoing Exploration. IACM 2007 Meetings Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1080632.  Accessed: 6^th November 2009.