Symbolic modeling is a therapeutic and coaching process developed by psychotherapists Penny Tompkins and James Lawley, based on the work of counselling psychologist David Grove. Using Grove's clean language, a progressive questioning technique using clients' exact words, the facilitator works with a client's self-generating metaphors to clarify personal beliefs, goals, and conflicts, and to bring about meaningful change. Because of its reliance on emergence and self-organization it has been called a "post-modern oriented therapeutic approach". [1]
The practice of symbolic modeling is built upon a foundation of two complementary theories: the metaphors by which we live, [2] and the models by which we create. It regards the individual as a self-organizing system that encodes much of the meaning of feelings, thoughts, beliefs, experiences etc. in the embodied mind as metaphors. [3] Symbolic modeling aims to heighten awareness of clients' personal "symbolic domain of experience", facilitating them to develop a unique "metaphor landscape" and to explore their internal metaphors, which in conceptual metaphor theory are seen to govern behavior. [4]
The symbolic modeling process guides the client through an exploration of the client's own metaphors, their organization, interactions, and patterns. These embodied metaphors can restrict a client's ways of viewing the world and his or her coping strategies, due to the inner logic prescribed by the metaphors. Without shifting these metaphors, lasting change may be difficult, as the embodied mind may continue to work within the constraints of this old paradigm. Through the facilitation, the client can discover how these metaphors can change to meet their desired outcomes, transformative shifts can occur within a client's "metaphor landscape", bringing about meaningful change on cognitive, affective and behavioral levels.
The "metaphor landscape" phenomenon is not a new discovery, with some similarities to "waking dream" or rêve evéillé, a term coined by Robert Desoille in the 1930s. [5]
Symbolic modeling proceeds through five defined stages, as follows:
Clean language is used throughout, to avoid contaminating or distorting the developing metaphor landscape through the form, content or presentation of the therapist's questions. [6]
A more structured subset of the above process called symbolic modeling lite is used in coaching: [7]
A number of studies have assessed the efficacy of symbolic modeling with 95 dyslexic coachees; [8] [9] in a psychotherapy case study; [10] and in an organisational setting. [11]
While therapy and coaching are the primary application areas of symbolic modeling, researchers have started to apply the method to metaphor research, [12] game design, [13] problem solving, [14] modelling excellence, [15] [16] and as a qualitative research methodology. [17] [18]
Group psychotherapy or group therapy is a form of psychotherapy in which one or more therapists treat a small group of clients together as a group. The term can legitimately refer to any form of psychotherapy when delivered in a group format, including art therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy or interpersonal therapy, but it is usually applied to psychodynamic group therapy where the group context and group process is explicitly utilized as a mechanism of change by developing, exploring and examining interpersonal relationships within the group.
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a pseudoscientific approach to communication, personal development and psychotherapy, that first appeared in Richard Bandler and John Grinder's 1975 book The Structure of Magic I. NLP asserts that there is a connection between neurological processes, language and acquired behavioral patterns, and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life. According to Bandler and Grinder, NLP can treat problems such as phobias, depression, tic disorders, psychosomatic illnesses, near-sightedness, allergy, the common cold, and learning disorders, often in a single session. They also say that NLP can model the skills of exceptional people, allowing anyone to acquire them.
Counseling psychology is a psychological specialty that began with a focus on vocational counseling, but later moved its emphasis to adjustment counseling, and then expanded to cover all normal psychology and psychotherapy. There are many subcategories for counseling psychology, such as marriage and family counseling, rehabilitation counseling, clinical mental health counseling, educational counseling, etc. In each setting, they are all required to follow the same guidelines.
Solution-focused (brief) therapy (SFBT) is a goal-directed collaborative approach to psychotherapeutic change that is conducted through direct observation of clients' responses to a series of precisely constructed questions. Based upon social constructivist thinking and Wittgensteinian philosophy, SFBT focuses on addressing what clients want to achieve without exploring the history and provenance of problem(s). SF therapy sessions typically focus on the present and future, focusing on the past only to the degree necessary for communicating empathy and accurate understanding of the client's concerns.
Cognitive analytic therapy (CAT) is a form of psychological therapy initially developed in the United Kingdom by Anthony Ryle. This time-limited therapy was developed in the context of the UK's National Health Service with the aim of providing effective and affordable psychological treatment which could be realistically provided in a resource constrained public health system. It is distinctive due to its intensive use of reformulation, its integration of cognitive and analytic practice and its collaborative nature, involving the patient very actively in their treatment.
The dialogical self is a psychological concept which describes the mind's ability to imagine the different positions of participants in an internal dialogue, in close connection with external dialogue. The "dialogical self" is the central concept in the dialogical self theory (DST), as created and developed by the Dutch psychologist Hubert Hermans since the 1990s.
Individual psychology is a psychological method or science founded by the Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler. The English edition of Adler's work on the subject (1925) is a collection of papers and lectures given mainly between 1912 and 1914. The papers cover the whole range of human psychology in a single survey, and were intended to mirror the indivisible unity of the personality.
Clean language is a technique primarily used in counseling, psychotherapy and coaching but now also used in education, business, organisational change and health. It has been applied as a research interview technique called clean language interviewing.
The conversational model of psychotherapy was devised by the English psychiatrist Robert Hobson, and developed by the Australian psychiatrist Russell Meares. Hobson listened to recordings of his own psychotherapeutic practice with more disturbed clients, and became aware of the ways in which a patient's self—their unique sense of personal being—can come alive and develop, or be destroyed, in the flux of the conversation in the consulting room.
Emotionally focused therapy and emotion-focused therapy (EFT) are related humanistic approaches to psychotherapy that aim to resolve emotional and relationship issues with individuals, couples, and families. These therapies combine experiential therapy techniques, including person-centered and Gestalt therapies, with systemic therapy and attachment theory. The central premise is that emotions influence cognition, motivate behavior, and are strongly linked to needs. The goals of treatment include transforming maladaptive behaviors, such as emotional avoidance, and developing awareness, acceptance, expression, and regulation of emotion and understanding of relationships. EFT is usually a short-term treatment.
Functional analytic psychotherapy (FAP) is a psychotherapeutic approach based on clinical behavior analysis (CBA) that focuses on the therapeutic relationship as a means to maximize client change. Specifically, FAP suggests that in-session contingent responding to client target behaviors leads to significant therapeutic improvements.
Reflective listening is a communication strategy used to better understand a speaker's idea by offering your understanding of their idea back to the speaker in order to confirm that the idea has been understood correctly. It is a more specific strategy than general methods of active listening.
Common factors theory, a theory guiding some research in clinical psychology and counseling psychology, proposes that different approaches and evidence-based practices in psychotherapy and counseling share common factors that account for much of the effectiveness of a psychological treatment. This is in contrast to the view that the effectiveness of psychotherapy and counseling is best explained by specific or unique factors that are suited to treatment of particular problems.
Family therapy is a branch of psychotherapy focused on families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of interaction between family members.
Dynamic deconstructive psychotherapy (DDP) is a manual-based treatment for borderline personality disorder.
Inference-based therapy (IBT), also known as inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy (I-CBT), originated as a form of cognitive therapy developed for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder. IBT followed the observation that people with OCD often inferred danger on the basis of inverse inference. Later the model was extended to inferential confusion, where inverse inference leads to distrust of the senses and investment in remote possibility. In this model, individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder are hypothesized to put a greater emphasis on an imagined possibility than on what can be perceived with the senses, and to confuse the imagined possibility with reality. According to inference-based therapy, obsessional thinking occurs when the person replaces reality and real probabilities with imagined possibilities; the obsession is hypothesized to concern a doubt about a possible state of affairs.
Clean language interviewing (CLI), sometimes shortened to clean interviewing, aims to maximise the reliability that information collected during an interview derives from the interviewee. CLI seeks to address some of the "threats to validity and reliability" that can occur during an interview and to increase the "trustworthiness" of the data collected. It does this by employing a technique that minimises the unintended introduction of interviewer content, assumption, leading question structure, presupposition, framing, priming, tacit metaphor and nonverbal aspects such as paralanguage and gesture that may compromise the authenticity of the data collected.
Terence J. G. Tracey is an American psychologist, author and researcher. He is professor emeritus of counseling and counseling psychology at Arizona State University. He is also a visiting professor at University of British Columbia. He has served in many administrative positions at Arizona State University including department head and associate dean. He is the former editor-in-chief of Journal of Counseling Psychology.
Multiple code theory (MCT) is a theory that conceives of the human brain as processing information in three codes. A certain issue can be coded in three languages, via symbolic verbal information (letters), symbolic nonverbal information (images), and pre-symbolic information. This theory was first hypothesized by the psychoanalyst Wilma Bucci, who combines the work of Antonio Damasio and psychoanalysis. What is important for psychotherapy is that there is no direct connection between the world of words and the physical world, but that the images are a pivotal point for communication between the mind and the limbic system and serve as a kind of translator. There is an image attached to every word and a physical feeling attached to every image. Her work had a major influence on the further development of various psychotherapeutic procedures.