The Evolution of the Helping Models

For tens of thousands of years, people had passed on traditional agrarian (land based) roles from generation to generation.

Then suddenly, with the advent of the industrial age, the human conditions changed.

The conditioned roles and responses that had given stability to society no longer worked.

Work roles evolved ... People moved from villages into cities. Extended families were scattered. The changes were incessant. People needed to learn new responses. As a result the human condition was changed ...gone was the stability that

traditional roles allowed. Now , people battle competitively for new opportunities. Some people are left behind, feeling increasingly betrayed as contract after

contract is broken. Comfort is no longer assured, hard work does not yield security. Stripped of their former roles, people begin to search for the answer to the

basic question of human experience: “who am I?” Robert R. Carkhuff 1993.

Fire

Making your own fire

Working with a fragile process in nature

Fragile process in nature - Findings from the traditional fire making workshop

I need to be very patient I need to accept that you might not get the

end result you want. It takes a lot of skill It takes a lot of practice Sometimes you have to keep going back to

the start Sometimes you feel like you have achieved

the next stage, then it all falls apart again Others?

In Client-Centred/Experiential Psychotherapy, fragile process is described as follows:

“Many clients have a fragile style of processing experience that makes it difficult for them to work in standard psychotherapy formats.

Therapists often find the experiences of these clients hard to understand and feel thwarted in their therapeutic efforts.

Such clients are often diagnosed as having borderline, narcissistic, or schizoid personality disorders......

...working with these clients is only effective once the therapist is able to understand the sorts of experiences clients are having”.

Margaret S. Warner, PhDChicago Counseling CenterIllinois School of Professional Psychology

Fragile process in nature – people who experience fragile process

The overall structure – An I.S.D. definition of a psychological

intervention

A Pre-Therapy orientated, Wilderness

Therapy

In the beginning – being close enough

Levels of connection – photographs in the unit

Working with individuals

Creating therapeutic, activity-based experiences while:

Taking lots of photographs

The ‘Going Places’ project uses the model of an on-going, interrupted rather than terminated, therapeutic engagement. i.e. once part of the project individuals can ask to be re-connected at any time with the on-going programme of activities. (Interruption replaces termination in focused, intermittent Psychotherapy throughout a life cycle. Cummings,N.A. 2007)

Stopping for cups of tea and

Treatment should be an active verb rather than a noun. R.D. Laing 1986.

Working with groups – camping at glengaber cottage

Why does the wilderness environment help?

At the end of the day or the week one feels worn out, ready for a break or respite. The worn out state is not physical but mental (fatigue).

However, people so fatigued that they can hardly function can non the less spring into action when an emergency arises or when something of particular interest happens to come along.

William James (1892) Identified two types of attention:(distinguished in terms of the effort involved in their use)

Involuntary attention (attention that requires no effort at all. )Voluntary attention (directed attention) where paying attention demands a good deal of effort.

As James envisioned it, the way one maintains directed attention is by inhibiting everything else.

Increased specialisation has meant that each of us spends longer hours pursuing a single activity,

Such persistence requires discipline, which depends heavily on directed attention.

The struggle to pay attention in cluttered and confusing environments turns out to be central to what is experienced as mental fatigue.

Achieving rest from directed attention fatigue requires environments and task that make minimal demands on directed attention.

The effects of the wilderness environment are powerful (studied) and deeply restorative.

Environments that are restorative have a quality of “being in a whole other world”.

The Experience of nature – A Psychological Perspective. Rachel Kaplan and Stephen kaplan. 1989.

Why use activities?

The Psychobiology of Gene Expression – Ernest L. Rossi.

Neurogenesis – the generation of new neurons and their connections in the brain (experience/activity based gene

expression).

So: What is Pre-Therapy?

The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways:

In the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and,

In the second, there is a disruption in his relation with himself. The Existential-

phenomenological foundations for a science of persons. ‘The Divided Self. R.D. Laing 1960.

Pre-Therapy/Psychological Contact

Pre-Therapy is used with clients who cannot utilise relationships because they are experiencing a level of ‘Contact’ impairment’.

‘Contact’ is defined as a necessary condition of any therapeutic relationship.

Underpinning all therapeutic interventions is the assumption that someone is able to be in Contact.

Pre-Therapy – Restoration or strengthening of contact functions

What are the Contact functions –

Awareness of the world,

Awareness of moods, feelings and emotions

Communication of personal experience and self to others through words or sentences.

Lastly, the camping question

On 5th June 1901, 40 patients (with TB )were moved into two large tents on the grounds of a New York State Psychiatric hospital.

The physical and mental improvements were so marked that the camp size was extended to 60.

At the end of the summer most were moved back in.Physicians noted that many regressed to incontinence and withdrawal.

Those left outside in tents continued to improve.

By the following summer several formely hopeless patients showed enough improvement to be discharged. Taken From: Camping Therapy its uses in psychiatry and rehabilitation. 1974