What works in therapy part 2

The dice game

To play this game with a colleague, throw the dice three times on your turn to choose your client, the model and one of the two issues in the problem column (your choice!). Decide together how you would work with that scenario. Then it’s your colleague’s turn. Help each other out – but having a colleague to play with ensures you do actually think it through and toss ideas around that emerge during the process.

 

If you don’t work with that category of client or that model of therapy, do your best with the knowledge you have and then look up more information so that you either confirm your current way of working or learn something wider that will maybe throw light on how and why your current work differs – which, strangely, may strengthen it.

 

 

DICE	CLIENT	MODEL	PROBLEM
1	child of 10	cognitive behavioural	anger / behaviour issues
2	teenager 14	person centred	health issue / chronic illness
3	single mum	psychodynamic	eating disorder / OCD
4	family dad	solution focused	bereavement / loss
5	single man	multimodal	anxiety / phobia
6	older lady	Personal construct/EFT/NLP	alcohol abuse / domestic violence

 

For instance, I just threw a 4 for family dad; a 5 for multimodal; and another 4 for bereavement/loss (I’ll go with loss). Now I mostly work with under 18s and their carers but that means I should have an idea of what would be most helpful to this imaginary dad who has had a loss of some kind (child, spouse, job, future, health etc) and how it might affect his children.

 

I’d go with him on the detail, of course, but on the general theoretical underpinning of multimodal therapy, I’d be assuming – in this scenario – that we should address several aspects of his situation (Behaviour, Affect, Sensation, Imagery, Cognition, Interpersonal relationships, and Drugs/biology) and also consider what we know about the effects of loss in general. And it’s instantly reasonable to assume this model would address what needs addressing. 

 

Because I work with young people, I should be aware of how loss affects different members of the family and how this impinges on the young person’s own coping. And because my work with young people takes into account their various contexts, then all this should be pretty familiar territory. The multimodel aspect obviously contains a “specific” way of working and parameters – but it’s also completely understandable to a therapist trained differently.

 

How far can we remain pigeon-holed in the 21st century? I’m not saying we should necessarily change our way of working, just consider it in a wider context and be open to possibilities. The thought of being more effective surely underpins why we do this work in the first place. And that’s why I invented this game – to think around what I do!