Counseling

As I am working on a counseling degree, I created this page initially to integrate my learning into a course here. It is didactic, and the stat quo psychological approach focuses on ego and human capital with only enough current evidence to preserve those things. It is safe to say that psychology was the last science to leave the philosophy of the Greek oligarchs, Socrates Lyceum, and that the purely behavioral model is directly based on what is conceived as Aristotle's scientific method to a degree that the "official" version of psychology was built to fit Aristotle's method. Aristotle got his data from Hippocrates and it was kept intact in its original version through the 1970s. Only American pragmatism was different, and it was not psychological, but educational and sociological; the pragmatist work matured with Carl Rogers' personality model and evolved to become the person-centered model, which is best described as "client-driven." Sadistic experimental psychology morphed into Aaron Beck's behavioral-cognitive school to eventually absorb the person-centered model as the therapeutic alliance. The psychoanalysis, the original psychology, is going through a similar change.

The person-centered approach is based on the processing of experience to construct the "self" from what is in the "field of perception," and is moving towards a group, or social, model but much too slowly.

My own approach to psychology, and hence interest in counseling, grew from empathy studies. It is a clean room model derived from material from interviews (mostly online) with people who were having difficulties, and then fitting their responses to the empathic evolutionary model such as presented by de Waal.

The central advice of the empathy model came early: "attempt to think in terms of how people feel about what you say and do." The model hinges on the concept of emotional communication to show that mental health, or at least happiness, depends on collaboration skills necessary to participate in society to obtain the resources that support a successful life. In many respects, it is a resources model based on the idea of how mutually-supporting species evolved empathically to be able to live comfortably within the opportunistic environments found in nature. (It was originally inspired by a purely synthetic experience--questions surrounding the short-lived promotion of an obviously bipolar and predatory coworker (whom I owe much) to be the manager of a concrete batch plant--why would a successful organization promote a self-admitted "broken" worker?

Because the "clean room" nature of the empathy model is so divergent from the stat quo, I have found that I need to periodically refresh for myself, the (easily self-confirmed) basics of the model. Despite being so different, much of conservative psychology does occasionally provide the model with support such as Kurt Lewin's field theories.

I think it suffices to say that the main psychological manual, the DSM, is a former military manual, and that it is rejected by all agencies that I am familiar with.

Functional modeling

Just prior to the beginning of the first course which was biopsychology, I realized from the text that a key breakthrough would be to create a function model of the emotional system, or lymbic, that would mature into a simulation that would show emotional state. Ironically, emotion state, which most people analogize with psychology, has so far been barely mentioned. Further, the idea of a complex structure, no matter how simply described, is far beyond the scope of the psychological stat quo.

This of course does nothing to discredit information science, and signifies that the very recent research, mostly imaging, will confirm that psychology is a single explanation for scientific phenomena, like all Science, and that certain philosophies did in fact "hit the money" early on--just not the group that has dominated Western philosophy from the grave for 2,500 years.

Mutual support in substance abuse

Seeing how quickly confirmable Science is finally replace 2,500 year-old philosophy, it only makes sense for counseling science to follow research science closely and to contribute to it. This research proposal leverages highly-successful substance abuse mutual support models to explore the "system of self" as a functional model.

Wiki functional model structure (to be programmed) click

APA-style writing click

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ABSTRACT: Self-efficacy in those attempting to recover from substance abuse disorders is believed to contribute to abstinence. Participation in mutual support groups is believed to reinforce self-efficacy by giving participants the opportunity to help others. Self-efficacy, as a component of the conceptual "system of self" works in conjunction with self-esteem to help goal achievement, or self-agency, which, for those with substance disorders, is abstinence. To reinforce research from previous largely qualitative studies, this study proposes to correlate self-efficacy and self-esteem as predictors of the rate of abstinence, or self-agency, of a group 30 men with a mean age of 30 who attend mutual support substance abuse programs. It is hypothesized that increases in self-efficacy and self-esteem will predict self-agency in terms of higher abstinence and lower drug craving, but that self-efficacy will be a greater predictor. The study also proposes to explore innovative data collection and statistical methodologies that leverage cell phones, the internet, and continuous online statistical analysis for the benefit of other researchers and those who want to manualize self-efficacy and self-esteem concepts in the group context for substance abuse recovery.

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Course sources

All the material that I have created for the counseling course is temporarily stored on another site WV::Counseling, but will be integrated into this course, and is free for use as most wiki material is. It is formated for the didactic requirements but attempts to cover the relevant topics as they can be implemented into a science that is about emotional communication using a functional object model rather than the dominating ego-based model, which is still philosophy-based.

The first significant writing for the course was about Carl Roger's "19 proposition" model for personality that he wrote in 1955, and I have created from it a "Rogers word game" course that leverages "wikiology" to organize his model into something that is comprehensible. Rogers was "right on" by adapting the educational and pragmatist concepts of "self, experience, and process" that preceded him (as far back as the 1700s), and augmenting them with newly-arrived Gestalt and Lewin-like geometric ideas of perception. But, ultimately, he had to "let go" of this to get to the real point of life which is interrelation, and, for counselors, is the therapeutic relationship. Still, with Rogers' (humanistic) approach the focus remains on the individual and not interrelation, and the "field of perception" is still subjective experience that avoids the concept of reality. Reality is where we all live and why we all need therapy (of many kinds). Sociology is far stronger with reality, and it has at times led psychology onto the "real plane" so that social sciences can actually have wide-spread beneficial effect. Psychology's official mission is limited to applying "bandaids" to the suffering of the depressed, addicted, psychotic, schizophrenic, traumatized, and executive function sufferers such as those with ADHD. (Missing from the course program, so far, is aspergers, which figures heavily into the empathy model as it often described an absence of emotional connection.)