Status Dynamics:
Creating New Paths to Therapeutic Change
by
Raymond M. Bergner, Ph.D.
Table of Contents:
1. A Further Path to Therapeutic Change
2. The Therapeutic Relationship
3. Reconstructing Worlds
4. Changing Self-concepts
5. Assessment and Diagnosis: The Individual Case Formulation
6. Policies in Status Dynamic Psychotherapy
7. Using Images in Psychotherapy
8. Conclusion
References
Index
Preface
The status dynamic therapist occupies a world of places. Our particular interest is in places that carry power – places from which our clients can act effectively in their worlds to bring about personal change. As active agents of change, our interest is in helping our clients occupy such positions of power. We position them to fight downhill battles, not uphill ones, to be “in the driver’s seat” instead of the passenger seat. We help them approach their problems as proactive, in-control actors, not helpless victims. We want them to attack these problems from the position of acceptable, sense-making, care-meriting persons who bring ample strengths, resources, and past successes to the solution of their difficulties. We help them to proceed from reconstructed worlds, and from places within these worlds, in which they are eligible and able to participate in life in meaningful and fulfilling ways.
Everything that will be said in this book, in one way or another, centers around this core agenda. To further it
• We assign certain empowering statuses – places of power – to our clients based, not on observation, but on the fact alone that our clients are fellow persons (chapter 2).
• We assist our clients in reconstructing both their worlds and their places within their worlds (chapter 3).
• We assist our clients in changing their self-concepts, circumventing that concept’s notorious resistance to change by utilizing the largely unrecognized truth that “status takes precedence over fact” (chapter 4).
• We co-create with our clients formulations of their problems in which they are the active initiators of certain “linchpin” factors at the heart of their difficulties, and thus are already in positions of power from which to bring about broad changes in their lives (chapter 5).
• We assist our clients in accepting these new conceptions of themselves and their worlds by adhering to certain policy guidelines such as “appealing to what matters” to them and “going where we are welcome” (chapter 6).
• We communicate places of power for our clients to occupy through the vehicle of stories and other images (chapter 7).
• Finally, in all that we do, we endeavor to be credible persons so that our clients will accept our status assignments.
My colleagues and I have found the ideas put forward in this book extrraordinarily helpful and powerful over the course of several decades. I hope that they will prove of equal value to you and your clients.
Copyright 2007 by Raymond M. Bergner. All rights reserved.
