DCT ASSESSMENT and ADLERIAN EARLY RECOLLECTIONS Instructors Guide Thomas J. Sweeney, Ph.D. & Jane E. Myers, Ph.D. PURPOSE OF THIS LESSON: To introduce the use of earlier recollections with Allen Ivey s Developmental Counseling and Therapy (DCT) assessment as a means of helping to ascertain clients preferred developmental cognitive style for knowing and responding to life. Based upon such assessment, clinicians can select an appropriate intervention suited to assist their clients most effectively when they are blocked in resolving their life s issues. COMPETENCY OBJECTIVES: 1) Each student will be able to discern the difference between specific, clinically useful Early Recollections and general, nonsignificant events recalled from early childhood; 2) Each student will be familiar with specific techniques and types of questions used in the DCT assessment sequence. 3) Each student will learn how to use DCT techniques to explore an ER and help a client develop greater understanding of their presenting issue. OVERVIEW: Adlerian clinicians use Early Recollections as an entrée to clients most basic attitudes and expectations for meeting life s tasks (Clark, 2002; Sweeney, 1998). In the process of learning Ivey s DCT assessment and intervention strategies, the senior author realized that Early Recollections were a logical source of coping beliefs and attitudes derived through the DCT assessment. Through some experimentation, I determined that by combining the two methods clients could be helped to gain both insight and motivation for addressing their presenting issues using any number of counseling techniques. Early memories disclose expectations for the future that shape one s responses to daily life tasks. The anticipation of what will happen when influences the choices each of us makes in both large and small decisions related to work, friendships, love relationships, self, and spiritual matters. Helping clients uncover the meaning and purpose associated with these Early Recollections empowers them to make new choices, exercise new behaviors, and discover new emotions associated with current and future life experiences and relationships. By using DCT assessment and intervention strategies with Early Recollections, clients can be helped to more quickly uncover mistaken expectations that they hold for self, others and life in general. Unrealistic expectations found in Early Recollections such as if it is to be, it is always up to me! or whatever I do must be done the very best it can be done! are types of rules that become guiding notions toward life easily associated with stress, emotional turmoil, and physical consequences. Through DCT, we deconstruct such rules in order to help clients
modify, delete, or change completely expectations that do not serve them or others well. New or modified rules offer more flexibility and less stress. DCT assessment is basically straightforward and logical in its sequence. However, it is important that the protocol be followed without innovation or skipping steps when learning how to use it. For the inexperienced helper, supervision will be essential in order to ensure that the client has proper assistance beyond the assessment as the process itself can be powerful and therapeutic even in the hands of a neophyte. This lesson includes some safe guards for minimizing the inappropriate use of these techniques.. CONTENT: While it is beyond the scope of this lesson to provide an in depth discussion of DCT theory and the Standard Cognitive Developmental Assessment Interview (SCDI; Ivey, Ivey, Myers, & Sweeney, 2005), viewers will benefit from a brief introduction to the assessment process as it applies to Early Recollections. The SCDI is both a structured clinical assessment and a potentially powerful clinical intervention. Once mastered, the questions and questioning sequence used in this interview may be used singly or in combination as interventions to facilitate both first and second order change processes. Ivey presents an interview protocol, the SCDI, that relates to four developmentally based cognitive styles of relating to others, self, and experiencing life choices. These are: sensorimotor, concrete operational, formal operational, and dialectic. Each has an essential function and none is better than the other. Sensorimotor Style involves being able to experience and describe one s feelings and emotions. The helper asks the client to image as vividly as possible a specific moment, event, or experience and to describe what they see, hear, smell, feel, and sense (touch if appropriate). The feelings associated with the experiences, as is true with Early Recollections, are essential. Equally important, the client is asked to locate that feeling in his/her body, i.e., where is the memory embedded physically. To miss the significance of these questions can make the remainder of the process ineffective. Once the embedded feelings have been identified, the helper asks, Have you ever had that feeling since (or on another occasion?) Will you please tell me about that one as well? This leads to the concrete operational assessment. Concrete Operational Style includes the ability to associate life experiences in a linear, specific manner (when she said this, I said ). Some clients are so concrete that helpers get lost trying to understand
their predicaments. Other clients are so obtuse that they have difficulty understanding why life treats them the way it does. Being able to help clients deal with this style is essential to helping as well. Focusing techniques, summarizations, and restatements are helpful. Formal Operational Style involves connecting life experiences into themes and associations that permit analysis, synthesis and insight, for example, when consequences are the result of poor decision making. Once the second event has been clearly described or nearly so as the client can do so, the helper summarizes the two events in as much details as can be used and then asks something like the following, We have here two events, both involve this feeling (describe), what do they seem to have in common otherwise, do you see any similarities in them? What themes do these suggest in how you approach such situations that you describe? Clinicians often prefer formal operational clients because that tends to be the clinicians preferred copying style. While a childhood experience may not seem related to an adult s present predicament, the rules and expectations for life have early origins and they are most often accepted as fact without reexamination unless guided through a process such as with the DCT assessment. Dialectic Style permits one to empathize, understand, and analyze differing points of view, their origin, and relative merits. The transition to the dialectic style after uncovering the client s rules begins with questions like: Where did these life rules come from and are they good rules? How do they affect others in my life? The capacity to reconcile differences with others in life often rests with this style. Likewise, creating a better future for oneself requires seeing possibilities not seen or valued before. In the lesson video, a young man fully capable of solving any number of life s challenges reaches the dialectic stage of the interview only to acknowledge that how his present behavior affects others is beyond his understanding at this time.
All of these styles help us to live life successfully. When we have a block or incapacity to utilize one or more of these developmental cognitive styles, however, we experience distress. One goal in the DCT assessment is to identify coping strategies that clients use customarily and when blocked in achieving success. Through treatment planning and use of appropriate interventions tailored to the client s cognitive styles and blocks, clients can be helped to use their other cognitive capabilities to overcome the blocks. Ivey et al. (2005) provide a convenient table of common counseling approaches and techniques that helpers can use to match or mismatch clients styles to help promote change. VIEWING CUES: The first excerpt of this interview begins with the senior author asking a young father to describe one of his Early Recollections based upon his completing an Adlerian life style assessment form. Prior to this sequence, the dialogue had been associated with the life style information and an open ended question about any concerns for which he might wish to seek resolution. He stated that nothing was pressing except finding balance in his life for family, school responsibilities, and related work. There is stress associated with his responsibilities but ostensibly these would be similar to any graduate student with a young family. As the viewers will note, however, this father has a unique challenge and an early recollection holds the rule that guides his present behavior. The young man easily shares his recollection and its sensorimotor components. As a four year old, he witnesses his dog, Pepper, running after a taxi cab and subsequently dying after being run over. His association of the feelings embedded in his body leads to another life threatening event but this time with his infant son. In very concrete, vivid terms, he describes this event and his responses to it. When asked what they had in common, again he was able to see the association between them although it had never occurred to him before. His rule is that he must be ever vigilant, ready as at the beginning of a race, to literally take emergency action to prevent another tragedy. While the price for such vigilance is readily acknowledged, when asked how this affects others in his life, he simply says words to the effect that right now, this is about me and I can t imagine how it affects my family. With an obviously bright and educationally advanced client, next steps in self and other exploration will follow. While he had been aware of the strain that vigilance required, he never had the benefit of uncovering the underlying expectation and rule by which he was attempting to live. With this discovery, he is better able to deconstruct this rule and construct another more suitable to his family and himself. Any number of family systems homework assignments could be used to help provide other perspectives for him to consider in how to be a responsible father without the same level of stress his current outlook holds.
STUDY QUESTIONS: 1. What are the four DCT cognitive-emotional styles and how do they differ in the way we process life events? For example, how might persons who are sensorimotor describe a sporting event when their team won and defeated an arch rival compared to someone who is formal operational in responding as an interested observer? 2. How does an early recollection differ from recall of early life experiences? 3. What do Early Recollections and DCT assessment client images have in common? 4. Why do the authors encourage the use of positive ERs for those with less experience in the processes of ERs and DCT assessment? SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES: 1. Invite students to share a positive early recollection in small groups using the DCT assessment and have them process the possible rules or meaning associated with them in relation to their preferred way of relating to self, others, and life (e.g., ER relates to enjoyment in watching brother playing with his friends, possible self-talk, I like observing others have a good time or I feel content watching others and don t have to be involved in order to feel good and enjoy myself. Such reflections may be only partially accurate but the ones sharing the ERs can help add or modify the groups tentative reflections to make them fit as an interactive discovery process. The group may ask if there are specific times recently when this self-talk seemed to be in operation for the member sharing the ER. 2. For more advanced students/practitioners, invite them to identify a current relationship, work, or family issue for which they are seeking resolution, to focus upon it briefly and then to free associate to their childhood years and to identify one or more early life recollections (8 years or younger) and to share two or more of these with their small group, and then to select one for the DCT assessment. One student or the instructor should conduct the assessment by using the same methods as found in the video demonstration. The client will likely identify another sensorimotor event with implications for the presenting issue in the second step of the process (concrete operational). Upon exploring what these two events have in common, the rule for dealing with such life issues should become apparent. Please note, however, if the volunteer client has a block at either the sensorimotor or concrete operational styles (i.e., has difficulty with emotional responsiveness or being able to relate the events in a linear, specific manner) this is in itself a diagnostic indication of why the individual is finding the circumstances
difficult to resolve. Familiarity with gestalt or cognitive-behavior methods, for example, would offer possibilities for helping individuals to become unstuck when dealing with such issues. RECOMMENDED READINGS: Clark, A.J. (2002). Early Recollections: Theory and practice in counseling and psychotherapy. New York: Brunner-Routledge. Ivey, A., Ivey, M, Myers, J. & Sweeney, T. (2005). Developmental counseling and therapy: Wellness over the life span. NY: Houghton/Lahaska Press. Sweeney, T.J. (1998). Adlerian counseling: A Practitioner s Approach. Philadelphia, PA: Accelerated Development, Inc. Taylor & Francis.