Operationalizing the gift of love (GOL) in Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy (IRT): An examination of the role of meaning reconstruction in therapeutic change.

Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy (IRT) (Benjamin, 2003/2006) is an integrative, principles-based treatment approach and theory of psychopathology that conceptualizes the motivating factor that underlies personality psychopathology as the gift of love (GOL). That is, copy processes are learned and maintained to achieve psychic proximity to the important people and their internalized representations (IPIRs) that were the original teachers. Relinquishing this gift of love allows a person to re-orient their life towards uncovering and living by their own individually held meanings that will then define how they relate to themselves and their world. Spirituality and religion have historically helped individuals make meaning of and endure some of life’s most trying events (Canada et al., 2016; Hawthorne et al., 2015; Lichtenthal et al., 2010; Johnson & Zitzmann, 2020). Furthermore, Park and Folkman (1997) and others have studied how spirituality can play a large role in a person’s meaning-making processes. The ability to make meaning out of a stressful situation has been shown to promote adaptation and well-being. This study asserts that the process of understanding and learning to let go of the gift of love is inherently a spiritual task. Studies involving IRT have not yet considered explicitly spiritual coping and its connections to the gift of love. This study created a coding system based on existing theory that reliably detects the gift of love as well as spiritual coping in an archived IRT dataset. Results indicated that the presence of spiritual coping, particularly positive spiritual coping, was significantly associated with higher levels of adherence to IRT. In addition, this study revealed that GOL is associated with personal and social spiritual coping and is positively associated with therapeutic change, as measured by GOL stages of change. Keywords: Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy, interpersonal theory, personality disorders, religious coping, spiritual coping, therapeutic chang

“WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?” THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL MOTIVATORS ON ATTITUDES TOWARD STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND INTERPERSONAL FORGIVENESS

The goal of this research is to develop an interpersonal definition of forgiveness. The question asked by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 still remains: where do we go from here? Conflict is ubiquitous and systems for managing direct and structural violence are struggling to address issues like the police brutality experienced by African American populations or women’s lived experience of sexual abuse and harassment. Forgiveness can play a role in many conflicts, what can it do in these cases? From intractable global and political disputes to basic inter and intra-personal conflicts forgiveness and reconciliation projects have meant the difference between outcomes of persistent dysfunction and vulnerability, or resilience. Forgiveness has not been clearly defined, or predicted, and many questions about who forgives and how they forgive remain unanswered. This research examines hypotheses on personality type influencing individuals’ preferences for forgiveness. This research also examines hypotheses on social motivators influencing individuals’ preferences for forgiveness. Statistical analysis of participant responses is done to generate a functioning forgiveness typology with 10 distinct forgiveness types relating to specific preferences in attitudes and behaviors for forgiveness. Analysis identifies strong relationships with personality. Significant relationships between gender, race, religiosity, and conflict management styles are also identified. The results of participant responses and the findings on the relationships between personality and social motivators are applied to the contemporary #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements and their responses to structural violence. This dissertation successfully defines forgiveness in interpersonal terms and presents a forgiveness typology which aids in assessing responses to structural violence

Ways to Mental Health: West and East

What is the psychosocial condition of Western man? What has happened to Apollonian man, characterized by order, harmony and leisure? Why has the ideal or Apollonian man (so well described by Nietzsche and Spengler) given way to Dionysian man ... Faustian man? Whence has gone the Apollonian safeguard, essential to measure, constraint, health and love? How really sick is Western man? Why is he not at peace with himself, his family, his associates, people in other countries who may have political philosophies different from his own ... nay, with God? An inventory of the concrete condition of Western man may perhaps be appreciated by surveying some of the high points in his current psychosocial predicament. Some of the more critical areas in the human condition of Faustian man in the latter half of the twentieth century are briefly explored in the present chapter, prior to a consideration of some salutary ways to mental health ... both West and East

Building Teachers’ emotional competence: A transactional training model

Classrooms are complex entities, where the emotions of students and teachers interact to influence learning, relationships, and students’ social emotional development. Teachers’ understanding of emotional processes within the classroom is critical to effective teaching, promotion of healthy child development, and attaining desired learning outcomes. Further, emotions have powerful consequences for teachers themselves. They affect teachers’ well-being, self-efficacy, and ultimately whether teachers remain in the profession or not. Therefore, teachers need skills to recognize and respond to emotional experiences in the classroom. In the present research project a set of emotional competences relevant to educational practices were developed. These competencies include awareness of one’s own experience, capacity for effective self-regulation, knowledge of emotional transmission, and maintenance of emotional well-being. In addition, there are competencies related to understanding emotions in systemic and relational contexts, utilizing emotions to promote learning, recognizing and responding to emotions in students, and building students’ emotional competence.This research project further offers a conceptual model of training of emotional competencies to preservice teachers by employing a transactional, process-based approach. The transactional aspect of the model emphasizes that emotions emerge as a result of interpersonal transactions in the classroom informed by teachers’ and students’ personal histories and experiences. The process-oriented aspect emphasizes that teachers must develop an understanding of how and why emotions emerge through an increased awareness of self, emotional experiences and expression in self and others, as well as the individual goals that pervade the classroom. The training model provides a rational for each emotional competency, an illustrative example that describes the competency in practice, and means for instilling the competency in pre-service teachers

Presidential Arcs: What Institutional Histories Can Tell Us About The Office

This comparative case study defined and examined the presidential arc at three small, private colleges in the Northeast. The study of an institution\u27s presidential arc is proposed as a more effective means of assessing the success or failure of higher education presidencies than examination of a single presidency in isolation. The presidential arc, a concept introduced in this study, is defined as a comprehensive and integrative examination of: each individual presidency, or, at institutions with a history of short-term presidents who left little impact on, groups of presidencies; the level of success of each presidency, as determined by a definition shared with all correspondents or interviewees; the institutional culture, history, and self-defined saga and environmental factors that significantly impact presidencies or institutional history (i.e., enrollment trends, the national or regional economy, trends in curriculum, shifts in the national higher education culture, etc.). Comparative examination of touchpoints (common or parallel themes or events) in each of three arcs yielded four broad themes with wider implications for success and failure in the higher education presidency: founding president syndrome/evolving role of the academic presidency; institutional saga/insularity of small schools with distinctive cultures; competing cultures in modern higher education; and legitimacy of the presidency and individual presidents. The study concludes with a set of recommendations for institutions to take collective responsibility for the success or failure of their presidencies: redefine our expectations of the presidency; jointly plan for success; understand and use the concept of the presidential arc in searching for new presidents; and change the way we search for presidents. This ETD is available in open access in Ohiolink ETD, http://etd.ohiolink.edu/, Center and AURA http://aura.antioch.edu

Presidential Arcs: What Institutional Histories Can Tell Us About The Office

This comparative case study defined and examined the presidential arc at three small, private colleges in the Northeast. The study of an institution\u27s presidential arc is proposed as a more effective means of assessing the success or failure of higher education presidencies than examination of a single presidency in isolation. The presidential arc, a concept introduced in this study, is defined as a comprehensive and integrative examination of: each individual presidency, or, at institutions with a history of short-term presidents who left little impact on, groups of presidencies; the level of success of each presidency, as determined by a definition shared with all correspondents or interviewees; the institutional culture, history, and self-defined saga and environmental factors that significantly impact presidencies or institutional history (i.e., enrollment trends, the national or regional economy, trends in curriculum, shifts in the national higher education culture, etc.). Comparative examination of touchpoints (common or parallel themes or events) in each of three arcs yielded four broad themes with wider implications for success and failure in the higher education presidency: founding president syndrome/evolving role of the academic presidency; institutional saga/insularity of small schools with distinctive cultures; competing cultures in modern higher education; and legitimacy of the presidency and individual presidents. The study concludes with a set of recommendations for institutions to take collective responsibility for the success or failure of their presidencies: redefine our expectations of the presidency; jointly plan for success; understand and use the concept of the presidential arc in searching for new presidents; and change the way we search for presidents. This ETD is available in open access in Ohiolink ETD, http://etd.ohiolink.edu/, Center and AURA http://aura.antioch.edu

Minds Online: The Interface between Web Science, Cognitive Science, and the Philosophy of Mind

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent–world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind

Dreaming myself: combining dreams, autobiographical writing and psychotherapy in addressing narrative fracture

This study springs from my experience of what I term ‘narrative fracture’, a life-hiatus or crisis that derails one’s current life pattern and self-identity. It examines the nature of this phenomenon and its possible roots in early infancy and childhood. Three therapeutic modalities: dreams, psychotherapy and autobiographical writing, which were instrumental towards resolution of that narrative fracture for me, are then explored. The study uses first person heuristic methodology because my own experience, and ongoing process towards resolution, lies at the heart of the research. It also, as part of that methodology, draws on the experience of three ‘textual co-researchers’ as recorded in their autobiographical writings. Each of the segments of the study, narrative fracture, roots of narrative fracture, and modalities towards resolution, are interrogated from three directions: my autobiographical narrative relating to that segment, and extracts from the other authors’ texts of theirs, then examination of these in light of the relevant theory, and finally a reflexive review made of the findings, following thus a pattern, identified by Michelle Davies, of a narrative ‘voice’, an interpretive ‘voice’ and an unconscious ‘voice’. Most traumatic for me at narrative fracture was loss of self-identity and erupting internal chaos. Psychoanalyst/interpersonal theorist Karen Horney’s theories around the formation of a ‘false self’ and the related palliative measures of addiction and controlling are my foremost source of understanding here. To discover how self-identity is formed and can potentially be impeded, the mother-baby relationship, the issue of attachment, and the crucial involvement of the body in the infant developmental matrix are explored, principally through the works of Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby; and the related development of ‘affect-regulation’ and ‘mentalization’ through Peter Fonagy’s breakthrough work. Ulric Neisser and Jerome Bruner’s theories bring further understanding of development of the self and the socially constructed elements of self-identity. In the process towards ‘reconstruction’ Donald Kalsched’s theory of the crucial necessity of ‘re-traumatization’ is foregrounded, and the study holds this in mind during exploration of the three therapeutic modalities. Neuroscience and brain research also inform this exploration, and a common denominator is found between the three therapeutic modalities via Ernest Hartmann’s notion of a ‘continuum’ of modes of mental functioning. It is established that the REM programming and reprogramming state, and input from unconscious mental processing are increasingly at work as we operate at the ‘creative’/’dreaming’ end of this continuum, and that here psychotherapy, autobiographical writing and dreaming are all shown to be located. Four key points emerge in understanding the impact of these three modalities on healing narrative fracture: the centrality of the relational; the emotions as ‘linchpin’; the power of pattern, metaphor and image; and the potency of the sleeping brain. With its personal accounts, and the new syntheses made between aspects of the different academic fields it mines, this study offers a new perspective on the nature, and lifelong consequences, of early childhood development. It is envisaged that this will provide valuable insight to the burgeoning numbers of quantitative researchers now recognising the need for first person input to their third person research, and to those who are professionally involved in the care of others, as well as to related policy-makers

Top leaders’ experiences of learning

This qualitative grounded theory study explores how ten top leaders experienced their learning, whether there were any commonalities in their learning and how that learning could be applied to leadership development and coaching. Four military generals, three corporate chief executives and three academic leaders were interviewed on learning experiences that they judged as being influential. These interviews were transcribed and analysed according to social constructivist grounded theory through a process of initial, focused and clustered coding followed by individual theme development and common theme construction. A tentative theory emerged from the data. At each stage findings were referred back to the ten research participants for their validation. Finally a ‘reflective conversation’ was held with each leader, during which they were asked to rate the level of their identification with 11 characteristics and tools that were identified from the common themes. The results showed considerable common identification and use across the entire sample. Findings indicate that, very early in their lives, these top leaders developed a navigational stance based on their exploration of early relationships (Bowlby, 1988), which assumes a ‘partnering’ relationship with their world. This navigational stance is strengthened by the consistent and compound application of a navigation template consisting of 11 identified tools and characteristics. These are: navigation (finding a way through), pragmatism (doing the best possible), three-way challenges, socialised decision-making, no attachment to failure (but to holding accountable), an acute sense of reality (no wishful thinking), holism (seeing linkages within and between contexts), alertness to constituents, a sense of direction (with no dogma), use of mentors and the use of the tools as a composite template. Three innovative insights emerge: a) that the individuals in this research who go on to be successful organisational heads, experience their relationship with their world as a manageable partnership at an early age, b) that because this partnership relationship is perceived to be effective, they reinforce and refine it by the consistent application of a navigation template, and c) that the consistent application of the navigation template may cause these leaders to be in default transformative learning mode. The developing theory and model is articulated and applied to leadership coaching