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Pediatric Oncology
Published in Pat Price, Karol Sikora, Treatment of Cancer, 2020
Stephen Lowis, Rachel Cox, John Moppett, Helen Rees
Talking to the child with cancer is difficult for parents, and they look to the team for guidance. The approach depends on the child’s chronological age, developmental age, and their past experiences. Children may be unable to express their feelings in words, so need to explore other means of communication, e.g. art therapy, music therapy, and play therapy. Prior to 1970 most of those dealing with childhood cancer believed that unless a child was older than 10 years, they were incapable of understanding death and therefore did not experience anxiety about it. It is clear now that even pre-school age children have a concept of the seriousness of their illness. Those children who had not had the opportunity to express their feelings may demonstrate a psychological distance from those around them, leaving them isolated. Play therapists and child psychologists are important members of the wider multi-disciplinary team for every pediatric oncology department.
How we communicate is a choice we make
Published in Amar Rughani, Joanna Bircher, The Leadership Hike, 2020
As leaders we need empathy skills to be able to ‘read’ a given situation/interaction and to make more effective choices regarding what to say or do in response. We also need enough psychological distance so that we are able to be more objective in decisions and actions that are likely to affect some people more deeply and personally than others. Our ability to be empathic can be clouded by other influences, as well as factors related to our current personal circumstances and mental well-being.
Interrelated Multidimensional Diagnoses
Published in Michael R. Bütz, Parental Alienation and Factitious Disorder by Proxy Beyond DSM-5: Interrelated Multidimensional Diagnoses, 2020
The main point here is that professionals, practitioners, and researchers may feel an unconscious pull. They may feel drawn into the family dynamic to join part of the family’s triangle, or they simply may well feel overwhelmed and disoriented in the face of such cases. That is the big idea here, and why the psychoanalytic literature developed the term splitting and the family therapy literature developed the term triangulation! If one does not know how to describe what they are feeling, then naturally, no matter how good the professional, practitioner, or researcher is, they will not know how to respond, no less realize that such experiences are expected in working with these cases. Both literatures point to maintaining one’s scientific psychological distance and to addressing these dynamics with certain levels of interventions too detailed and too numerous to go into here. But let us just say that the powerful effects of these dynamics were such that the literature in Psychoanalysis is replete with instructions to therapists about maintaining professional boundaries and neutrality in the face of such dynamics (Drozek, 2019; Kwawer, 2019; Siegel, 2019). In the Family Therapy literature some woefully maladaptive cases were so powerful, their capacity to pull others into their dynamic called for one therapist to sit in the room with the family while others observed through a one-way mirror, attempting to comprehend the dynamic at work and generate interventions (Selvini-Palazzoli et al., 1978).
Perceptions of disordered eating and associated help seeking in young women
Published in Eating Disorders, 2018
Annamaria J. McAndrew, Rosanne Menna
In addition to differences in perceptions of the character’s behaviors, the identity of the character in the vignette also impacted the associations between perceptions of severity of the character’s issue, her ability to cope, and the need for her to seek help. Specifically, the findings indicated that women who perceived the character’s problem as being more severe more strongly believed that she should seek help, and women who believed the character could cope with her problem alone less strongly believed that she should seek help. Furthermore, these associations were stronger for individuals who read the vignette about the themselves—a novel contribution to the literature. Although these findings require further investigation, at present they may be (at least partly) a function of the differing levels of psychological distance (and associated thought processes) that are associated with perceiving the behaviors of oneself versus those of another person (e.g., Danziger, Montal, & Barkan, 2012; Trope & Liberman, 2010).
Pilot Test of an Acceptance-Based Behavioral Intervention to Promote Physical Activity During Weight Loss Maintenance
Published in Behavioral Medicine, 2018
Meghan L. Butryn, Stephanie Kerrigan, Danielle Arigo, Greer Raggio, Evan M. Forman
Participants also learned to gain psychological distance from internal experiences, including thoughts (i.e., “cognitive defusion”). Participants were taught to relate to their thoughts, feelings, sensations, and urges as transient cues that do not have to inflexibly dictate their behavior. To illustrate, group leaders asked participants to imagine that they felt such a lack of energy that they could not pick up a pen, which was sitting on the table in front of them. As participants imagined this, they were asked to simultaneously pick up the pen and say out loud, “I have no energy to pick up this pen, I can't pick up the pen.” Participants were able to have the internal experience of “not being able to” pick up the pen and doing so anyway, showing that having a thought did not impact their ability to act against that thought. Throughout the treatment program, participants were encouraged to integrate defusion, willingness, and flexible action skills to support healthy behavior change.
Overcoming Resistance in Clinical and Forensic Interviews
Published in International Journal of Forensic Mental Health, 2018
Katz, Byrne and Kent (2016) argue that if the “situation is occurring at a closer distance and you are thinking about it very specifically, you are likely to perceive a greater threat to freedom than if the situation is occurring in the future or you are thinking about it abstractly” (p. 2). This demonstrates the importance of increasing the psychological distance of the request. If possible, the receiver should view the message more abstractly. This is in line with Wicklund (1974) who noted that increasing distance implies that the implications of one’s actions are diminished. The message is less likely to arouse reactance. For the same reasons it is often wise to begin interviews with “there and then” questions, and later move to questions of “here and now.”