Report on use of PCT/MOL Treatment Plan Form

David.Goldstein (2009.07.10.10:55)

I used the form last night. It helped me to keep track of topics during a session. At the end of a session, I will identify the topic that seemed to be the one the person spent the most time on. I would ask the person about how he/she feels about the topic now. Then I would check off the appropriate box next to the topic that indicates progress.

Some revising needs to be done to give more room to write the topic.

I agree with Tim's comments about Bill's process/prediction summary of MOL. It is not as clean as appears from the desciption.

David

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.10.1026 MDT)]

David.Goldstein (2009.07.10.10:55)

I agree with Tim's comments about Bill's process/prediction summary of MOL. It is not as clean as appears from the desciption.

Consider the description to be the reference condition at the program level.
As the guide accumulates experience, departures from the reference pattern will get smaller, but as in any control task, the guide will always have to vary what is done to counteract disturbances (including his own unavoidable departures from the pattern).

If there are consistent departures from the reference pattern, that might indicate that the whole process needs tweaking, or even that the theory needs some revisions. Or it could simply indicate a need for more practice by the guide.

Having made plenty of mistakes myself, I can say with some confidence that they aren't fatal. It's terribly easy to get involved with the content of what the explorer is talking about and lose sight of the basic MOL patterns. But it's not hard to get back on track once you notice what you're doing. One reason I wrote that outline of the processes and predicted behaviors was as an aid to staying close to the basic MOL pattern, a reminder of what's supposed to be going on. You can expect to find yourself straying from it now and then.

But the other reason for writing the outline was simply to point out the predictions that we would make from the basic model of therapy, for comparison with what actually happens in MOL sessions. If actual sessions didn't resemble the reference pattern rather closely, we would have to ask whether the method needed to be altered (assuming we can verify that the guide played his part correctly).

The procedures to be followed by the guide are constrained by the MOL pattern as described, but what the explorer does is not predetermined; it's the explorer's behavior that is the real test of the theory. Do background thoughts show up as predicted? Can the guide, simply by asking questions, get the explorer to attend more closely to the background thought? Does more material of similar nature then start appearing? And does another level of background thoughts then begin to appear?

Do conflicting aims or perceptions show up and slow or stop the search for background thoughts? Can the guide then bring out both sides (or all sides) of the conflicts? After exploring the conflicts and refining their definitions, does the explorer then appear to resolve them?

And can the progress up the levels of background thoughts then be resumed?

Those are research questions to be answered by going over recordings of actual MOL sessions. If you take notes during the session, these are the topics that should be recorded for future reference. And of course these are subjects the guide needs to keep in mind during any session.

···

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is one possibly helpful observation about getting snared in the content of the explorer's communications. The greatest temptation occurs at the moment when the explorer has described a pressing problem that really needs a solution. Instead of listening to the problem (any more than necessary), the guide can listen to the frame of mind from which the explorer is speaking. Is the explorer worried about the problem? Is the description one that sounds as if it has been given many times before? Does the explorer show any hope of solving the problem? Is the description shaped so as to invite the listener to offer solutions for it? In other words, is the explorer hoping that the guide will fix the problem? Does the explorer want nothing but to solve the problem, or are there hints of a conflict which says that most solutions would be rejected? Are there advantages to having this problem? Is the explorer thinking in terms of how he could change, or is it how someone else should change?

Listening for such things will help the guide see what sorts of background thoughts to ask about, and whether there may be conflicts that need to be addressed. It will be easier for the guide to avoid participating in the problem-solving if these other questions are kept in mind as the guide looks for evidence concerning them in the explorer's words or actions.

It occurred to me (during a conversation with my son) that what I have started doing is thinking of ways to make MOL learnable by almost anyone. Adoption of what DMG (as well as Tim Carey) calls the "MOL attitude" would be of help in almost any human interaction. I think it could have profound effects.

And finally, if you turn every conversation into an MOL session, you may end up with no friends or relatives willing to talk with you.

Best,

Bill P.

[From David Goldstein (2009.07.10.13:49 EDT)]
[About Bill Powers (2009.07.10.1026 MDT)]

I did redo the PCT/MOL Treatment Plan Form including renaming it.

I am attaching what I did. I will do a different sheet for each session.
Each goal can be shown to the patient and talked about. It gives some idea
of what will be happening in therapy. I might elaborate on the goal
descriptions.

David

Treatment Plan2.pdf (138 KB)

···

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Powers" <powers_w@FRONTIER.NET>
To: <CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU>
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2009 1:19 PM
Subject: Re: Report on use of PCT/MOL Treatment Plan Form

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.10.1026 MDT)]

David.Goldstein (2009.07.10.10:55)

I agree with Tim's comments about Bill's process/prediction summary of
MOL. It is not as clean as appears from the desciption.

Consider the description to be the reference condition at the program
level.
As the guide accumulates experience, departures from the reference pattern
will get smaller, but as in any control task, the guide will always have
to vary what is done to counteract disturbances (including his own
unavoidable departures from the pattern).

If there are consistent departures from the reference pattern, that might
indicate that the whole process needs tweaking, or even that the theory
needs some revisions. Or it could simply indicate a need for more practice
by the guide.

Having made plenty of mistakes myself, I can say with some confidence that
they aren't fatal. It's terribly easy to get involved with the content of
what the explorer is talking about and lose sight of the basic MOL
patterns. But it's not hard to get back on track once you notice what
you're doing. One reason I wrote that outline of the processes and
predicted behaviors was as an aid to staying close to the basic MOL
pattern, a reminder of what's supposed to be going on. You can expect to
find yourself straying from it now and then.

But the other reason for writing the outline was simply to point out the
predictions that we would make from the basic model of therapy, for
comparison with what actually happens in MOL sessions. If actual sessions
didn't resemble the reference pattern rather closely, we would have to ask
whether the method needed to be altered (assuming we can verify that the
guide played his part correctly).

The procedures to be followed by the guide are constrained by the MOL
pattern as described, but what the explorer does is not predetermined;
it's the explorer's behavior that is the real test of the theory. Do
background thoughts show up as predicted? Can the guide, simply by asking
questions, get the explorer to attend more closely to the background
thought? Does more material of similar nature then start appearing? And
does another level of background thoughts then begin to appear?

Do conflicting aims or perceptions show up and slow or stop the search for
background thoughts? Can the guide then bring out both sides (or all
sides) of the conflicts? After exploring the conflicts and refining their
definitions, does the explorer then appear to resolve them?

And can the progress up the levels of background thoughts then be resumed?

Those are research questions to be answered by going over recordings of
actual MOL sessions. If you take notes during the session, these are the
topics that should be recorded for future reference. And of course these
are subjects the guide needs to keep in mind during any session.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is one possibly helpful observation about getting snared in the
content of the explorer's communications. The greatest temptation occurs
at the moment when the explorer has described a pressing problem that
really needs a solution. Instead of listening to the problem (any more
than necessary), the guide can listen to the frame of mind from which the
explorer is speaking. Is the explorer worried about the problem? Is the
description one that sounds as if it has been given many times before?
Does the explorer show any hope of solving the problem? Is the description
shaped so as to invite the listener to offer solutions for it? In other
words, is the explorer hoping that the guide will fix the problem? Does
the explorer want nothing but to solve the problem, or are there hints of
a conflict which says that most solutions would be rejected? Are there
advantages to having this problem? Is the explorer thinking in terms of
how he could change, or is it how someone else should change?

Listening for such things will help the guide see what sorts of background
thoughts to ask about, and whether there may be conflicts that need to be
addressed. It will be easier for the guide to avoid participating in the
problem-solving if these other questions are kept in mind as the guide
looks for evidence concerning them in the explorer's words or actions.

It occurred to me (during a conversation with my son) that what I have
started doing is thinking of ways to make MOL learnable by almost anyone.
Adoption of what DMG (as well as Tim Carey) calls the "MOL attitude" would
be of help in almost any human interaction. I think it could have profound
effects.

And finally, if you turn every conversation into an MOL session, you may
end up with no friends or relatives willing to talk with you.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.10.1547 MDT)]

David Goldstein (2009.07.10.13:49 EDT) --

DG: [About Bill Powers (2009.07.10.1026 MDT)]

I did redo the PCT/MOL Treatment Plan Form including renaming it.

I am attaching what I did. I will do a different sheet for each session. Each goal can be shown to the patient and talked about. It gives some idea of what will be happening in therapy. I might elaborate on the goal descriptions.

BP: Looking at the goal statements, I wonder if there's a way to do that that doesn't seem to prescribe behaviors for the explorer to carry out, which wouldn't be consistent with the rest of the MOL approach. How about something like the following, but in your own words?

···

============================================================================
You are the Explorer. Your therapist is the Guide who helps you find your way while you decide where you want to go.

The Guide's Role: to be alert for your comments about subjects that might lead to progress; to direct your attention where important subjects may be discovered; to help your efforts to understand by pointing the way to higher levels of consciousness where you can understand more about yourself. The Guide primarily asks questions, while following the lead of the Explorer.

The Explorer's Role: to observe what the Guide can't see: your own thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and present-time experiences; to describe your own internal world when the Guide asks questions; to look inward to find any answers that are actually there.

============================================================================

I don't know if that's too formal or repetitive. Try your own version.

Best,

Bill P.

Hello all. I am relatively new to the list and have been lurking for a few weeks while I develop more confidence in understanding PCT, HPCT, and the practice of MOL. I am a psychotherapist in private practice in the Chicago area, and I must say that I have found MOL and the the principles of PCT a Godsend - delivering me from a long-standing feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction in my ability to truly help people help themselves using standard psychodynamic/cognitive-behavioral methods I was indoctrinated with in my training and subsequent study.

I want to formally express my gratitude to Bill Powers, all his well-known associates, and the other members of this list, for forging ahead despite the lack of recognition they so much deserve. Keep going! Maybe I’ll be able to help out some day!

Andrew

···

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Bill Powers powers_w@frontier.net wrote:

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.10.1547 MDT)]

David Goldstein (2009.07.10.13:49 EDT) –

DG: [About Bill Powers (2009.07.10.1026 MDT)]

I did redo the PCT/MOL Treatment Plan Form including renaming it.

I am attaching what I did. I will do a different sheet for each session. Each goal can be shown to the patient and talked about. It gives some idea of what will be happening in therapy. I might elaborate on the goal descriptions.

BP: Looking at the goal statements, I wonder if there’s a way to do that that doesn’t seem to prescribe behaviors for the explorer to carry out, which wouldn’t be consistent with the rest of the MOL approach. How about something like the following, but in your own words?

============================================================================

You are the Explorer. Your therapist is the Guide who helps you find your way while you decide where you want to go.

The Guide’s Role: to be alert for your comments about subjects that might lead to progress; to direct your attention where important subjects may be discovered; to help your efforts to understand by pointing the way to higher levels of consciousness where you can understand more about yourself. The Guide primarily asks questions, while following the lead of the Explorer.

The Explorer’s Role: to observe what the Guide can’t see: your own thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and present-time experiences; to describe your own internal world when the Guide asks questions; to look inward to find any answers that are actually there.

============================================================================

I don’t know if that’s too formal or repetitive. Try your own version.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.10.1154 MDT)]

···

At 06:46 PM 7/10/2009 -0500, Andrew Nichols wrote:

Hello all. I am relatively new to the list and have been lurking for a few weeks while I develop more confidence in understanding PCT, HPCT, and the practice of MOL. I am a psychotherapist in private practice in the Chicago area, and I must say that I have found MOL and the the principles of PCT a Godsend - delivering me from a long-standing feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction in my ability to truly help people help themselves using standard psychodynamic/cognitive-behavioral methods I was indoctrinated with in my training and subsequent study.

Well, that was a cheerful item to read tonight! I trust that you know Dick Robertson lives in Glenview. So you have the nucleus of an Interest Group.

Welcome aboard.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Rick Marken (2009.07.11.1110)]

···

Bill Powers (2009.07.10.1547 MDT)

============================================================================

You are the Explorer. Your therapist is the Guide who helps you find your
way while you decide where you want to go.

The Guide's Role: to be alert for your comments about subjects that might
lead to progress; to direct your attention where important subjects may be
discovered; to help your efforts to understand by pointing the way to higher
levels of consciousness where you can understand more about yourself. The
Guide primarily asks questions, while following the lead of the Explorer.

The Explorer's Role: to observe what the Guide can't see: your own thoughts,
feelings, attitudes, and present-time experiences; to describe your own
internal world when the Guide asks questions; to look inward to find any
answers that are actually there.

============================================================================

from the time of my very first experience with MOL (which was probably
back in 1980 or so) I thought it would be helpful to tell the
"Explorer" what MOL was all about before the start of the process. I
found this first experience with MOL, doing it without a clue as to
what was happening, to be very annoying and, therefore, not very
helpful. I think a nice, simple explanation of what will be happening
during a session -- like the one given above-- removes unnecessary
mystery from what is really a very straight-forward procedure that
even a non-clinician like myself can understand, and use.

Best

Rick
--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

[From David Goldstein (2009.07.11.02:22)]

[About Bill Powers (2009.07.11.0853 MDT)]

Bill,

DG: I have been using the latest form with several patients. The goals at the top are not necessary. The form does help to keep track of the topics. At the end of a session, I have been asking the person what was the main issue that was talked about. At the follow-up session, I will have the person self-evaluate the status of the problem and check-mark the appropriate box.

BP: MOL isn't about stress. An athlete doing the 25th mile of a marathon
is under huge stress, but doesn't need therapy. Stress just isn't a
psychological problem; the problem is the inability to cope with
stress. Conflict keeps you from doing the things you need to do to
cope with stress; get rid of the conflict and you can stop worrying
about the effects of stress because you'll simply do whatever can be
done. Stress alone won't harm you psychologically.

DG: Stress is the word I was using because it is the result of chronic error signals. Are you saying that MOL has nothing to do with chronic error signals? Are you saying that the only source of chronic error signals is internal conflict? Hans Selye, the father of the stress concept, showed that severe, chronic stress can result in the break-down of body systems and death. Martin Seligman showed that chronic stress can result in 'learned helplessness' in animals. They stop trying to control their environment and showed signs of 'depression'. Even when given the opportunity to escape from a punishing situation, they didn't take advantage of the opportunity.

DG: I guess you are saying that the only reason a person doesn't reorganize and solve a problem himself/herself is because of internal conflict. I can see that PCT leads you to this conclusion. However, my clinical experience tells me that the failure to adequately control can happen anywhere around the loop and can include overwhelming disturbances. Having a supportive therapist can help a person stick in there and not give up. Taking medication can also provide some temporary relief and also help a person persist in spite of very large error signals. These palliative measures may result in the time needed for the stupid reorganization system to resolve the problem.

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.11.1923 MDT)]

David Goldstein (2009.07.11.02:22) --

BP: (earlier) Stress alone won't harm you psychologically.

DG: Stress is the word I was using because it is the result of chronic error signals. Are you saying that MOL has nothing to do with chronic error signals? Are you saying that the only source of chronic error signals is internal conflict? Hans Selye, the father of the stress concept, showed that severe, chronic stress can result in the break-down of body systems and death. Martin Seligman showed that chronic stress can result in 'learned helplessness' in animals. They stop trying to control their environment and showed signs of 'depression'. Even when given the opportunity to escape from a punishing situation, they didn't take advantage of the opportunity.

BP: Stress is not a word for chronic error signals -- it's a word for disturbances. To stress is "To subject to the action of external forces" according to my dictionary. The external forces would be the stressors, or disturbances. When you apply stress to a person; the result may or may not be a large error signal, depending on how well the person's control systems are working and what their limits of action are.

Selye studied physiological consequences of stress, mostly in animals. Of course when stresses are large, there are large effects in the body, and the resistance of the body to the stressors can be overwhelmed. In that case the body's control systems might break down. This does not mean that there is anything wrong with the organism that could be cured with psychotherapy.

Learned helplessness means that the organism has learned that its efforts to resist stresses do not work. In the experiments that were done, that would have been the correct assessment even if the subject were an intelligent human being. In this situation, the normal result would be large error signals and reorganization. The former way of resisting the disturbance would be reorganized away and new ways would appear. If no new way can be found, the old failed control systems would disappear but no new ones would take their places. Futile efforts to oppose the effects of stresses would cease because they would exhaust the organism and make it even less able to oppose disturbances, even normal ones. "Exhaustion" is the final stage before so-called learned helplessness is observed. At that point the old control systems have been reorganized away and no new ones have replaced them. So of course if an opportunity to escape punishment appears, there is no control system any more that would take advantage of it.

I always thought these experiments were stupid and sadistic, and that the thinking about them was sloppy. PCT explains the phenomenon neatly, don't you think? Do we really have to pay any more attention to Selye's theories?

DG: I guess you are saying that the only reason a person doesn't reorganize and solve a problem himself/herself is because of internal conflict. I can see that PCT leads you to this conclusion. However, my clinical experience tells me that the failure to adequately control can happen anywhere around the loop and can include overwhelming disturbances.

BP: I certainly don't deny that. But failure to control doesn't cause psychological problems in itself; we fail to control things quite often, and quickly learn either not to try controlling those things or to find different ways that work better -- either way, we reorganize.

If the reason for failure to control is an overwhelming disturbance -- meaning that the person's muscles are not strong enough or fast enough to resist it -- no amount of psychotherapy or reorganization will enable the person to overcome the disturbance. However, if the person does have sufficient strenght and quickness but still doesn't overcome the disturbance, we might suspect that there are conflicts that make it impossible for the person even to try to oppose the disturbance. The person wants to act against the disturbance, but for other reasons wants not to act against it. For example, the person might want to batter against the door of the jail cell, but doesn't want to suffer the pain and exhaustion of attempting to open the door (and even if successful, being captured immediately and returned to the cell anyway). So the urge to try the door is cancelled, and the person won't even walk through the door if it swings open by itself. Psychotherapy might help with that problem, although there is still probably nothing psychologically wrong with the person. Resolving that conflict won't change the fact that the jailors have more resources than the person has and still won't allow a successful escape. It would be irrational to go on trying in that case.

DG: Having a supportive therapist can help a person stick in there and not give up.

BP: But that would be exactly the wrong advice in the case of the learned helplessness experiments. Since the situation is such as to prevent success, urging the person to keep trying could simply bring a quick death from exhaustion. Of course the therapist might take steps to remove the irresistable disturbances, and then persuade the person to try again. That would work -- but has the therapist done anything to improve the functioning of the person? Not at all, because until the disturbances are removed, sticking in there and not giving up would be crazy. In those experiments, helplessness is exactly what SHOULD be learned by a properly functioning system.

DG: Taking medication can also provide some temporary relief and also help a person persist in spite of very large error signals. These palliative measures may result in the time needed for the stupid reorganization system to resolve the problem.

BP:I doubt that very much. Drugs act to reduce the feelings that go with large error signals, so the same error might still be occurring, but the person doesn't feel bad about it at the higher levels. This could easily mean that reorganization stops. While the drugs may provide time for reorganization, the fact that they make the person feel better means that they also remove the error signals that drive reorganization. If your priority as a therapist is to make the person feel better, by all means give advice, interpretation, suggestions, homework, and happy pills. But that means you have given up on the person's own ability to reorganize. Whatever has gone wrong, you're not fixing it.

If the problem is of the kind that can't be fixed by reorganizing -- i.e., the learned helplessness scenario -- the drugs can't do anything but help the person feel better about being helpless. And even that, most people can do for themselves.

So look what we're doing. I am arguing from the standpoint of PCT. You are arguing as a defender of conventional psychology. I can't see why you're doing that.

Best,

Bill P.

[From David Goldstein (2009.07.12.04:06 EDT)]
[About Bill Powers (2009.07.11.1923 MDT)]

BP: Stress is not a word for chronic error signals -- it's a word for disturbances. To stress is "To subject to the action of external forces" according to my dictionary. The external forces would be the stressors, or disturbances. When you apply stress to a person; the result may or may not be a large error signal, depending on how well the person's control systems are working and what their limits of action are.

DG: A remark could be a "stressor". For example, a policeman stops you for speeding and gives you a ticket. Is this "an external force?" Or a person's schedule is so packed and full of things to do, that s/he experience stress when something happens to impact the time schedule. Is this an "external force?" Or a person who has had a difficult day at work, comes home and a verbal disagreement happens with a spouse. Is this "an external force?" Or a man who wants his wife to have sex more often or be more expressive during sex? Is this an "external force?". Or my annoying repetition of the phrase "Is this an external force?" The problem may be that we use the word stress both to refer to disturbances and error signals.

DG: I have spent years helping people with "stress management." This involves involves educating them about a number of topics. For example, they are helped to learn when their body is under stress versus relaxed. It may surprise you that many people cannot accurately perceive this. The use of Biofeedback Equipment provides an objective measure to help them learn this. There are many other topics covered involving: breathing techniques, skeletal muscle relaxation, smooth muschle relaxation, using imagination to create peaceful/safe scenes, using imagination to alter how one is paying attention, using discussion to identify the aspects of their life which are not under control.

BP: But failure to control doesn't cause psychological problems in itself.

DG: This is because of the way you define a "psychological problem". The only kind of psychological problem that you recognize are internal conflicts. This is a much more narrow and specific than I am familiar with, as a Psychologist.

BP: "Exhaustion" is the final stage
before so-called learned helplessness is observed.

DG: I thought that "exhaustion" was Selye's term for the final stage of what happens after a long period of stress. At first there is an initial body reaction of "fight or flight", then an adjustment period in which the organism reaches a new stable state, then an exhaustion period in which there is tissue damage and death.

BP: But that would be exactly the wrong advice in the case of the learned helplessness experiments.

DG: I don't agree with this. I have a suicidal patient who has "hung in there" with my encouragement and is still trying to find a way to make her life more meaningful. Should I stop encouraging her to keep on trying to find meaning in her life?

BP: So look what we're doing. I am arguing from the standpoint of PCT. You are arguing as a defender of conventional psychology. I can't see why you're doing that.

DG: I see it a little differently. I see you arguing as a brilliant, genius engineer with a little bit of practical clinical experience and a very impressive knowledge of many subjects from self-education . I am a working Clinical Psychologist who does his best to help people through difficult times with an inadequate toolbox. A Psychiatrist I worked with for a while at the residential center described all of us practioners as "desperate therapists." Hopefully, PCT/MOL will prove itself to be the only tool I will need in the future. Right now, I am trying it out. It is looking good.
.

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.12.0812 MDT)]

David Goldstein (2009.07.12.04:06 EDT)]

DG: A remark could be a "stressor". For example, a policeman stops you for speeding and gives you a ticket. Is this "an external force?"

BP: Yes. The policeman's action is a variable in the environment that affects your controlled variables (your speed of driving in this case) independently of your own ability to affect them.

DG: Or a person's schedule is so packed and full of things to do, that s/he experience stress when something happens to impact the time schedule. Is this an "external force?"

BP: Yes. The person's own reference condition is the planned time schedule, which the person's own actions are aimed at meeting. If something happens like another person being very late for a meeting, that is an external force, not produced by the person's own actions, that alters the perceived schedule and causes an error.

DG: Or a person who has had a difficult day at work, comes home and a verbal disagreement happens with a spouse. Is this "an external force?"

BP: Yes. The person wanted agreement with his spouse (whether he had a good day or a bad day). His spouse disagreed. That perceived disagreement was generated by the spouse's words which were not what he wanted to hear. His part of the argument was determined equally by the change in perception of the relationship and his reference level for the relationship. His communications, presumably, were aimed at getting agreement, while his spouse's were not.

DG: Or a man who wants his wife to have sex more often or be more expressive during sex? Is this an "external force?".

BP: Yes. From the man's point of view, the controlled variable is the degree of pleasure from sex, and it is disturbed when the woman is too passive, or not passive enough (depending on his reference level). From the woman's point of view, the perception may also be the degree of pleasure from sex, with a positive reference level, but the perception may be of a smelly, grunting pig with whom sex is not perceived as pleasurable. Each person's actions are a disturbance -- an external force -- that affects the controlled variable of the other independently of the other's actions.

DG: Or my annoying repetition of the phrase "Is this an external force?" The problem may be that we use the word stress both to refer to disturbances and error signals.

BP: I agree: that is the problem. Now that you've seen it, what comes next?

Your words are an external force that affects my perception of our communications (relative to my reference levels), while mine are the same for your perception of the communications. I did not have any particular reference level for the repetitions themselves, which I perceived as meaning you were making the same point each time. I did perceive, in each case, that the questions were actually denials that the examples were "external forces," so I tried to reply in a way that would show why I classify them that way, in accord with the basic PCT model. I hoped to change your mind about whether they should be thought of as "external forces."

DG: I have spent years helping people with "stress management." This involves educating them about a number of topics. For example, they are helped to learn when their body is under stress versus relaxed.

BP: You are using "stress" in two different ways in these sentences (as you noted above), and indeed within the third sentence alone. You do not teach people, with biofeedback, how to manage the stresses that impinge on them. That would require altering the causes of body's becoming tense, not the tension itwself. What you do is teach them to manage bodily changes that arise when stresses occur -- increases in heart rate, headaches, and so on. In the third sentence, you contrast "when their body is under stress" with "relaxed." But the opposite of "relaxed" is "tense" or "active", states of the body, while "under stress" says that something stressful is happening, unnamed, producing a state of the body, also unnamed, that is not relaxed. You help people manage the effects of stresses, not the stresses themselves. Resolving conflict, may I add, alters the causes of stresses by eliminating internally-generated disturbances of perceptions (that is, each system's action disturbs the controlled variable of another one enough to disable both systems). This kind of cause of stress is far more damaging than most external causes, because the ability to resist the effects is destroyed.

DG: It may surprise you that many people cannot accurately perceive this.

I think I've known that since biofeedback was invented. It did surprise me at first.

The use of Biofeedback Equipment provides an objective measure to help them learn this. There are many other topics covered involving: breathing techniques, skeletal muscle relaxation, smooth muschle relaxation, using imagination to create peaceful/safe scenes, using imagination to alter how one is paying attention, using discussion to identify the aspects of their life which are not under control.

BP: Only the last of these ways of combating the effects of stress does something to the cause of the stress (whether it is external or internal). The others involve learning to do something that controls an unwanted perception of the state of the body. If, for example, the person suffers migraine headaches after a day in the office with an unpleasant boss, you can teach the person to control certain perceptions in a way that makes the migraine less likely to occur, but without affecting the way the boss treats the person -- that is, without altering the stressor or disturbance. This could be useful, or it could just hide the problem and make its recurrence likely.

BP: But failure to control doesn't cause psychological problems in itself.

DG: This is because of the way you define a "psychological problem". The only kind of psychological problem that you recognize are internal conflicts. This is a much more narrow and specific than I am familiar with, as a Psychologist.

BP: Conflict is not a psychological problem; presence of conflict causes and explains psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, jealousy, lack of confidence, and so on down a rather long list of superficial symptoms. That is why resolving conflicts can permanently do away with such psychological problems; remove the cause and the effects go away. Other ways to make the psychological problems go away are to suppress them chemically, oppose them by will power, ignore them, or in general learn (with help from biofeedback or other measures) how to act internally to alter the body's responses without removing the causes.

BP: "Exhaustion" is the final stage before so-called learned helplessness is observed.

DG: I thought that "exhaustion" was Selye's term for the final stage of what happens after a long period of stress. At first there is an initial body reaction of "fight or flight", then an adjustment period in which the organism reaches a new stable state, then an exhaustion period in which there is tissue damage and death.

The third stage is when learned helplessness sets in. In the second stage, the organism is still trying to counteract the disturbance and regain control. When it can no longer sustain the effort it gives up, and that is when it ceases to try to control -- I suspect that the control system that was trying to control is reorganized (because of the continuing large error) to make it stop trying, because trying has a cost, too.

BP: But that would be exactly the wrong advice in the case of the learned helplessness experiments.

DG: I don't agree with this. I have a suicidal patient who has "hung in there" with my encouragement and is still trying to find a way to make her life more meaningful.

That is not a case of learned helplessness, in which it is literally impossible to control something by any means whatsoever. If you are telling her she should continue trying to control something that is impossible for her to control, you are deceiving and deluding her, and perhaps prolonging her suffering. I wouldn't assume that is happening, but it would happen if the situation were like that in the learned helplessness experiments.

Should I stop encouraging her to keep on trying to find meaning in her life?

Only if there is some chance that this might happen, and the cost to her of trying doesn't exceed her potential benefit.

I think, of course, that using the method of levels with her would be more effective than simply encouraging her to keep trying when she clearly has been doing that for some time without success in removing her problem. "Trying" implies conflict, when there's no obvious continuing disturbance. If she has to "try" to get out of her suicidal state, then something else is trying to stay in it. Otherwise, if it is possible, she would just get out of it. If it's impossible to change, making her keep trying is cruel. Why not just give her relief with drugs, if there's no chance of recovery by using psychotherapy?

It's possible that she has a physical condition that feels like grief or despair when it's really something else. Mary had this experience with unexplainable anxiety. It was finally cured -- almost instantly -- with Prilosec! The physiological symptoms of acid reflux were mimicking her previous experiences of actual anxiety.

BP: So look what we're doing. I am arguing from the standpoint of PCT. You are arguing as a defender of conventional psychology. I can't see why you're doing that.

DG: I see it a little differently. ... I am a working Clinical Psychologist who does his best to help people through difficult times with an inadequate toolbox. A Psychiatrist I worked with for a while at the residential center described all of us practioners as "desperate therapists." Hopefully, PCT/MOL will prove itself to be the only tool I will need in the future. Right now, I am trying it out. It is looking good.

BP: I know you are trying it out, and that is good. By arguing with you, I'm trying to show you that the old methods are not as simple and clear-cut as once thought to be, involve some very inadequate reasoning, and quite likely get in the way of the method of levels. But I can't resolve this conflict for you, nor do I know exactly what it is for you. You're the only one who can figure that out. If you did figure it out, the knowledge you gain would be of immense usefulness in communicating our new approach to others who are in the same desperate lifeboat with you. The battle within you is precisely the battle between the old paradigm and the new one, happening right where you can observe it. Your problems with this battle are exactly the problems that hundreds of thousands -- who knows how many? -- of other psychologists would have with PCT and all that grows out of it. There would be many beneficial effects if you were to explore this problem as deeply as you can and find a resolution of it. Each person has to do this because no two problems are exactly alike, but what one has done, others can learn to do in their own way.

Best,

Bill P.

[From David Goldstein (2009.07.12.01:22)]

[About Bill Powers (2009.07.12.0812 MDT)]

BP: Conflict is not a psychological problem; presence of conflict
causes and explains psychological problems such as anxiety,
depression, jealousy, lack of confidence, and so on down a rather
long list of superficial symptoms.

DG: Thanks for clearing this up. Then why would you object, or would you, to a treatment goal such as: John Smith will work on reducing his anxiety? This goal doesn't explain how this is done, only what the desired result would be, namely that he would experience a reduced anxiety state.

DG: use of the word stress. OK, we agree that sometimes the word is used to refer to disturbance variables and sometimes to error signals.

DG: I found this interesting description of Selye's work on stress: http://www.icnr.com/articles/thenatureofstress.html

In any rewrite of the Introduction to Modern Psychology Textbook, a discussion of the PCT view of stress should be included.

BP: I did perceive, in each case, that the questions were actually denials that
the examples were "external forces," so I tried to reply in a way
that would show why I classify them that way, in accord with the
basic PCT model. I hoped to change your mind about whether they
should be thought of as "external forces."

DG: I am glad that you put "external forces" in quotes because technically, they are not forces in a physics sense, are they? One person's "external force" might not be an "external force" for another person.

BP: (re.: the suicidal woman I mentioned) I think, of course, that using the method of levels with her would be more effective than simply encouraging her to keep trying when she
clearly has been doing that for some time without success in
removing her problem. "Trying" implies conflict, when there's no
obvious continuing disturbance. If she has to "try" to get out of her
suicidal state, then something else is trying to stay in it.
Otherwise, if it is possible, she would just get out of it. If it's
impossible to change, making her keep trying is cruel. Why not just
give her relief with drugs, if there's no chance of recovery by using
psychotherapy?

It's possible that she has a physical condition that feels like grief
or despair when it's really something else. Mary had this experience
with unexplainable anxiety. It was finally cured -- almost instantly
-- with Prilosec! The physiological symptoms of acid reflux were
mimicking her previous experiences of actual anxiety.

DG: She is taking lots of medication for anxiety, depression, sleepiness, pain which is prescribed by a Psychiatrist and a pain specialist. She has been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Hepatitis C. She is not a particularly good psychotherapy candidate, but I keep on making the effort. She does trust me and has made a verbal commitment not to attempt suicide again. She has been in and out of work on disability leave.

BP: I know you are trying it out, and that is good. By arguing with
you, I'm trying to show you that the old methods are not as simple
and clear-cut as once thought to be, involve some very inadequate
reasoning, and quite likely get in the way of the method of levels.
But I can't resolve this conflict for you, nor do I know exactly what
it is for you. You're the only one who can figure that out. If you
did figure it out, the knowledge you gain would be of immense
usefulness in communicating our new approach to others who are in the
same desperate lifeboat with you. The battle within you is precisely
the battle between the old paradigm and the new one, happening right
where you can observe it. Your problems with this battle are exactly
the problems that hundreds of thousands -- who knows how many? -- of
other psychologists would have with PCT and all that grows out of it.
There would be many beneficial effects if you were to explore this
problem as deeply as you can and find a resolution of it. Each person
has to do this because no two problems are exactly alike, but what
one has done, others can learn to do in their own way.

DG: I will self-explore and if I figure it out, will let you know. Warren Mansell's article entitled: "Perceptual Control Theory as an integrative framework and Method of Levels as a cognitive therapy: what are the pros and cons" does some exploration in a very nice way. I would recommend it to list mates.

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.12.1438 MDT) --

David Goldstein (2009.07.12.01:22)]

[About Bill Powers (2009.07.12.0812 MDT)]

BP: Conflict is not a psychological problem; presence of conflict
causes and explains psychological problems such as anxiety,
depression, jealousy, lack of confidence, and so on down a rather
long list of superficial symptoms.

DG: Thanks for clearing this up. Then why would you object, or would you, to a treatment goal such as: John Smith will work on reducing his anxiety? This goal doesn't explain how this is done, only what the desired result would be, namely that he would experience a reduced anxiety state.

Look at it this way: "John will work on reducing his weight." Is there anything he can do directly to affect his weight? Of course: he could cut off parts of his body; then he would weigh less. But is that a cure for whatever is causing his obesity? Similarly for anxiety: you can give the person a drug that makes the sensations of anxiety disappear, but is that a way to keep anxiety from returning when the drug is stopped? The anxiety is not causing the anxiety; something else is.

If a person is anxious, I would agree that the ultimate goal is for the (chronic) anxiety to go away. But I would add, " ... and not come back when a similar situation occurs." For that result to occur, we would have to find out why the person's reaction to the situation is to feel anxious instead of just doing something about whatever the problem is. I would word the treatment goal not as reducing the anxiety, but as discovering and fixing whatever is causing the anxiety -- and possibly causing other problems as well.

That's actually a little harder to do, because it's subtler and indirect. My present idea is that conflict is the problem: opposing goals that can't be reached simultaneously, at least not the way the person is trying to reach them. We almost have to forget that anxiety is involved rather than, say, anger or depression, and focus on discovering the core conflict. The anxiety arises from the goals of escaping or warding off some danger, yet being unable to take action because the action would cause some equally undesirable error of some other kind. But that merely says that anxiety has something to do with escaping danger (yet not wanting to act to avoid it), while in other cases we would find that anger has something to do with attacking (but attacking is forbidden because of other goals) and depression has something to do with avoiding failure in everything (which conflicts with wanting to act so as to succeed). The nature of the symptom indicates the sort of situation in which the feelings arise, but the cause of the problem is, in each case, a conflict about something in the situation that prevents action from working, or even from starting. I think this happens because of reorganizing the wrong thing, at the wrong level, so the cause of the conflict is not removed.

DG: use of the word stress. OK, we agree that sometimes the word is used to refer to disturbance variables and sometimes to error signals.

DG: I found this interesting description of Selye's work on stress: http://www.icnr.com/articles/thenatureofstress.html

That is a very confused article. Stress is neither the cause of something (the stressor) nor an effect of it (the rise in adrenal concentration). Whatever you think it is, it is something else. It's as if the author doesn't want it to be something ordinary and understandable, or pin it down to a clear explanation. PCT gives us ways to understand it in terms of disturbances, goals, perceptions, error signals, and conflicting control systems, in which cause and effect are clearly separated and nothing magical or mysterious is happening. He clearly reveres Selye; it looks as if he is trying to make his own kind of sense of Selye's notion of stress because he couldn't quite make sense of what Selye said.

BP: I did perceive, in each case, that the questions were actually denials that the examples were "external forces," so I tried to reply in a way
that would show why I classify them that way, in accord with the
basic PCT model. I hoped to change your mind about whether they
should be thought of as "external forces."

DG: I am glad that you put "external forces" in quotes because technically, they are not forces in a physics sense, are they? One person's "external force" might not be an "external force" for another person.

I was using "forces" to be a general term like "influences," not a technical term in physics.

BP: (earlier, re.: the suicidal woman I mentioned) I think, of course, that using the method of levels with her would be more effective than simply encouraging her to keep trying when she clearly has been doing that for some time without success in removing her problem. "Trying" implies conflict, when there's no obvious continuing disturbance. If she has to "try" to get out of her suicidal state, then something else is trying to stay in it.
Otherwise, if it is possible, she would just get out of it. If it's
impossible to change, making her keep trying is cruel. Why not just
give her relief with drugs, if there's no chance of recovery by using
psychotherapy?

It's possible that she has a physical condition that feels like grief
or despair when it's really something else. Mary had this experience
with unexplainable anxiety. It was finally cured -- almost instantly
-- with Prilosec! The physiological symptoms of acid reflux were
mimicking her previous experiences of actual anxiety.

DG: She is taking lots of medication for anxiety, depression, sleepiness, pain which is prescribed by a Psychiatrist and a pain specialist. She has been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Hepatitis C. She is not a particularly good psychotherapy candidate, but I keep on making the effort. She does trust me and has made a verbal commitment not to attempt suicide again. She has been in and out of work on disability leave.

I don't envy you as you work with such a heartbreaking case, nor would I get self-righteous about anything you try as a way of helping her. Sometimes theory just has to take a back seat.

First, do no harm, it says here. Can you do MOL with her without interfering with other things that are helping her? Perhaps just as an interesting exercise? For suicide to come up, there must be some pretty serious conflicts between wanting to live and wanting not to live. Do you think you could allow her to resolve that kind of conflict in the way you would hope not to see? I'm not sure I could, even though my gut feeling is that her choice belongs to her. I'm getting more vulnerable to the sadness in life; I probably couldn't do it.

Best,

Bill P.

[From David Goldstein (2009.07.12.20:23)]

[About Bill Powers (2009.07.12.1438 MDT)

BP: I would word the treatment goal not as reducing the
anxiety, but as discovering and fixing whatever is causing the
anxiety -- and possibly causing other problems as well.

DG: OK. John Smith will work on reducing his anxiety, and work on
understanding the reasons for it.

BP: That is a very confused article. Stress is neither the cause of
something (the stressor) nor an effect of it (the rise in adrenal
concentration). Whatever you think it is, it is something else. It's
as if the author doesn't want it to be something ordinary and
understandable, or pin it down to a clear explanation. PCT gives us
ways to understand it in terms of disturbances, goals, perceptions,
error signals, and conflicting control systems, in which cause and
effect are clearly separated and nothing magical or mysterious is
happening. He clearly reveres Selye; it looks as if he is trying to
make his own kind of sense of Selye's notion of stress because he
couldn't quite make sense of what Selye said.

DG: I agree. Did you notice the following part of the article-- Thus, the
G.A.S. may be defined as the manifestation of stress in the whole body, as
they develop in time. As we have seen, a fully-developed G.A.S. consists of
three stages: the alarm reaction, the stage of resistance, and the stage of
exhaustion. Yet it is not necessary for all three stages to develop before
we can speak of G.A.S. Only the most severe stress leads rapidly to the
stage of exhaustion and death. Most of the physical or mental exertions,
infections, and other stressors, which act upon us during a limited period,
produce changes corresponding only to the first and second stages: at first
they may upset and alarm us, but then we adapt to them.

DG: My recall that the third stage was exhaustion was correct. Seligman's
concept of learned helplessness is probably part of the stage of resistance.

BP: I was using "forces" to be a general term like "influences," not a
technical term in physics.

DG: OK. You probably don't remember, but in 1989, I wrote an article about
the PCT view of stress in Wayne Hershberger's edited book. You viewed it
before I sent it in and gave you stamp of approval. At that time, your
definition of the concept of stress came closer to the idea of chronic error
signals. I am enclosing a pdf file about that article for you and any other
listmate who is interested. This is why I was confused when you said it was
a disturbance.

BP: I don't envy you as you work with such a heartbreaking case, nor
would I get self-righteous about anything you try as a way of helping
her. Sometimes theory just has to take a back seat.

First, do no harm, it says here. Can you do MOL with her without
interfering with other things that are helping her? Perhaps just as
an interesting exercise? For suicide to come up, there must be some
pretty serious conflicts between wanting to live and wanting not to
live. Do you think you could allow her to resolve that kind of
conflict in the way you would hope not to see? I'm not sure I could,
even though my gut feeling is that her choice belongs to her. I'm
getting more vulnerable to the sadness in life; I probably couldn't do it.

DG: No, I couldn't allow her to kill herself. The only way that I felt
comfortable for her to be outside a hospital was that she promised to keep
herself safe. One day, policemen were sent to her house by supervisors at
work. She had spoken to a supervisor in a way that raised concern. They were
going to take her to a hospital for evaluation and possible commitment.
After they spoke to me, they were willing to let her stay in her home which
is what she wanted. I informed her mother, brother and sister of the need to
monitor her closely and they have.

.

PCT View of Stress.PDF (795 KB)

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.13.0945 MDT)]

David Goldstein (2009.07.12.20:23) –

[About Bill Powers
(2009.07.12.1438 MDT)

BP: I would word the treatment goal not as reducing the

anxiety, but as discovering and fixing whatever is causing the

anxiety – and possibly causing other problems as well.

DG: OK. John Smith will work on reducing his anxiety, and work on
understanding the reasons for it.

BP: These are not separate processes, and “understanding” is
not what causes the change (though it may occur during the change).
Reorganization causes the change, and it must occur at the level where
the anxiety is being caused, not felt. If John Smith focuses on his
anxiety he will be reorganizing at the wrong level. Maybe I can make this
clearer by addressing the article you attached.

DG: OK. You probably don’t
remember, but in 1989, I wrote an article about the PCT view of stress in
Wayne Hershberger’s edited book. You viewed it before I sent it in and
gave you stamp of approval. At that time, your definition of the concept
of stress came closer to the idea of chronic error signals. I am
enclosing a pdf file about that article for you and any other listmate
who is interested. This is why I was confused when you said it was a
disturbance.

BP: As you know, I don’t require perfection of anyone learning to use
PCT, and I have indicated approval of many pieces of writing which showed
less than perfect comprehension of the details. The article you reference
was written 20 years ago. I don’t recall my thinking when I gave approval
of the article, but reading it now, I see that “stress” was
being used to indicate the effect of a disturbance, and I probably just
accepted that usage, not wanting to quibble about what was then a minor
issue. I have commented rather frequently since then on the problem with
the term “disturbance” caused by interpreting it to mean the
effect of the disturbing variable rather than the disturbing variable
itself. The main problem comes from the fact that when a large but not
overwhelming disturbance(1) is applied, it may not cause any significant
disturbance(2) of the controlled variable. Many times I have seen the
initial step of of the Test for the Controlled Variable described as if
it involve causing an observable change in the controlled variable – a
disturbance(2), an effect. But that is not the case. You can apply a
disturbance that is counteracted by the action of a control system so
well that there is no change at all in the controlled variable – that
you can see. If you keep increasing the applied disturbance until there
is a significant observable change in the controlled variable, you are
not allowing a good control system to operate normally – in fact you
will be observing its properties after its control has been nullified by
an overwhelming disturbance.
A stress (meaning 1) can be applied without causing any stress (meaning
2) that you can observe. Twenty years ago, when the CSG was four years
old, I probably figured that saying this would just create confusion.
Only an engineer familiar with the original meanings of
“stress” and “strain” would know that stress means
the applied force and strain means the deformation or compression caused
by the stress. In engineering, stress always refers to the cause, with no
exceptions, and strain refers to the effect, with no exceptions. In the
world of psychology, terms can switch from one meaning to another in the
middle of a sentence and nobody even notices. Psychologists have borrowed
a number of technical terms from the physical sciences and engineering,
and use few of them correctly. Consider “negative feedback”, or
“energy.”
In the article, you say
“Power’s model defines feeling/emotion/mood as the relatively
passive
(i.e., relatively uncontrolled) perception of the internal bodily
reactions
which prepare a person for overt action, say for fight or flight.
Since the
activity of both the internal organs (neuroendocrine
system) and the
skeletal musculature (neuromotor system) are driven by the
same higher-
order error signals, the two types of activity are normally
coordinated and
well matched. However, sometimes they are mismatched, and
whenever
they are, we have what is commonly referred to as stress… According
to
control theory, however, psychological stress is merely a reflection of
an
abnormally large error signal at some higher
level in the hierarchy, an
error signal which the neuromuscular system is failing to
erase.”
Now what was I to do with that? You very nicely described my theory of
emotion, and immediately described stress as an effect, which would be
wrong in my usages. But then you described “psychological
stress” as being “merely a reflection of an abnormally large
error signal at some higher level in the hierarchy,” which is
perfectly correct if “stress” means the change caused by some
large disturbance or conflict. If I were to read this now at a beginner’s
request I would probably not quibble, since most readers would accept
this usage of stress, and the error is embedded in an otherwise perfectly
OK description. But how am I to respond now when the article is presented
by a person with 35 years of association with PCT?
The problem is that in this paper from two decades ago, you don’t use
your own knowledge of PCT to analyze older interpretations; instead, you
present them as if they existed in a different universe:
" Control theory suggests that sensitivity
to error may distinguish between these three
groups. The “reactive” person appears to be more
sensitive or reactive to error, and is therefore
more readily stressed. However, the polyactive person, although
perhaps less sensitive or reactive to error, may be the first to be
overwhelmed by stress simply because, in stretching himself
thin, his control is readily undone, sometimes by
the slightest additional disturbance. Also, the
polyactive person appears more susceptible to the type of stress
called 'boredom" where the level of environmental
stimulation is less than the person’s set point or reference level.
(Both understimulation and overstimulation are known to trigger the
adrenal medullary and the adrenal cortical response.) Therefore,
persons seeking clinical assistance for reasons of stress are
as likely to be polyactive as reactive."
My immediate reaction to this sort of thing has always been to go hide
somewhere for fear of saying something that might destroy a relationship.
I’m sure I didn’t say anything about this blah-blah-blah twenty years ago
and I have hesitated to do so even now. In fact, all I can really do is
ask you if you still think this is how to describe a high-gain control
system – to say that a reactive person, because of being highly
sensitive to error, is more likely to have abnormally large error
signals, while a polyactive person who is less sensitive to error is
likely to be overwhelmed by stress (meaning a disturbance). And to speak
of “overstimulation” and “understimulation” is surely
not something you would say now, is it?
OK, imagine a really nasty paragraph here which I have deleted. I will go
on to something else I’ve been avoiding: biofeedback. In your article you
say this:
"In biofeedback therapy (Goldstein, 1978) people are
provided with information about their body that has been
detected by means of electronic sensors. When people
are given this information about their body, they can develop
a degree of voluntary control over their body’s physiological
activity. Various types of information about the body have been
used in biofeedback:

“Since one hallmark of stress is excessive muscular tension,
one
clinical approach to the management of stress involves training
individuals simply to relax.”
Have you ever asked yourself how “excessive muscular tension”
can arise? As one with some training in physics I’m sure you realize that
you can’t have more than momentary excessive muscular tension in just one
muscle, when not supporting a load. If that happened, a joint angle would
start changing, the angular velocity increasing until the limb or other
body part was extended or flexed as far as possible. No, continuing
excessive muscular tension in the absence of a load means that two
or more opposing muscles are contracting at the same time, pulling in
opposite directions in a balanced way so there is no motion. In this
condition, the muscles have less range over which they could be used to
counteract external disturbances because part of their available effort
is being used just to cancel the forces from the opposing muscles. If the
tension is excessive, it can greatly reduce the ability to control the
limbs.
In short, excessive chronic muscular tension is caused by
conflict.

Now, how is that conflict created? That is, where do the signals
activating those muscles come from? You say it yourself: from
higher-level error signals. And where do those error signals come from?
from comparators in the higher-level control systems. And why are the
error signals present? Because the perceptual signals in the higher
systems differ from the corresponding reference signals entering the
comparators. And why does that occur? Because the higher-level systems
are telling the lower-level systems to achieve two contradictory goals at
the same time: they require the lower systems to increase the joint
angle, and the same time, decrease the same joint angle.

You say that you are training people " simply to relax." In
terms of the control systems involved, this can mean only a few different
things.

One is that you are training them to lower the loop gains in the
conflicted control systems, so that with the same error signals they
produce less muscle tension. That will reduce the degree of excessive
muscle tension. Unfortunately, it will do so by decreasing the loop gain
in both of the conflicted systems, which will decrease the ability to
carry out motor control. Injecting curare would have the same effect, but
I presume you would not call that “training a person to
relax.”

Another meaning is that you train them to lower the reference signals in
the two opposing control systems so each system is trying to achieve less
muscle tension. That will leave the loop gain about the same and will
reduce the amount of excessive muscle tension. Unfortunately, this will
also prevent those muscles from being used by other higher-order systems,
since they use these control systems by varying their reference signals.
In fact, any attempt to alter a muscle tension directly by voluntarily
changing the desired degree of tension will constititute a disturbance
for any other higher control systems that are also using those muscles.
You couldn’t voluntary relax the leg muscles and still keep your balance
against a wind or on a tossing deck.

This leads to still another possible meaning. You can voluntarily relax
the excessive tension by setting up a new conflict between the higher
system responsible for setting one of the lower reference signals and
some new control system that cancels the offending system’s action,
leaving the other contributors to the reference signals free to change.
This is known as “will power.” You say “I am NOT going to
get tense when my boss asks me for my report, I am NOT, I am NOT, I am
NOT.” So you force yourself to relax by cancelling out the signals
that create the tension, and as long as you keep that conflict active
you’re OK. Sort of.

Another is that you substitute imagination for actual present-time
perceptions. You think “My boss is smiling at me, nodding, giving me
a raise” or “I’m not in my boss’s waiting room, I’m on a beach
with a pina colada and a beautiful companion who thinks I am
wonderful.” Of course this totally prevents the control system in
the imagination mode from dealing with actual present-time disturbances
or achieving present-time goals relating to the real
environment.

I could keep going, but the conclusion is obvious. The excessive muscle
tension is the result of a conflict, which is the result of adopting
incompatible goals, which is the result of trying to satisfy higher-level
reference conditions in mutually exclusive ways. And the only permanent
cure is to resolve the conflict. Just removing the excessive muscle
tension does not resolve anything. You say in the article that
biofeedback training addresses symptoms. And I say that is its main
flaw.

You say that the article reviews the PCT view of stress. But does it? Or
does it attempt to merge the PCT view and the older ideas you cite to
make them appear compatible with each other? What I see going on in that
article is the latter – it’s an exercize in maintaining two very
different points of view toward certain phenomenon while trying to make
them seem consistent with each other.

But so what? What can I do about this? I guess all I can do is complain
and explain and hope to be heard. As I’ve been doing for – let’s see –
56 years. That’s beginning to feel like a long time.

Best,

Bill P.

[From David Goldstein (2009.07.13.16:50)]

[About Bill Powers (2009.07.13.0945 MDT)]

BP: You say in the article that biofeedback training addresses symptoms. And I say that is its main flaw.

DG: If you read the article carefully, and fairly, you will see that I am also saying this. Notice how I summarize the role of Medication, Biofeedback and Psychotherapy. However, I am not calling it a flaw for the following reason.

As a licensed Psychologist, if a procedure provides some relief for a person, I will use it. I know, from my own use of it and that of other practitioners, that Biofeedback provides some relief for people with all kinds of conditions, including migraine and tension headaches. I received some pain relief from EMG Biofeedback and some emotional relief from SCL Biofeedback after surviving a plane crash in 1974. I was unable to tolerate the Medications that they first gave me. The relaxation I learned to do helped me to tolerate the fear and panic I experienced when I went into an airplane again about a year later.

No doubt the Psychotherapy helped also. I realized that I almost died. I realized that the only control I had was walking or not walking into a plane. After I walked into a plane, I had no control and so there was no point in being hypervigilant or tense.

DG: Having two words, ‘stress’ and ‘strain’ makes things a lot clearer than one word ‘disturbance’. At all but the lowest level, it is more confusing to me. The output of a control system at level N gets turned into reference signals at level N-1. Where do the disturbances come from at all but the lowest level? I guess they are the results of an internal conflict. Two control systems are fighting over a lower level control system and setting conflicting goals? So the outputs of one higher level control system is a disturbance for the outputs of a different higher level control system.

DG: The terms reactive, polyactive and reactive comes from Dr. David Saunders who was a pioneer in something called the Personality Assessment System. How a person performs on three tests (color naming, digit symbol and time estimation) is the basis for the tripartite categories which Dr. Saunders discussed as “styles” of handling stress. I was trying to integrate some of the things I knew with PCT. I guess I must remember the first of William T. Powers 10 commandants: Do not attempt to integrate PCT with any other idea or research result.

BP: In fact, all I can really do is ask you if you still think this is how to describe a high-gain control system – to say that a reactive person, because of being highly sensitive to error, is more likely to have abnormally large error signals, while a polyactive person who is less sensitive to error is likely to be overwhelmed by stress (meaning a disturbance). And to speak of “overstimulation” and “understimulation” is surely not something you would say now, is it?

DG: Your violating the first commandment, are you not?. Who knows and how would anyone ever show it to be true or not true since we can’t measure error signals, perceptual signals or reference signals directly, especially at the higher levels.

BP: You say that the article reviews the PCT view of stress. But does it? Or does it attempt to merge the PCT view and the older ideas you cite to make them appear compatible with each other? What I see going on in that article is the latter – it’s an exercize in maintaining two very different points of view toward certain phenomenon while trying to make them seem consistent with each other.

DG: I get it. Commandment 1!

DG: Right now, I am going to stop and recover from a tooth extraction I had tonight.

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.13.1809 MDT)]

David Goldstein (2009.07.13.16:50)]

DG: If you read the article
carefully, and fairly, you will see that I am also saying this. Notice
how I summarize the role of Medication, Biofeedback and Psychotherapy.
However, I am not calling it a flaw for the following reason.

As a licensed Psychologist, if a procedure provides some relief for a
person, I will use it. I know, from my own use of it and that of other
practitioners, that Biofeedback provides some relief for people with all
kinds of conditions, including migraine and tension headaches.

Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not against providing relief. But to me,
doing something that stops a headache for no known reason is not therapy
– it’s not doing something that will keep headaches from happening
again. I’m just not very interested, as a theorist, in temporary
solutions, especially when we have no explanation for why they work. As a
human being, I’m all for preventing pain and distress. But my ambitions
as a student of human behavior are to find out what is causing pain and
distress again and again, and figure out how to remove the
cause.

I received some pain relief from
EMG Biofeedback and some emotional relief from SCL Biofeedback after
surviving a plane crash in 1974. I was unable to tolerate the Medications
that they first gave me. The relaxation I learned to do helped me to
tolerate the fear and panic I experienced when I went into an airplane
again about a year later.

BP: That’s good, of course, but only temporarily. Look how long it took
you to partially overcome that fear of flying. I can’t know, of course,
but I think that a competent MOL practitioner could have taken you
further through recovery in much less time than the methods you tried. I
don’t know how you remember the telephone sessions in which we did MOL
about that plane crash. It seemed to me that some interesting
things happened, but naturally only you know for sure.

DG: Having two words, ‘stress’
and ‘strain’ makes things a lot clearer than one word
‘disturbance’. At all but the lowest level, it is more confusing to
me. The output of a control system at level N gets turned into reference
signals at level N-1. Where do the disturbances come from at all but the
lowest level?

BP: They come from perceptions of lower order that are not controlled. A
dog chasing a cat is controlling a spatial relationship to the cat. This
requires perceiving the location of the cat and also the dog’s owm
location. The dog has no control over the location of the cat. It can
perceive this higher-order variable, but since it has no way to affect it
the dog can’t control the relationship by moving the cat. It can only
move itself. Therefore the perceived position of the cat is a disturbance
at the relationship level. It affects the controlled variable, the
relationship, independently of the dog’s own actions that affect the same
variable. The dog changes its own location to counteract the effect
of independent changes in the cat’s location on the spatial relationship
the dog is controlling.

It’s generally the case that higher-order perceptions are functions of
many lower-order perceptions. Some of the lower-order perceptions are
under control and can be varied to affect the state of the higher-order
perception. But other perceptions of lower order that are also part of
the higher-order perception are not under control; they vary and affect
the higher-order perception. They are disturbances. That effect can be
countered only by altering the lower-level perceptions that are under
control.

I guess they are the results of
an internal conflict. Two control systems are fighting over a lower level
control system and setting conflicting goals? So the outputs of one
higher level control system is a disturbance for the outputs of a
different higher level control system.

The explanation is much simpler than that.

DG: The terms reactive,
polyactive and reactive comes from Dr. David Saunders who was a pioneer
in something called the Personality Assessment System. How a person
performs on three tests (color naming, digit symbol and time estimation)
is the basis for the tripartite categories which Dr. Saunders discussed
as “styles” of handling stress. I was trying to integrate some of
the things I knew with PCT. I guess I must remember the first of William
T. Powers 10 commandants: Do not attempt to integrate PCT with any other
idea or research result.

I wish you would, especially when you are trying to integrate ideas that
work with all people all of the time with ideas that work with some
people only some of the time. How does Saunders explain the individual
cases in which someone whose color naming, digit symbol, and time
estimation scores indicate one style of handling stress, but actually
proves to handle it in a different style? I think “personality
assessment” is one of those fields where published correlation
coefficients are abysmal. Why even bother with such studies?

The trouble is that most of the “things I knew” you refer to
are simply things you read about or were taught about in the days before
PCT, and accepted because you were young, enjoying yourself, and didn’t
know any better. And it felt good to have a lot of things you knew. But
the move into PCT requires giving up practically everything we thought we
knew before; I spent years, while gradually working out the principles of
PCT, giving up things I thought I knew. Why should you have it any
easier? Just because Saunders invented three styles of coping with stress
is no reason to believe anything he said, especially considering how
often he would predict the style wrongly (I’ll bet).

That Dr. before his name is no guarantee that he did good work any more
than my lack of it means I didn’t.

BP (earlier): In fact, all I can
really do is ask you if you still think this is how to describe a
high-gain control system – to say that a reactive person, because of
being highly sensitive to error, is more likely to have abnormally large
error signals, while a polyactive person who is less sensitive to error
is likely to be overwhelmed by stress (meaning a disturbance). And to
speak of “overstimulation” and “understimulation” is
surely not something you would say now, is it?

DG: Your violating the first
commandment, are you not?. Who knows and how would anyone ever show it to
be true or not true since we can’t measure error signals, perceptual
signals or reference signals directly, especially at the higher
levels.

BP: Any time we can identify a controlled variable we can measure the
loop gain and the ratio of output to deviations of that variable from the
reference level (note that the reference LEVEL is observable, even if the
reference SIGNAL with which we explain the reference LEVEL is
theoretical). You’re sidestepping my question. Isn’t the error smaller in
a control system when the gain is higher? Check it out with the live
Block Diagram in Chapter 3 of LCS3. You’re offering a theory that large
error goes with higher sensitivity to error, which makes that theory
diametrically opposed to control theory. You can’t merge theories that
disagree with each other, and that’s why (and when) the first commandment
is correct. It’s not just a whim on my part.

BP: You say that the article
reviews the PCT view of stress. But does it? Or does it attempt to merge
the PCT view and the older ideas you cite to make them appear compatible
with each other? What I see going on in that article is the latter –
it’s an exercize in maintaining two very different points of view toward
certain phenomenon while trying to make them seem consistent with each
other.

DG: I get it. Commandment 1!

You’re copping out. Commandment 1 rests on 50 years of looking into other
theories of behavior and seeing how incompatible with control theory they
are. I told you what the compatibility problem here is: you propose that
higher sensitivity to error means there will be more error; control
theory says that higher sensitivity to error means there will be less
error. It’s not commandment 1 that says these theories are incompatible,
but the opposite predictions.

DG: Right now, I am going to stop and recover from a tooth extraction I
had tonight.

OW. OK, I forgive you.

Best,

Bill P.

···

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.14.0747 MDT)]

David Goldstein (2009.07.13.16:50) --

DG: If you read the article carefully, and fairly, you will see that I am also saying this.

BP: I didn't address this point. Yes, you are right. I should have included the following quotation which comes after the reference to Saunders:

DG: Biofeedback therapy, from a control-theory viewpoint, focuses upon
the symptoms rather than the causes of stress. The stress response is
viewed as the presumed cause of bodily wear and tear, illness, and
disease, and biofeedback is used to inhibit that response. The error signal
driving the stress response is not itself addressed. In biofeedback therapy
(Goldstein, 1978) people are provided with information about their body
that has been detected by means of electronic sensors. When people are
given this information about their body, they can develop a degree of
voluntary control over their body's physiological activity.

BP: Aside from the concept of "stress response", I agree with all this. What I find interesting is the statement that "The error signal driving the stress response is not itself addressed." This implies that the error signal continues to exist. In later sections you discuss facts that might be seen to follow from the continued existence of the error signal -- cases in which some people are unable to learn physiological control, or in which there is a rebound effect, or in which people do not practice the assignments or "seem unable to make it a part of their life." Then you speak of the literature on who is a good candidate for biofeedback therapy, but never again refer to the continued existence of the error signal that was driving the stress response. You mention a case in which a patient initially suffered nausea and headaches after the first few sessions, which stopped only after the amount of physiological change during a session was reduced -- but you don't link this to the error signal that still remains or the possibility that a conflict was created by the arbitrary change in the physiological state.

When I speak of the failure to address the error signal as a flaw in biofeedback theory, this is what I refer to: it does not remove the cause of the stress response, which you also say. But I seem to see different implications. To me, it seems logical to predict that because the error signal is still present, it will either result in relearning the same stress responses or learning new ones. The stress responses, I would assume, are associated with attempts to correct the error (they are not just "responses" if PCT is correct -- that is a term from stimulus-response theory). It seems clear to me that leaving the error signal still present is going to generate conflicts, since you have trained the person to change the actions that were formerly part of an attempt to reduce the error, which will increase the error in the system that's generating the error signal that still remains.

Because the stress responses are being suppressed voluntarily, you can legitimately say that biofeedback has had its intended effect; it has reduced the symptoms. But if it has caused errors at higher levels to be prolonged or to increase, is this a net gain for the client?

You, of course, can say that this is a flaw in PCT, that it seems to predict outcomes that you don't observe. You do note the sorts of outcomes that would be predicted, but without saying what fraction of a randomly-selected population would be involved. However, I can point out that you can't observe an effect if you're not looking for it. A patient can have an increase in other problems without your noticing the relationship to suppressing the physiological symptoms. If you keep the psychological problems separated from the physiological ones, in your mind, the connection that PCT would suggest will not be discovered.

Can you think of any reasons why you might not be looking for effects of biofeedback that can make a patient's life worse?

Your previous reply went on like this:

Notice how I summarize the role of Medication, Biofeedback and Psychotherapy. However, I am not calling it a flaw for the following reason.

As a licensed Psychologist, if a procedure provides some relief for a person, I will use it. I know, from my own use of it and that of other practitioners, that Biofeedback provides some relief for people with all kinds of conditions, including migraine and tension headaches.

Is the reference to "licensed Psychologist" (with capital P) significant here? Does connecting what you know to reports from "other practitioners" imply something about psychology as a profession? These look to me like links to background thoughts that might be pertinent. Are they?

Best,

Bill P.

[From David Goldstein (2009.07.14.18:21 EDT]
[About Bill Powers (2009.07.14.0747 MDT)]

DG: Thanks for giving the article a second look.

BP: Can you think of any reasons why you might not be looking for effects
of biofeedback that can make a patient's life worse?

DG: The topic of possible negative side effects of Biofeedback has been raised by practioners.
While I can't refer to you to a definative study right now, the consensus among practioners is that they are not
seeing such effects. And if they do occur, they are short-term.

BP: Is the reference to "licensed Psychologist" (with capital P)
significant here? Does connecting what you know to reports from
"other practitioners" imply something about psychology as a
profession? These look to me like links to background thoughts that
might be pertinent. Are they?

DG: Yes. Licensed Psychologists are subject to regulation by a State Board. There is a requirement
to adhere to a Code of Ethics, which spells out principles very specifically. A violation of the Code can result
in public censure, suspension of license, fines and jail time.

There is culturally transmitted "clinical lore" which represents the opinion of practioners about what works, what
doesn't, with whom, about what kinds of problems. Professional meetings, workshops, journal articles, books, and peer
discussions are some of the ways this takes place. A Licensed Psychologist who uses a procedure, therapy, test,
or piece of equipment which does not have some accepted way of showing that it is non-experimental may not
get paid by the insurance company and may be subject to the actions of the State Board. If a case goes to court,
the Psychologist may be on shaky ground if the Code of Ethics was violated. This would be malpractice.

When I was doing the MOL Psychotherapy Research, I was careful to follow the procedures that one does when
doing research.

[From Bill Powers (2009.07.14.1729 MDT)]

David Goldstein (2009.07.14.18:21 EDT --

DG: The topic of possible negative side effects of Biofeedback has been raised by practioners. While I can't refer to you to a definative study right now, the consensus among practioners is that they are not seeing such effects. And if they do occur, they are short-term.

BP: I should think that biofeedback practitioners would have to recuse themselves from any such study, since there would be a conflict of interest. Have any nonpractitioners asked such questions?

BP (earlier): Is the reference to "licensed Psychologist" (with capital P)
significant here? Does connecting what you know to reports from
"other practitioners" imply something about psychology as a
profession? These look to me like links to background thoughts that
might be pertinent. Are they?

DG: Yes. Licensed Psychologists are subject to regulation by a State Board. There is a requirement to adhere to a Code of Ethics, which spells out principles very specifically. A violation of the Code can result in public censure, suspension of license, fines and jail time.

There is culturally transmitted "clinical lore" which represents the opinion of practioners about what works, what doesn't, with whom, about what kinds of problems. Professional meetings, workshops, journal articles, books, and peer
discussions are some of the ways this takes place. A Licensed Psychologist who uses a procedure, therapy, test, or piece of equipment which does not have some accepted way of showing that it is non-experimental may not
get paid by the insurance company and may be subject to the actions of the State Board. If a case goes to court, the Psychologist may be on shaky ground if the Code of Ethics was violated. This would be malpractice.

When I was doing the MOL Psychotherapy Research, I was careful to follow the procedures that one does when doing research.

BP: Whew! That does make it tough to use the MOL in regular practice -- or anything not endorsed by the mainstream practitioners. So you're saying that when you decide to use MOL with a patient, you have to get approval from somebody to use an "experimental method", go through the informed consent business (I remember your doing that with some patients) -- and not get paid if insurance is the payer? It looks as if the deck is stacked against you -- those who want to reject anything new and protect their own positions can do it with laughable ease. Is this true in all 50 states? I know that in Colorado, you can do all sorts of therapy if you just advertise as an "unlicensed psythotherapist." There's even a grievance board with three members selected from the general population and four unlicensed therapists.

What would you recommend as a way of getting MOL on the list of approved methods? For example, if it were recognized by practitioners as a variant of CBT, would it come under their umbrella? We obviously couldn't win a fight with such entrenched and politically connected interests. If we can't fight 'em, how do we join 'em?

Best,

Bill P.