[From Tim Carey (971222.0725)]
Hi Mark,
I had another thought about the MOL ...
Part of the difficulty in applying the MOL (as I see it) to your line of
work may be in the way that the content of what the client is talking about
is dealt with. When you're working on solving a problem the content of the
conversation is very important. In the MOL, however, I don't think the
_content_ at any particular time is important. In fact, the challenge for
the therapist is to stay detached from the content while you are asking the
client more and more about what they are saying. The only reason you ask
questions about the "content" at any particular time is so that the client
will get "in" to the content and experience what they are talking about in
the here and now. Then they generally leave that level, and the content and
perceptions that go with it (sometimes they leave more "cleanly" than
others) and they start to talk _about_ it, that is to reflect on what they
have been just saying or to give some opinion about it. Then you ask them
about that, again not because you're interested in the content per se but
because you want them to experience that "level".
I imagine when you're working with suicidal people, the content is
paramount. I'm not sure, this is something I don't have experience with but
if the theory is right, then I think after an MOL experience, the client
would paradoxically understand the content differently than they did
before. When I have used this process, the person often starts talking
about a particular thing ... they then leave this and go to all sorts of
different places as they pick up on thoughts they are having ... and very
often, by the end of the MOL they have returned to the place they started
(usually there's just a key word or something that comes up again) and yet
they report that they think differently about whatever it is they were
talking about.
Does any of this make sense???
Cheers,
Tim