Harry J Aponte

The “Person-of the-Therapist” model is an approach to training and supervising therapists. The concept of a therapist as a wounded healer appears to be key in interpreting the therapeutic process and its healing power. This article aims at presenting this model’s philosophical foundations, which promote a creative use of the therapists’ personal potential independently of the different psychotherapeutic schools that they represent.

ABSTRACT In this paper, we will present a case vignette intimately detailing the work of a supervisor and therapist within the framework of the Person of the Therapist Training Model (POTT). The conceptual lenses we emphasize will be the empathic-identification and differentiation aspects of the relationship between therapist and client. In that context, the POTT calls for monitoring and describing the interplay between the personal and professional of the therapist in relation to both her supervisor and her client.

ABSTRACT The Person-of-the-Therapist Training (POTT) model has been developing and evolving since the late seventies. The current study explored the relationship between the personal self-of-the-therapist and the professional self-of-the-therapist within the POTT. A directed content analysis of the 18 trainees’ final reflection papers at the end of a 9-month POTT was conducted. Findings suggest that even though the training’s goal is improving trainees’ ability to use their selves in therapy, changes in the therapist’s self appear to expand to other areas in the therapist’s life. Thus, the road to becoming a more effective therapist goes through personal changes, specifically self-awareness and the acceptance of one’s own struggles and imperfections. Implications for training and future research are discussed.

This paper is based on the premises that the conscious, active and purposeful use of self by the therapist in the therapeutic process is an essential aptitude in establishing an effective therapeutic relationship, and that this therapeutically purposeful use of self can and should be incorporated in the training of all therapists in a explicitly systematic manner. The paper will attempt to identify the contributions of the “what and how” the use of self by therapists contributes to the therapeutic process. First of all, therapists’ use of self is meant to be viewed as a Common Factor as defined by Sprenkle, Davis & Lebow (2009), which is a perspective about the effectiveness of therapy that “asserts that the qualities and capabilities of the person offering the treatment are more important than the treatment itself” (p. 4). Secondly, the use of self by therapists emphasizes developing the skill set of the therapist in the conscious, active and purposeful use of self as is in the mom...

Today's society speaks with conflicting voices about values, morality, and faithin a word, about spirituality. Consequently, therapists are having to consider with their clients the values and morality upon which to base the therapy, and having to aid clients in utilizing their belief systems and faith communities to help themselves. Spirituality is treated here in terms that are inclusive, applying both to secular and religious spirituality. We suggest three general ways in which spirituality enhances the power of therapy. The first relates to making moral choices the heart of issues clients present. The second involves assisting clients in becoming emotionally and spiritually grounded. The third has to do with including spiritually enriched resources among people's options for solutions.

This paper discusses how the spirituality of therapists, wittingly or not, colours their work, and how they need to use it mindfully whatever their school of therapy. How a therapist translates a spiritual perspective into a clinical approach is illustrated through the transcript of a clinical session in which family members discuss dealing with the hurts, angers and conflicts they experience with each other. If they are to forgive grievances sufficiently to attempt resolution and closeness, what principle about living should underlie their efforts? The therapist in the session floats the notion, springing from his own beliefs, that unconditional love will open up all doors to conciliation. If family members accept his position, it becomes the underlying spiritual premise for the work on their relationships. It is my belief that spirituality gives the ultimate meaning to psychotherapy. All therapy in some way has to contend with its spiritual base containing explicit or implicit assumptions about why we suffer in our psyches and hurt in our relationships, and what will bring healing and happiness. Our philosophical assumptions about connections between our everyday functioning and our spiritual health drive our therapy. I use the term spirituality here broadly, referring to the meaning, purpose and values in people's lives. As a therapist who is trying to understand people and help them navigate through the pain, conflicts and mysteries of life, I am looking for what drives their lives. Spirituality, for me, is how they understand life, where they want to go with it, and the standards by which they measure and judge life. It is the pursuit of money, sex and power or the idealiza-tion of poverty, chastity and humility, and everything in between and combinations thereof. It lies in the god of the belly or in the transcendent God of religion. It is what drives and/or we believe should drive our lives. For most of us it is complex, conflicted and fragmented. Its roots are everywhere in our lives: our cultural © 1998 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice

Poor families have taught us special lessons that are applicable to all families. They have instructed us about the problems, within families, of developing relationships adequate to the tasks of family life. One consequence is that therapists are attending more to the evolution of the structure of family relationships, particularly, the phenomenon of underorganization. Poor families have also provided insight into the dynamic relationship between families and their social context. As a result, a therapeutic perspective is emerging that focuses on the influence of the community on the individual and the family, a perspective that may be called an eco-structural approach to therapy. On rare occasions, an encounter with a family becomes a personal beacon to the therapist for work with, understanding of, and empathy for many other families. Such is the Hannon family, 1 which became for this therapist the prototype of the poor, minority family. A single consultation with the family crystalized my professional perspective of these families and provided the model for my work with them. The Hannon family is poor, black, and headed by a single parent, the mother. The family lives in an urban ghetto of a large northeastern city. The family's poverty means not enough money for daily needs, a paucity of work opportunities, limited access to medical care, poor housing in dangerous neighborhoods, and inadequate schools. In short, the family suffers from a lack of the financial and community resources it needs for its members to take care of themselves and one another. The Hannon family's minority status adds to the weight of the burden of poverty on the family's formation, development, and functioning. Mrs. Hannon's being a single parent is both one of the frequent effects of such social circumstances and an added handicap in the family's development. The result is a family that lacks the cohesive, continuous, and well-elaborated, internal relational structure necessary to meet the needs of its members and the demands of society (1). The relationships the family as a whole and many of its members have with its community are themselves fragmented, discontinuous, and limited in the ways they are structured for carrying out their life tasks. The Hannon family is the kind of family that social service agencies and mental health centers find most difficult to work with. They present a variety of personal, familial, and social problems. They live chronically from one crisis to another. Counselors and therapists often experience their sessions with them as chaotic, and the families may attend sessions irregularly and terminate prematurely. The clinicians become as discouraged as the families about the usefulness of therapy. The opening moments of the initial session with the Hannon family were disconcerting. But, as the session evolved, the family revealed itself and its pain to me with piercing clarity. THE SESSION For its first session at a child guidance clinic, the Hannon family comes with nine of its members from three generations: Mrs. Hannon, 47, her children, Vera, 22, Toby (a.k.a. Marie), 18, Joan, 17, Jack, 16, Mark, 12, and Earl, 11, and Vera's two children, Rita, 3, and Curt, 1 ½. The identified patient is Joan who was reportedly having problems in school. She is a heavy-set young woman with a cherubic face and intense manner that ranged from manic demeanor to a sweet, quiet seriousness. Her mother had made the appointment. The session begins with the family walking into an interview room equipped with an observation mirror, microphones, and TV cameras. One of the kids is loudly playing a portable radio as family members work out seating arrangements. Jack: You see the camera over there? Joan: [looking up at microphones hanging from ceiling] They just want to know how crazy we are. (In her first statement, she labels her family and herself as troubled.) Therapist: I don't want anybody in the corner over there. [pointing to blind concealing the TV cameras] Joan: Get out of the corner, Vera. (In her second statement, she joins therapist as an orchestrator of the family.) Therapist: Come on and join us somehow. Pull the chair over. Yes, right. Most of the children are talking loudly, over each other, and competing with the music on the radio. The therapist is drowning in noise, but persists in trying to seat the family and become acquainted with them. Mrs. Hannon, the mother, remains quiet and does not take charge of the children. Still, in the midst of the apparent confusion, Joan out-talks the others and gives directions and explanations. She also talks in a manic and compulsive manner, mocking herself and saying, "I ain't got no sense, no way" and "I told you I was crazy." Joan further focuses everyone's attention on her by explicitly inviting her siblings to tell how "crazy" she is. She later characterizes this demeanor of hers, which she also exhibits at _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1

2 authorities in the field core therapeutic tasks that need special attention in the treatment of disadvantaged families. The paper goes on to propose approaches to the use of self by therapists in the implementation of these tasks in ways that may be most effective with disadvantaged families. Materials and Methods For the identification and description of the therapeutic tasks, the paper will resource the work and experience of experts in the field who have contributed to the literature and research on therapy with disadvantaged families. For the proposed perspectives on therapists' use of self in the implementation of these tasks, the paper looks to the Person-of-the-Therapist Model on the use of self, a systematic method of thinking about the active and purposeful use of self by therapists in the therapeutic process. The theory and methodology behind the model is described, and an example of its use with a disadvantaged family is offered. Disadvantaged families call for a particular kind of therapeutic attention. The very designation " disadvantaged " adds a distinct dimension to the therapy that calls for therapists to take into account the

In this article we share our personal and professional experiences, struggles, and growth, as former trainees of the Person-of-the-Therapist Training pilot study, conducted during our master's coursework in the Couple and Family Therapy Department at Drexel University. We include our perceptions of the training process in vivo, the challenges and benefits of doing this work in an academic setting, case examples to convey our journey of personal discovery, and the use of what we learned about ourselves in our development as therapists. This development includes a deepening of awareness of self in our relationship and work with our clients, a greater ability to work with both our personal assets and vul-nerabilities, as well as the acquisition of skills to actively and purposefully use our entire person diagnostically and therapeutically in our work with clients. Person-of-the-Therapist Training (POTT) was introduced to Drexel's MFT program in 2003 via one of its professors, Harry Aponte—who, before this study, specialized in working with seasoned clinicians to integrate the POTT principles into their work during clinical supervision. The pilot study discussed in this article was a new attempt at the systematic training on the use of self in an academic setting with individuals at the beginning of their professional training in MFT. The study targeted first-year students. It was clear that this study was for research purposes to determine whether this model of training on the person of the therapist could be integrated into the existing MFT program at Drexel. Therefore, participating students were first asked to sign an appropriate release for the sharing of their information as they documented their experience—which has allowed the detailed, personal examples throughout this article. During an orientation to the program it was also explained that this training was voluntary , not graded, and limited in space; only six places were available—meaning only half of our master's class could participate. Names were put into a hat and drawn at random, the first six to be included in the training and the remaining listed as alternates in the order in which they were drawn. For the six participating in the study, a 3-hr block of time per week was dedicated to the training. The first two POTT sessions were focused on reading basics about this type of work: articles by Harry Aponte on the subject and readings from the Use of Self (2000) by Baldwin. From these readings, we understood that POTT was not a therapy theory per se, but rather a way of conducting oneself as a therapist, aware of personal experiences and feelings, and how they intersect with one's work. With the apparent inadequacies of first-time family therapy interns with no clinical experience, we fretted over our own ability to help anyone given our Lauren Lutz, MFT, and Sarah Spell Irizarry, LMFT, graduated from the Couple and Family Therapy Department of Drexel University in June 2005. Lauren is presently employed as a therapist with Safe Harbor Counseling and as an adjunct professor at Messiah College; Sarah is employed as Lead Clinician with the NorthEast Treatment Center in their Family Focused Behavioral Health program.

This study premises that self-of-the-therapist work is pivotal in the development of effective therapists. However, therapy models vary in their goals for this work and the means of accomplishing them. This study presents the perspective of the person-of-the-therapist Training (POTT) model that prioritizes the ability to consciously and purposefully use the self-as-is at the moment of contact with the client over the traditional goal of therapists working to resolve their issues. A key underlying assumption of the model proposes that therapists' core issues (referred to as " signature themes ") are potent resources that can be tapped into to connect, assess and intervene effectively with clients. The study presents the model and illustrates the use of signature themes in clinical work. For what matters above all is the attitude we take toward suffering, the attitude in which we take our suffering upon ourselves (Frankl, 1963, p. 178). Making one's own wounds a source of healing, therefore, does not call for a sharing of superficial personal pains but for a constant willingness to see one's own pain and suffering as rising from the depth of the human condition which all men share (Nouwen, 1979, p. 88). When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope (Nouwen, 1979, p. 93).

Family Institute of the Midwest This article introduces a tool that serves as a guide for building an effective bridge between the personal and technical aspects of therapy in supervision. The instrument is based on a model of clinical supervision that emphasizes the purposeful utilization of self—in the moment, with both flaws and strengths—in the therapeutic relationship in combination with the technical interventions with clients. The article also offers some aid to promote a personal integration of the philosophy underlying this supervisory model into a therapist's clinical thinking and practice.

In this article we share our personal and professional experiences, struggles, and growth, as former trainees of the Person-of-the-Therapist Training pilot study, conducted during our master's coursework in the Couple and Family Therapy Department at Drexel University. We include our perceptions of the training process in vivo, the challenges and benefits of doing this work in an academic setting, case examples to convey our journey of personal discovery, and the use of what we learned about ourselves in our development as therapists. This development includes a deepening of awareness of self in our relationship and work with our clients, a greater ability to work with both our personal assets and vul-nerabilities, as well as the acquisition of skills to actively and purposefully use our entire person diagnostically and therapeutically in our work with clients. Person-of-the-Therapist Training (POTT) was introduced to Drexel's MFT program in 2003 via one of its professors, Harry Aponte—who, before this study, specialized in working with seasoned clinicians to integrate the POTT principles into their work during clinical supervision. The pilot study discussed in this article was a new attempt at the systematic training on the use of self in an academic setting with individuals at the beginning of their professional training in MFT. The study targeted first-year students. It was clear that this study was for research purposes to determine whether this model of training on the person of the therapist could be integrated into the existing MFT program at Drexel. Therefore, participating students were first asked to sign an appropriate release for the sharing of their information as they documented their experience—which has allowed the detailed, personal examples throughout this article. During an orientation to the program it was also explained that this training was voluntary , not graded, and limited in space; only six places were available—meaning only half of our master's class could participate. Names were put into a hat and drawn at random, the first six to be included in the training and the remaining listed as alternates in the order in which they were drawn. For the six participating in the study, a 3-hr block of time per week was dedicated to the training. The first two POTT sessions were focused on reading basics about this type of work: articles by Harry Aponte on the subject and readings from the Use of Self (2000) by Baldwin. From these readings, we understood that POTT was not a therapy theory per se, but rather a way of conducting oneself as a therapist, aware of personal experiences and feelings, and how they intersect with one's work. With the apparent inadequacies of first-time family therapy interns with no clinical experience, we fretted over our own ability to help anyone given our Lauren Lutz, MFT, and Sarah Spell Irizarry, LMFT, graduated from the Couple and Family Therapy Department of Drexel University in June 2005. Lauren is presently employed as a therapist with Safe Harbor Counseling and as an adjunct professor at Messiah College; Sarah is employed as Lead Clinician with the NorthEast Treatment Center in their Family Focused Behavioral Health program.

Ssomething is broken, painful, and deeply personal, something the client could not achieve a solution to alone. , but that neither canIt will take the efforts of both the clients and the therapist to solve the issue. Neither one can do it on their own. These
solve it by his/her efforts alone. These two strangers, client and therapist, thus face the challenge to join hands to meet this formidable challenge together, the therapeutic alliance.

What is common to all methods of the enactment intervention is setting up a situation where clients feel free to or compelled to interact with each other around the focal issue in the session itself.When therapists actively join family interactions to alter their dynamics, an intervention gains power through therapists’ own emotional presence in what is interchanging among family members. Therapists live presence in family interactions take on color, energy and dimension through therapists’ conscious and purposeful use of all of self that may facilitate the process – whether it is through gender, age, race, religious affiliation or anything else that may make for a more immediate connection with the family.

If we accept that the essential goal of joining is to gain a level of trust with the client that draws the client into partnering with the therapist, then joining implies a type of intimate personal connection between therapist and client within the boundaries of the therapeutic process.

... This is an especially delicate multidynamics factor when the therapists practice in the same commu-nity, where reputation matters. On the professional level, clinician-clients may or may not share the same professional discipline or adhere to the same school of therapy. ...

ABSTRACT Today's society speaks with conflicting voices about values, morality, and faithin a word, about spirituality. Consequently, therapists are having to consider with their clients the values and morality upon which to base the therapy, and having to aid clients in utilizing their belief systems and faith communities to help themselves. Spirituality is treated here in terms that are inclusive, applying both to secular and religious spirituality. We suggest three general ways in which spirituality enhances the power of therapy. The first relates to making moral choices the heart of issues clients present. The second involves assisting clients in becoming emotionally and spiritually grounded. The third has to do with including spiritually enriched resources among people's options for solutions.

... They will discover what they need to learn about their clients' life styles and culture. ... Speaking of what therapists need in working with cultural differences, Pinderhughes argues that, "effective service ... They may want to meet and talk with ethnic, racial or gender defined groups ...

Therapeutic excellence is rooted in a clinician's mastery of both the technical and personal aspects of treatment. An exploration of the catalytic force of therapy and how it effects the person of the therapist and his use of self generates a number of training implications. A clinical training model, developed at the Family Institute of Virginia, focusing on the Person

... Theo-dora reluctantly but firmly said,“Let [the child] go into the system.” For her, Jeannie's health and her obligation to her own children came 6 125 Page 147. ... Page 157. 136 SPiritUal reSoUrceS in FamilieS Grace has been the goad that now has urged her back to church. ...

Today psychotherapists face a challenge quite different from Karl Menninger's early efforts to foster an understanding between the new science of psychiatry and traditional religion. Today the mental health sciences are struggling with the contradictions and conflicts about society's values and spirituality that are currently vexing us all. The challenge today for psychotherapists is how to address values and spirituality professionally, ethically, and usefully in our work. This article looks at the scope of the task of training psychotherapists to work with values and spirituality in today's climate of amorphous values and culture wars.

... They will discover what they need to learn about their clients' life styles and culture. ... Speaking of what therapists need in working with cultural differences, Pinderhughes argues that, "effective service ... They may want to meet and talk with ethnic, racial or gender defined groups ...

An exploration of the relationship between a therapist's clinical effectiveness and his family life, illustrated with a Tran scripted series of interviews with a therapist, provides the foundation for the development of a clinical training model. The process of family resolution and the management of the therapist's personal characteristics and subsequent utilization in the therapeutic context is examined. The Person/Practice

Therapeutic excellence is rooted in a clinician's mastery of both the technical and personal aspects of treatment. An exploration of the catalytic force of therapy and how it effects the person of the therapist and his use of self generates a number of training implications. A clinical training model, developed at the Family Institute of Virginia, focusing on the Person

... 22). 100 pages. Editeur. Médecine & Hygiène. Site Web DOI 10.3917/tf.014.0337. A propos de cette revue Site Web. Acheter en ... Le don gratuit et librement consenti est l'essence de l'amour ... à une excuse, mais je voudrais qu'elle puisse dire « Parfait, je t'aime comme tu es » et alors ...

... and will work with therapist accordingly a. problem-- boy fears father pc~rticipan~s-- boy and father ... with the therapist and by engaging in various tasks prescribed by thera~pist--eg, on ,alternate ... of the oouple and the therapist, but it was fo.cused on simultaneou~sly with the ...

2 authorities in the field core therapeutic tasks that need special attention in the treatment of disadvantaged families. The paper goes on to propose approaches to the use of self by therapists in the implementation of these tasks in ways that may be most effective with disadvantaged families. Materials and Methods For the identification and description of the therapeutic tasks, the paper will resource the work and experience of experts in the field who have contributed to the literature and research on therapy with disadvantaged families. For the proposed perspectives on therapists' use of self in the implementation of these tasks, the paper looks to the Person-of-the-Therapist Model on the use of self, a systematic method of thinking about the active and purposeful use of self by therapists in the therapeutic process. The theory and methodology behind the model is described, and an example of its use with a disadvantaged family is offered. Disadvantaged families call for a particular kind of therapeutic attention. The very designation "disadvantaged" adds a distinct dimension to the therapy that calls for therapists to take into account the