Psychodiversity
Welcome to the 4th Reversal Theory blog! In this “episode,” I hope to tie all of these concepts together for you in a way that will show how Reversal Theory can be a great addition to your therapeutic repertoire – in terms of conceptualization and even treatment planning!
Popular in both the professional and lay communities is the idea that mental stability equates to mental health. However, Reversal Theory posits precisely the opposite, that people are healthiest when they exhibit the fluidity to be able to experience satisfaction in all eight states at appropriate times. As Apter (2007) says, “The reversal theory view is that a certain kind of instability is essential for a full and happy life: one should be able to pursue the satisfactions of serious achievement, but also at other times the more frivolous joys of play; one should be able to feel the warm agreeableness of bring a ‘good citizen,’ but also from time to time the keen pleasures of defiance and independence; one should be able to experience the pride of personal strength as well as, on other occasions, the comforts of modest humility” (p.187). This ability to experience all of the states and their attendant satisfactions is known as psychodiversity. Combined with an adequate frustration tolerance, a functioning internal measure of satiation, and the ability to respond effectively to situational factors, including other people, psychodiversity defines what it means to be healthy – to be able to work, love, and play effectively.
Let me give a few examples of how the concept of psychodiversity plays out in therapy…
- Have you ever used Lazarus’ multi-modal therapy model as a way of identifying different areas of life that need to be treated for a holistic approached? What about the pie chart with physicals health, social health, spiritual health, emotional health, etc?
- How often do clients come in complaining of being “stuck”? They often need help to get the satisfactions from a state they don’t have much practice in, or in learning how to switch states to fit their situations.
- All those different presentations of depression that the DSM5 can’t quite seem to cover? When the main characteristic is low self-worth, consider an autic-mastery kind of depression, where the client isn’t able to acheive the satisfaction of that state, but is in it often. When the main characteristic is boredom consider a paratelic-depression. Lack of motivation? Telic depression. Loneliness? Self-sympathy depression. Alienation? Conforming depression. This gives us a way not only to help clients learn how to derive the satisfaction from a state they’re stuck in, but also to focus more on and gain more value from switching to other states, too.
- Anxiety is a classic telic-disorder. The focus on danger, on the importance of success (or of not-failing), the future-orientation… And we often try to manage it in a telic way only (reducing anxiety) rather than also using the tool of switching to the paratelic state.
- What are the personality disorders but various combination of autic stuckness?
I’ll do another blog post in the near future about some specific RT-based techniques and tweaks-to-techniques that I have found really helpful. In the meantime…
Comment below: Now that you know plenty about RT to start posing really interesting questions to yourself… how could you see this working in therapy?