I recently visited the Motivational Interviewing website and caught Theresa Moyers, Ph.D. and other M.I. luminaries giving us a few of their thoughts in the seven minute long Vimeo on their website.  Well worth watching and taking not quite seven minutes of your Time. http://motivationalinterviewing.org/

In the middle of it Ms. Moyers speaks to ‘where’ Motivational Interviewing is in its development – in its research and in its practice. Its refreshing to hear someone, anyone, say that their therapy model has not “arrived” yet, that it is still a work in progress.  Which is what Theresa Moyers says explicitly, and I admire that its up on their website.

Not all the current models pushing their way forward as Evidence-Based or Evidence-Supported Treatments leave you with that impression. I don’t mean that elsewhere they don’t critique their models – they do – but maybe not on the front page of their website!

You’ll find that Marhsa Linehan, Ph.D., and her cohort continue to persist in seeking out what the active ingredient(s) are in her model. They publish their research in peer reviewed journals.  There’s a book too -Dialectical Behavior Therapy in Clinical Practice: Applications across Disorders and Settings – that has twelve articles on adapting DBT to various sites and populations, adaptations that are not fully adherent.

Yet you are not going to see as much on the Behavioral Tech website (the official DBT website).

Elsewhere, when did you last see Solution-Focused Brief Therapy in the news?  What’s the latest on that model?

Don’t think I am knocking the advancement of our field.  I am pointing out that there is a faddish-ness about our therapies: good numbers that one condition or one population or some other unique identifier responds to the therapy model morphs into multiple conditions.  From CBT for depression to CBT for virtually everything. From Solution-Focused Brief Therapy for family problems to many other concerns.

Thus has it been in the U.S.A.  Our models begin humble then acquire the status of panacea and sometimes gain cachet, and go on to totem or talismanic status.  That happened with psychoanalysis, it happened with Carl Rogers’ therapy, it happened with Transactional Analysis and Gestalt Therapy. And then their moment passes.  Some more quickly than others.

I can’t say that I know with certainty that same cycle does or doesn’t occur on the European or South American or Asian or African continents, but I can tell you that many varieties of psychoanalytic practice persist in Europe and South America as common treatments; that in Germany inpatient hospitalization is considered the norm for conditions that in the U.S.A. would only be treated on an outpatient basis; in the United Kingdom a hodge-podge of therapies including REBT, Transactional Analysis, Neuro-Linguistic Programming and others are used.  Many of these therapies import a nice sized dose of Object Relations-informed psychodynamics, which is the original attachment theory.  See Margaret Mahler’s book (1975) The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant : Symbiosis and Individuation.

About the latter: Attachment, which is another Big Wave happening now in the USA.  Could it be the traditions in the U.K. allow them to keep the old ways of doing things – not cleaning house without regard for the “grain of truth” in those models which are now disenfranchised in the USA?

Here’s hoping that your clinical supervision incorporates some humility about our current state of knowledge and practice, and perhaps some consideration to the history of psychotherapy, not just the current “best practice.“