[Music] hello hello and welcome welcome today we are going to be talking about Carl Tom's IP scope and I I added Tom to the Third Edition of mastering competencies and uh he's also in the uh fourth edition so that's why you're seeing the cover here but welcome welcome everyone and as we um go through this webinar today um feel free to put uh if you're watching live if you're watching the recording on Zoom I'm not sitting there and I can't answer your Q&A but if you're live with me today um please put your questions in the Q&A and I will make sure I answer those so really excited to have you here today um I love Carl Tom's model and I am so excited to share it with you and especially those of you who are um in in the process of lure and having to for a marriage family therapy lure and having to memorize a lot of systemic theories I really think uh Tom's approach um can be super useful so just understanding systems it's a just kind of a I think a 21st century kind of way to understand some of the key issues um in um in marriage and family therapy systemic work so in the fourth edition um Carl Tom's model is in the integrative chapter and I will tell you a little bit about um that in just a minute so but you'll find it in chapter four integrative chapter and Carl Tom kicks off that chapter so let's go ahead and get started so Carl Tom um is a family therapist who's been around for many many years uh he has uh most of his career he was based in uh at the University of Calgary he is based in the University of Calgary he's actually an MD and many many years ago he is part of the pioneering crew um he got a large grant for their family counseling center at the University of Calgary and he is one of the only family therapists I know who actually was able to convince the local government that they were not going to do traditional dsm5 diagnosis and still get funding and in lie of using traditional uh diagnostic criteria um they developed this IP scope for kind of looking at what is going on he developed it um with uh Dan and Sal Dan Sally St George uh Dan Wolf who are actually two of my long-term colleagues are also very active um in collaborative therapy and Tom strong who also does work in the area of narrative and yet this approach is very systemic and so that's one of the reasons I love Carl Tom um both he and I um uh talk a lot about both the systemic and from postmodern perspectives and kind of brings it all together hence both of us are in this collaborative chapter you go figure that out okay um it it is very a systemic approach that has a a very relational relationally postmodern conceptually uh systemic looking at interpersonal patterns and when you look at Family Therapy it is an art of understanding interpersonal patterns and how to identify them and in particular Carl Tom's work focuses on those complimentary patterns which you know are addressed in almost every single approach in my therapy that works unifying framework the second level of the first level the second half of the first level is complimentary patterns and I it is so on my to-do list I got a couple other books to write but someday I will write the book on complimentary patterns from traditional psychodynamic you know all the way through humanist IC CBT um postmodern systemic and when you really look at the difference um across all the different theories which is part of what I love to do and what I do for my work it is how people identify complimentary patterns in each approach that really is where most of the divers language and jargon quote unquote comes from and so what I love about what Carl Tom and his colleagues have done in Calgary is that they have really um focused on this and de veloped it and developed it into a system um that you can use in multiple different ways so um multiple phases of therapy and looking both at therapeutic relationship as well as client relationships as well as their Wellness patterns as well as their you know negative pattern so it is such um it just such a simple and elegant approach once you get the hang of it so I'm so excited to share it with you today so he calls it the IP scope with IP meaning um the uh interpersonal patterns or the IPS and we'll be talking about a lot of ips today um and it is used to observe clients couples families you know even individuals and individual Dynamics um the same um the same focus on complimentary patterns just kind of replicates across all different levels of systems and problems so you're looking at how these interactional patterns um organize around behaviors both problem behaviors as well as Wellness behaviors and so uh uh interpersonal patterns are defined as recurrent and relatively stable so even if a couple um you know argues about different things they have relatively the same pattern for interacting so which is really fascinating when you begin to identify the underlying pattern it really becomes a lot more simple and so if you have studied emotional focused couples therapy this is really at the heart of that work is very similarly looking at um primarily the pursuer distancer is the main pattern you know but obviously there are other ones that they can look at but they are surprisingly um even if the couples arguing about different things that same fundamental push and pull seems to be fairly consistent usually with couples you'll see they typically have the same roles but you can have a couple where they flip the rolls I've had couples do that less often but it does definitely happen interpersonal um patterns are generally mutually reinforcing and so you know when one person pursues the other one distances and they reinforce each other's behaviors and they tend to be complimentary which is you know one is um pursuing and one is distancing and so they're kind of moving in opposite directions and so you can have over functioning and underfunctioning even within the individual or within a relationship right so even our patterns around depression or anxiety can similarly whe whether they're int psychic or interpersonal we tend to see these complimentary patterns which are you know typically developed from a polarity of some kind um that creates the pattern and Tom uh even though it sounds super super systemic uh he is fundamentally also uh got a postmodern lens and and refers to these descriptions as serviceable fictions tools that help the therapist to facilitate treatment and I do remember at the end of doctoral program I marched into my dissertation chair he was my major professor in my grad program and I said why didn't you tell me everything's a metaphor and I remember him saying I've been trying to say it for the last four years it's just taking you this long to fully grasp what I meant by that so saying it's a serviceable fiction um what Tom is trying to get across here is that these descriptions of these patterns are not are not are what we are using to help us help our clients okay they're not some deep ultimate truth about the nature of this client and their value as a human um it is a serviceable fiction these are um descriptions that clinicians use to help them help clients better and so in some ways that's what all theories are they are just stories that therapists use to help us help clients solve their problem better and more efficiently so please don't um fall into the Trap which we often do is taking our theories to be about some fundamental truth or Essence of humanity these are serviceable fictions that work for us at this time and how we help people to help others um and they're just tools and so don't ever you know you need to revise and update and adjust them um as you go along and continually revise them I remember once I a long time ago I was at a training with boscolo um from the Milan Institute and I remember they were prepping before live demonstration and he says something like um oh my goodness I think we need to stop talking because I'm beginning to believe the hypothesis that we were talking about and and so so the idea here is all of these hypothesis we have about our clients they are serviceable fictions to help us help them but we need to be careful to not believe ourselves and fall in love with our ideas or hypothesis about what's going on with our client like we know what's going on with them better than they do that can be a dangerous thing so in terms of the inter personal patterns um there are several different types and I love this because uh Carl Tom and his team at Calgary have like helped give you a way of looking at things that you can keep using in different areas of treatment so the most common one um is the path what's called a pathologizing interpersonal patterns so these are patterns that um basically relate to our symptoms and what we're coming to get help for but they increase negativity and suffering in one or both people who are interacting so Pips are what we're trying to stop with our we're trying to interrupt those find alternatives to Pips healing are uh interpersonal patterns are hips and these are the patterns um that facilitate for forgiveness or insight to minimize future Pips so you're you're using the hips to fix the Pips and if you think of EFT they talk a lot about um you know addressing attachment injuries that's a good example of a hip so every single Theory you can you know has a way at least in Family Therapy of addressing Pips and many of them also have these hips which are how do you help facilitate forgiveness and reconnection and Reconciliation in relationship so these are actually he healing interactions then there are also Wellness interactions in addition to the healing interactions and these are the ones that bring forth competence positivity and intimacy so these the whips are what you're trying to get your clients to do a lot more whips and a lot few hips and oftentimes there needs to be some healing patterns in between not always um there are certainly situations where that's not true but if you're um you know familiar like I said with EFT talks a lot about the importance of if there been an attachment injury where which is when one person kind of reaches out to the other in a great moment of need you're going to need something like a hip to get you to the whips if you think of solution Focus therapy right solution Focus therapy is kind of like how do we get the whips to happen we'll do a hip if we need to and in solution Focus or not even talk a whole lot about the Pips like okay let's identify what a whip would be or what a whip has been and let's do more of that the wellness patterns so the wellness patterns are really what you're trying to stabilize in therapy no matter which approach you're using that is truly the goal and you know I I fully agree with Tom and his team that you know identifying labeling you know identifying these Wellness interaction patterns is so important I have been doing couple family therapy for three decades now and I think one of the things that routinely surprises me especially with my couples and even with my families I um but couples in particular they can come in and go yeah we just had a great week and I'm like so what was different they're like I don't know we just didn't fight this week I'm like so believe it or not I have to work so hard to help couples identify what the wellness pattern is because it's almost like there was no problem and so it just kind of like they don't notice that it happened and so it takes a lot of work for most clients to identify those Wellness interaction patterns oh so you know um like when you came home and you um you know just went and started you know hanging out with the kids so she could do dinner that like created this Wellness pattern where there's less tension yeah and you know why did you go and hang out with kids instead of going up to your room like you normally do okay so let's look at how that created a virtuous cycle but most of my clients especially couples in particular but even with with families when there's a parent who I kind of expect to sort of notice when I do X my child's Behavior gets Better or Worse even in families um it is not common and at the individual level because all of these you know patterns also can um exist in our psyches and if you think of internal family systems it's taking all that systemic metaphor and looking at how in psychically we kind of have these inner internal patterns as well that um individually we often don't notice what we're doing on a good day versus a bad day and so sometimes you have some idea of what you did differently but like looking at how that internal process creates a wellness process versus a pathologizing process so again pathologizing inter pattern interpersonal patterns those are your symptoms the healing ones or what anything that needs to be done especially between people to reconcile um facilitate forgiveness between our clients and the wellness is kind of your solution what you want to have more of and then um transforming interpersonal patterns are often refers to what we as clinicians do but we're facilitating a move from a pip to a whip and so you can and and I I described some of this in the textbook you can take every theory in any of my textbooks and you know look at how each one has a way of assessing Pips except for solution Focus are the only ones who don't do that and then there is a way that clinicians you know try to transform and move our clients from a pit tip to a whip continuing there are more IPS I am not done with IPS um there are detering deteriorating interpersonal patterns which are dips in this one the IP makes sense this is where behaviors that lead one to slip go from your Wellness pattern back to your pathologizing pip right so it's so the detering patterns is you get the the wellness pattern you know somewhat established and then you slip back to the more symptomatic patterns and those are called the dips and so you're looking at how that kind of goes back how you slip and and all of us as humans we all know we we have dips um and then finally they talk about skips which are sociocultural interpersonal patterns so this is looking at either beliefs and values and societal discourses that inform our internal interaction patterns and they can either be a negative or beneficial effect and so when you're looking at skips you're looking at the social cultural element um to what might be going on in our internal identities okay guys we got this Pips Pips whips hips skips dips tips you're with me okay good so um so yeah so you're looking for the skips both the skips the social you cultural discourses that might support the problem the Pips and you're going to look for skips that support the wellness interaction patterns or the whips I know a lot of acronyms that end with i kind of makes fun so let's look at some examples of what a pip might be so you have defending and criticizing very common in both couples and families distancing pursuing and so a lot of EFT that's one of their main ones they look at and then resisting and controlling often um seen with like uh parents and children so so oftentimes the more you know let's say a parent is trying to you know micromanage or control their child the more the child resists the more they can get parent tries to control the more the child resists in romantic relationships you might have one person pursuing for closeness the other one starts feels overwhelmed in distance so the pursuer gets more anxious and pursues harder which gets the distancer to um pull back so you can create the these um symptomatic patterns that underly um the problems that clients are bringing to us both families and couples have lots of Defending criticizing interaction patterns um so so looking at how these patterns you know it came it's like the fundamental type of um Dynamic going on the topic can change but oftentimes there's the one critical um party and the other person is defending the criticizing defending you'll often see that flip back and forth um in a couple or a family but particularly couples you can have Pips with power differentials so you can have a more domineering and a more submissive partner you know and so that what that means is the domineering or dismissing partner tends to have more power and influence over the dynamic than the person with less power so oftentimes In classical classic systems theories um the power the issue of power differential really was not well addressed or clearly addressed in the early systemic work and I think many of us in the field are very thankful for Carl Tom and his colleagues for bringing us a model working model for understanding yes there is still an interactional Dynamic but when there's a big Power differential the person on the bottom half of the relationship has a lot less influence over that Dynamic compared to the person with most the power so if you think of an authoritarian parent the child yes they there might be dismissing and acessing or domineering and submitting or even domineering and Defiance you can get that one too right but the um the child in many of these situations does not have the same amount of power to influence this Dynamic um than the parent and again in abusive uh couple relationships you can have a very similar Dynamic where there's a very dominant ing partner and a very submissive partner and so um the person who's more dominant so you can say both people you know theoretically from a pure whatever systemic place you can say they're in reinforcing each other's behaviors yes that's true but the person who has more power and wields it in a domineering authoritarian authoritative way even if it takes the form more of dismissing someone um the other person has less influence in this type of of relationship so just kind of being aware of the power differentials then we have the hips which are healing interactional patterns and so this is you know apologizing and forgiveness and it can create a positive healing interaction there is performing more acts of competence and then the other person noticing and positive acknowledging so in a couple or family system you can have this um these healing inter action patterns that kind of shift and heal and move things in the right direction they're not quite the wellness pattern because they're more reparative than they are like this is going to be the new Norm this is more healing um when systems have gotten out of balance um then there are the transforming ones so this is often what the therapist is doing the tips are what we the clinicians do so so the more we can ask about experience the more we'll the client might disclose about their experience and so we ask more we get more disclosure and we have this kind of opening and learning about the client um using reflexive questions which are questions that are open-ended There Is No Agenda to get them to just reflect on these interactive patterns right new possibilities new distinctions are made and so that helps open up you know kind of reinforces itself so Wellness inter personal patterns this is the goal this is what we're going for so you can have things like giving constructive feedback recognizing correcting mistakes Rel you know leads to more constructive feedback and you create a very um positive interaction cycle even when there are difficulties um showing a affection and appreciation uh showing yeah affection and respect you know which is responded to with appreciation and and respect creates this very positive interactive cycle so like in fames saying things like please thank you I love you you know I appreciate you you know the more that families have these patterns you know these are Wellness patterns and they are important and you know I've heard people say oh you know you know can't say please and thank you all day long and I'm like you know you really can and it's okay to have that appreciation and respect can be real important so this is looking um at how these intera actions and how couples can interact to create um you know to stabilize the wellness and so with couples families individuals we're always looking for these moments where they brought out the best in each other maybe that's a good way to think about it right you know like with parents and children the more um let's say a child takes responsibility the more thee you know the parent can appreciate that and give them more freedoms and you know the more freedoms they have that will probably Inspire hopefully Inspire the child to you know be more responsible and to create this positive you know interaction cycle and so having these patterns well established you know within couples within families and even within ourselves you know um going to bed early gets me up on time which gets me exercising and meditate every every morning starting off in the right place so we all you know these these can even come down to very practical patterns that we have but there is this whole cycle and Rhythm um and these behaviors where there's this Mutual reinforcement of positive you know behaviors in our within ourselves and between ourselves so deteriorating interpersonal patterns this is where you go from um you move to from a wellness to a um to a pip a pathologizing pattern so this is where you know scrutinizing let's say a child's performance per performance you know makes someone more self-conscious or awkward in performing you know you see this happen all the time with couples and in families where you know it can be a parent or partner is you know the other person tries to do something helpful let's say they try to take out the trash um and they don't do it quite to the other person's um standard you know like in my house the kids will often take out the trash but they forget to put the liner back in right and if you if what happens is they go and they do the the big the heroic effort of taking the trash out and my first Focus becomes well you forgot the liner again um then then that really makes them not want to do it as much and so it's really funny at a certain point my eldest son is like and my younger son because I you know I'm like thank you all for doing that and oh please don't forget to get that liner and so trying to keep it light and the two boys one day had negotiated that the older son will take out both Recycling and the trash if the younger son will put the two liners on the younger son's like like sign me up I get the two second task and you're gonna do the two-minute task like okay I don't know why my older son hates that I'm like oh that's not the best deal I've ever heard but um but they found their pattern they work together as a team to figure out you know how they can both maximize and get the most out of it so um that's kind of the wellness pattern in my house if you can negotiate with your brother how to divide the chores other than how they've been assigned I don't care because it creates the motivation the positivity and if every time they did chores they rarely do chores up to my standards for the record if anyone was wondering um if I scrutinized them more than I cheered them on and thank them um we would not have I would be doing a lot more chores probably and we'd have a lot more conflict I think in the house so so that's a good example deter the scrutin izing a performance um is a very common thing you will see in families um then there is you know withholding information failing to learn because with more information gets you know withheld and so you can create these negative patterns um where families will just kind of spiral back backwards and I think as clinicians we've all seen that so again oh um so so here's a good one you know we deny the free expression of anger in healthy ways obviously oftentimes that anger can turn inward against the self and my absolute favorite of all of these Dynamics is this really fascinating Dynamic I've seen over the years where the more so you e we tend to see either self- criticizing or other criticizing and I've become over the years to slowly realize that if you're critical of others you tend to be even more critical of yourself and um if you T you know and sometimes you all you hear is the criticism of others and those people often sound like they have a lot of quote unquote self-esteem but if they're running around criticizing almost everyone they meet and everything they encounter typically they are actually that hard of themselves even if they seem to present like I've got it all together as your therapist and you talk to them long enough you realize they're criticizing themselves as harshly even though they don't show it on the outside on the other hand when you've got someone who's constantly criticizing themselves and I'm not good enough and often times on the surface they are very pleasant to others um when you scratch below the surface as their therapist you soon discover there's often a lot of unspoken criticism and Judgment of others that creates this negative pattern and one of the strangest things I've learned about human human psychology or psyches or however you want to think of it is as you learn to accept yourself more you learn to accept others and their humanity and vice versa as you learn to truly accept others as they are you become more accepting of yourself and those two things are definitely interrelated and so this also fits into some of the individual dynamics that you will see and your clients so again are these patterns real it's better to really think of them as a social construct that we use they're held very tentatively we look at these labels we notice the patterns but they're they're they're very they're held they're very fluid we can rename them we can re um label them we can redescribe them at any time so these are constantly edited revised um to help us better understand what's going on knowing that none of these verbal labels are truly capturing the essence of who someone is or the essence of some kind of pattern it is just a description we can use to hopefully help um shift these negative negative patterns that we would like to have differently so bringing forth hips or healing interaction patterns so sometimes the first place to always begin is to identify the family's natural you know healing patterns patterns of forgiveness and Reconciliation you know bring them out and notice them um using circular questions and certainly Carl Tom's early work he did beautiful work around I love circular questions they circular questions if you need a refresher circular questions Milan team pioneered them but they are questions that g therapists asked to you know help identify the interaction patterns and you often can do it by comparing and contrasting you can look at behavioral sequences you can you know look at before and after you can have hypotheticals so um you know it can be something like um when mom's upset you know which which kid is the the most uh changes their Behavior the most to um help get her in a better mood and you know who's the most likely to disappear when you know these so you're looking at all these differences um to just notice the pattern put them into words um and so that's what these circular questions are and and so then there's imagine another way to work with healing patterns is to imagine possible hips so if you can't find any like the pattern the family or couple doesn't have any um ident readily identified pattern patterns imagining what Behavior would um would either contradict or prude one of the behaviors in the PIP or would act as a healing interaction to increase trust usually is what it is in most systems um looking at the complimentary behaviors so looking for what type of behavior um would reinforce and stabilize a hip so oftentimes with parents who we generally expect the parents to do the lion share of Shifting some of these interaction patterns um I will often um you know tell parents who let's say that the negative pattern is a parent gets super critical I would instruct the parents then to find catch their kid doing something well and compliment them so that would be the opposite and so by just noticing and complimenting um e happen works really well with Partners too it works really well with children um by just noticing what they're doing right rather than what they're doing wrong um you can you know kind of trigger a healing interaction pattern especially if you do it more than once um so you can help create an interaction either in session or out of session where you talk about what that healing pattern might look like and you can use reflexive questions to bring forth the component you know of the hip you know so like I don't know got the kid taking out the trash who never puts on the liner I know this is a minor problem but some sometimes it's helpful to just deal with simple problems you know you can say you know so you know when you're walking back you know why is it you think you don't think to put the liner in what what are you doing instead where is your mind what are you thinking about and some just having those conversations and realizing you know my my kid is doing the chore because his mom asked him to and his heart's in the right place but boy as soon as the trash is in the can he is like his mind is off on whatever happened at school he's going to go call a friend or play a game and you know making sure that all the rest of the chore is taken care of he's just you know I've asked his mind just often with a lot of things it's like I do the first step he does the first step and remembering to do the other steps takes more time right it's going to take time for me to you know um patience for me um but just kind of even understanding that helps me feel less um resentful and and you know helps these reflexive questions can really create um people to to think in different ways I will tell you there was one day um my son gets early to go to Jazz Band so we have to leave the house at 705 um so we're up early at like 6:30 and 6:15 6:30 in the kitchen honestly neither of us are 100% really awake and I'm sitting there making my tea and um and normally while my tea water is boiling I'm entering the dishwasher half the time and I I'll never forget there is one of the best moments in my parenting life my son walks over and without a word because he's half asleep as well he just starts helping me unload the dishwasher and I was like this I'm like oh my God is this like really happening is there like a Candid Camera somewhere and I'm like what do you even say because I'm like I know I'm gonna like compliment but I don't want you know he's 14 you don't want to make too big of a deal and you know one point I'm like um I asked him I said so so thank you so much that's just so amazing you know I really appreciate your help you have no idea how much that means to me and at a certain point I'm like so so what made you think of even coming over to help me and he's just you know at some point I had said something we had had some conversation I'd asked some kind of reflective question where it just clicked in like if you live in this house you you know you need to help it's not fair if one person does all the work he says and it's just the one thing that he is he is down and he ever if I'm ever entering a dishwasher no matter how tired he is he jumps up and he helps with that particular chore now getting a trash can liner on the trash can totally different story but um but this is again these reflexive questions can hit people and reframe things and you just never know which one's going to stick and for whatever reason my son somehow got a message about this uh you know always helping and so asking these questions can help you see the good intention and so certainly when I see him do things like that I'm able to be a little more forgiving with the trash can liner oh yeah that's just not his he still needs to work on it but it creates a little more give and take in relationships so so this is a good example of let's say you have a a family pattern here where there's pressuring from the parent and there's resistance on the other side you also see this with couples where one person is oh honey take out the trash right and then there's the resisting oh I forget or oh not I'm busy whatever it is and you want to switch that into a healing pattern where um the person who's like pressuring is inquiring asking about what's going on and the other person is able to actually put into words and respond as to what was going on ah yes I I will tell you I was recently I was flying with my kids and my kids are usually very well behaved right they're 10 they're 14 we rarely have I rarely have to like tell them to stop doing anything but when we fly by the end of the flight they are always like poking each other and laughing and they're like hysterical and I'm like I I feed you kids like with expensive airport food what is going on here and um I and so this is where this part of me is like you gotta beave we Landing you know and then a certain point just ask so what goes on why what is it with plane flights that make the two of you crazy and finally it was my Elder son was just like I get so bored on a plane um even with the movies even with the handheld whatever you know so it's the boredom okay so it's boredom so how do we work on the boredom for the next time and and so I I I really you know um I really can't imagine because boy I feel like they got a fair amount of Technology at their disposal they're still bored and being for him it was actually being sitting down and it was funny because when he even talks to his friends on the phone he walks he is's one of those people who just does lapse he will walk he doesn't even sit down and play video games for a long periods of time he just likes to be in motion and so at least it helped me you know understand more we can come up with better Solutions and so that's the healing pattern going from this pathologizing pattern where there's a lot of snap judgments and this pursue um this pursue distance pressure resistance all of that you want to switch it to um another sort of interaction so circular questions are certainly a core technique where um you're making distinctions and clarifying you know and this is where it could be about um systems of beliefs or you know what's going on for you um you know um like on the plane like I couldn't make sense of why their behavior was so bizarre on a plane right so you know asking these um distinctions because I noticed it was only on the planes they behave this way we get the clarifying questions I get more information it helps me see things behavioral effect questions so when one person does this person a does this person B interprets it in a way that makes them have the opposite usually complimentary pattern um and understanding those Dynamics and H and connecting those dots about you know when you walk in the door you know with a oh gosh during the pandemic I had several couples where the pattern was they have all day in a very stressful meeting and because they don't have the 30 or longer you know 30 60 Minute cute that you typically would had pre pandemic in Los Angeles they H get off the stressful phone call from work and immediately in their kitchen and the partner asking for help with the kids and the other you know you have all this tension because there wasn't the wi wind down you know so we had to create all these artificial windown periods that got lost when um we were in lockdown and people you know did not have a normal commute so looking and identifying all all those opens up a lot of um hopefully empathy and understanding for one another as well as Solutions and then you have interpersonal perception questions for how each person is seeing the scenario seeing the situation and helping to put language and words and noticing how one perception reinforced another perception and so often right you can be tired but you look angry and so your partner responds in um that way as such and you create this downward negative spiral and so um very very common with couples that interpersonal perception how they interpreted each other's nonverbals you know can trigger very negative St spirals especially very quickly if they're well established reflexive questions are where so the circular questions you're looking at kind of the interaction reflexive questions um invite clients to reflect on The Unwanted implications of their current perceptions and actions and these are not leading these are just kind of um opening up for reflecting on things so you know what do you think would happen if you fall back into using drugs and rebelling when people ask you to do things again so what's gonna how is that going to work and what would that be like for you and um what's going to be the thing that tends to make you go that way versus you know what's keeping you from doing that right now so being able to just kind of do a lot of this reflecting on what is going on so skips um they identified four different so these are the social cultural interpersonal patterns and they identified four different types or strands um of these approaches there is the experiencing so your individual experience of um your social location social identities dominant discourses and how how you experience them and it's so important to know that even though we have these dominant discourses we have cultural norms we have subculture cultural norms we have a individual fam's unique interpretation of the cultures and their cultural intersections there're still the individual right and so you the individual even within a family can have wide uh diversity in terms of how they experience social cultural narratives um there is the naming and labeling of experience that a person might be um experiencing and how social cultural discourses kind of affect their experience of these interaction pattern patterns there's the coupling so joining the emotional inter personal behaviors into patterned interactions so looking at how your emotional and interactional behaviors you know inform these large these other patterns that were're having and so you're looking at the culture gender and other lenses um that are attached to these patterns and then there's Collective values defining what the good life is that is very much what culture cult does we often don't think of that as one of its primary functions but often embedded in any culture are various definitions of the good life and so looking at that looking how there's cultural norms subcultural Norms around gender social class um ethn racial identity sexual orientation all of these things and to be able to step back and reflect on them and what part of this do we agree with what part do we not agree with what part do we want to keep enacting what part is you know contributing to these um problems that we're having and so being able to name these label these um even with couples they can have very different experiences um heterosexual couples talking about just gender norms and how they play into virtually every pip that a couple will have not all but many many of them there are you know in heterosexual couples you have just the layer of just gender discourses and then you can have their cultural and family of origin influences onto that so the skips help identify that level of the system or of what's going on with these patterns so here are some examples of what skips might look like you have certain beliefs that inform certain actions so if you come from or you choose to adhere to more individualistic beliefs there's putting the individual need before the um that of the other relationships if you come from more collectivist cultures it's putting the needs of the the the family or social group above the prioritizing that above the individual so the belief informs the actions and so these go together um you have patriarchal entitlement here uh it can be the belief that informs the action of males exercising dominance you can have a belief in gender egalitarian roles and then you can have males Fales males and females sharing power so these are different um ways that you can think about and look at how these kind of interact together to um shape our lives and both our problem interaction patterns and our Wellness interaction patterns so so yeah with gender roles um Pips tend to become more rigid if the couple has a very uh kind of heterosexual sexist gender roles and they can be more difficult to identify oftentimes in the hips and the whips so there can be a lot of Pips based on you know stereotypes like heteros sexist Norms male sex drive discourses you know men always want sex uh gendered couple role discourses um gender differences in parenting gender differences in therapy participation so gender is one especially if you do a lot of um couples work and even with same-sex couples you will even see some of these patterns that are similar emerge in samex couples but you know idea is here to just name describe identify these patterns and have the couple reflect on how they're working or not working for them and to invite them to you know think of ways to transform them these interaction patterns but identifying how um these different kind of roles uh reinforce um off of the problem Behavior but you can also look at how to um reinforce Wellness patterns with certain types of beliefs and actions and how those become Interactive okay so that is a quick summary of Carl's Tom's uh IP scope and this approach I think just really Dives deep into complimentary patterns and helping understand how they are everywhere they're in the therapeutic system they're in our clients pathologizing patterns they're in the wellness patterns they're in the healing patterns um and even in Social cultural patterns and so beginning to notice these Dynamics are usually this is you know if you look at all the different theories across counseling traditional Psychotherapy family therapy postmodern you name it um most approaches will have one one way or another addressing these kind of polarities that we get into both individually and relationally and often time our job as clinicians whatever we're working on we are reducing and addressing these complimentary and often polarized patterns okayy so this time if you have any questions please put it in the chat and otherwise I just want to thank you for joining me and hopefully this kind of helped give you a sense of the uh carlt IP scope um developed by carlt Tom and his colleages of in Calgary and it really is a wonderful integrative way to think about what we do you can use it to even think about no matter what approach you're using I think there's a way to think about how we both as therapists you know um engage with our clients how our clients engage with each other and really being on the lookout for these complimentary patterns um with couples families as well as individually in terms of our all our own internal psyche um to look at these polarities and compliment complementarities in how um certain beliefs inform certain actions and and how certain behaviors you know affect the behaviors of others and how we really kind of have these sequences of the interpersonal patterns so yeah oh one uh getting one question to repeat what IP stands for it stands it stands for interpersonal pattern and yes they do use it also for um INTC psychic but it stands primarily for uh oh interactional pattern excuse me interactional pattern is what it stands for so you can also have it think of interpersonal inter psychic they all start with i but interactional is the formal word that um Tom and his colleagues use so great well I hope you enjoyed this I hope it was a nice introduction to the IP scope and um hopefully it helps you kind of flesh out some of what is in the integrative chapter okay everyone well thank you so much for joining me it was great to have you here and um I wish you well good luck and I look forward to hopefully having you join me in another session in the future [Music] bye-bye