The Science of Interaction: Relationships in and out of psychotherapy using the structural analysis of social behaviours (SASB) with Dr. Ken Critchfield Part 1

Dan is joined by Dr. Ken Critchfield to dive deep in the science of interactions. Dr. Critchfield is Associate Professor and Program Director of the Clinical Psychology Program of the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Yeshiva University.

Dr. Critchfield discusses his creative aspirations, particularly in pottery and music, and how these interests intersect with his professional journey in psychology. He delves into the SASB model, a framework for understanding interpersonal behavior (7:14), emphasizing the importance of relationships and the influence of his mentor. Then, Dan and Dr. Critchfield discuss the dimensions of SASB (28:34), including focus, affiliation, and interdependence, and how these concepts apply to therapeutic contexts and personal interactions.

Special Guest: Dr. Ken Critchfield

Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB): A Primer for Clinical Use

IRT Institute

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Transcript

Broadcasting from the world. Host Dr. Dan Cox, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia.

Welcome to episode number 20 of psychotherapy and applied psychology, where we dive deep with the world's leading applied psychology researchers to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and hopefully have some fun along the way.

I'd love for you to send in your questions, whether they're for me on any topic or for past guests.

I'd be happy to reach out to them and share their answers in future episodes.

In the show notes you'll find several ways to get in touch with me.

You can leave me a voice message, send me a text, drop me an email or connect on social media.

Today I couldn't be more excited to welcome one of the world's foremost experts on the science of human interaction.

My guest is an associate professor and program director of clinical psychology at Yashhea University.

He's a a fellow of APA society for the advancement of psychotherapy and has held several leadership roles with the society for the exploration of psychotherapy integration.

He's also just published the bookstructural analysis of social behavior, a primer for clinical use.

In part one of our conversation, we discuss the structural analysis of social behavior, or the SASB, for short, how to use the relationship therapeutically, Lorna Smith, Benjamin, and interpersonal reconstructive therapy, or IRT.

This episode begins with my guest telling me about the job he would do if he wasn't doing the one he's doing now, so without further ado, it's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Ken Critchfield.

My fallback plan and the thing I even crave sometime, even though I have no experience with it is to be a potter.

I would make pottery.

I would throw mud and get really messy, and and I think I have that image in mine and crave that because so much of what I do is uh verbal and relational and in my head.

And it's always seemed to me that something like that would be much more just like visceral and embodied and I would enjoy that.

In in truth, I would probably become bored by that after a little while and need some balance, but um that that's always been kind of my fallback plan that I tell to myself is like, well, I can always do pottery.

I don't think there's any money in it.

I don't think it's that kind of pottery, but I can be doing something Have you ever done it?

No, not really.

Which is kind of the weird part of my answer is like it's just I like the image of it.

That's um in in in my secret other life I'm a musician, so that's probably a a little bit more of a thing that I would actually follow up on.

What does that look like?

Um I know we can link to this too.

I I play bass, usually upright bass. Um a lot of experimental like free jazz has been where uh my interests are in about every 10 years I put out a CD of original work or whatever I'm doing at the time.

Wow, all right.

That's great.

Oh, well, and and actually, I mean, this is something that if you don't mind me spinning off a little further on this, it it's a part of me that I used to think of as being separate from being a psychologist, being a therapist and thinking about people and sel.

And I think what I learned through this very improvisational approach to playing music with other people.

We we would um spontaneously improvise in it.

I'm not sure it was music a lot of times.

It was a bit more like sound making, but I I got a deep appreciation for how if if folks are listening and they have some manner of voice and intend to get along in some way, then interpersonal process, relationships, personality actually bubbles out of interactive cycles.

And I was hearing that in in musical improvisation and I I think it informed a lot of this kind of felt sense of of what we do when we're talking or doing anything else we do with each other.

So that leads right into how you got into studying the structural analysis of social behavior or what we're going to call the acronym is the SASB. Okay, can you talk a little bit about how you got into that?

Yeah, um you know, it goes all the way back to being an undergrad for me, and I was at the University of Utah, where Lorna Smith Benjamin was on the faculty and um I I finally realized I'm interested in psychology instead of uh artificial intelligence and math and music and everything else I explored for a while. And uh ended up in a graduate psychopathology class that Lorna was teaching.

And I've always been interested in abnormal psychology, psychopathology, people suffering and and what it means and how to think about it. Um But the thing that I think I I had coming into life at that point was just a sense that there is something about people that isn't exactly rational, but it makes sense.

And so is sort of developing a language internally for myself about an emotional logic to things.

And I think what that class taught me is that what I was trying to look for is is a phrase probably more like a relational logic. Um and a lot of times in lay conversation, when we talk about something emotional, we mean relational and relational.

We emotional and they're all kind of fused together because I think we have strong feelings about relationships.

So I learned about the SASB model in Lorna's class focused on how to understand different kinds of psychopathology. And they're sort of a different, especially with the personality disorders, a different set of learning histories and manner of expressing oneself and relating to self and others in the present that's just part and parcel of of that domain.

And I was hooked and I said, okay, I'm going to go to grad school and we'll see how it goes.

And I get lucky enough to land there at the University of Utah.

I didn't study with Lorna at first.

I was studying with um a guy named Bill Henry, who was a student of Hans Stras and so they were using SASB actively in that research as well.

So I was always sort of Lorna Benjamin adjacent through graduate school and then ended up going back to study directly with her as part of setting up the IRT clinic as a postdoc.

And so I think I got hooked with Sazby from the beginning, but I was also as a graduate student, going through a path that was much more of a general common factors, the relationship matters and is itself transformative uh this this kind of an ethic, uh, and as a psychotherapy researcher, I think I was sort of a skeptic and and still am in terms of everything seems to work just fine and why are we doing all these RCT studies to see that therapy works.

I mean, I was never very interested in in the question, does therapy work?

I was always in the into the question of how does therapy work?

Or why does therapy work?

It's a conversation of all things.

And um so when I went back to work with Lorna, the I thought, well, IRT will probably work as well as everything else does.

And, um what would be a fair test, I thought that I could bring to the table is uh to understand the model really well.

And it has some interesting challenges about the need to tailor treatment to each individual in terms of their relationship history and what their goals are relative to that history.

So it's um it comes from a research point of view, it comes with the challenge of one-sized does not fit all.

It's a set of principles for particularizing therapy and tailoring it to the needs of individuals.

And I thought, well, that's a vexing research challenge.

And so I got hooked in numerous ways in terms of SASB as a way of tracking patterns and to test some research hypotheses. Um but it was supervising right alongside Lorna for some years while trying to set up the clinic and get the research going that, um, you know, I took on some clients and was part of the mix and was as engaged as anyone else was, and found that um what used to feel like a probability field to me about whether or not this patient or that patient would get better or if this way of understanding the relationship or approaching something would lead to a better conversation or worse, it my sense of what I was doing as a therapist shifted from something that kind of matched the literature about the probabilities of whether or not it would be helpful, and it shifted over into something that felt much more causal and predictable, so even when things weren't going well, I had a very, I thought good sense of why and would try to do something about it and yeah, I set a whole lot there about myself.

Yeah, there there is a lot.

So, um, I'm thinking, I'm trying to think.

So let's do very briefly.

So, um, back me up.

Let's break let's just do the quick because we're going to talk about um Lorna Benjamin quite a lot in this conversation.

Could you just give like the 30 seconds for the listener who who that is?

Yeah.

Lorna is a as a friend of mine and a colleague and like a family member to me at this point, but she's in in full retirement and has had a a well, her retirement with some health concerns that make it so that she probably doesn't remember me very well anymore.

And I I just want to jump in real fast.

And so um Marta is really the she's founder player Right.

Go ahead.

She's the founder of IRT, the developer of SASB.

She has a long history, but a professional version of it starts in grad school in the 50s, where she's working with Harry Harlow in the recess monkey lab at Madison, Wisconsin and this is in the same period of time that John Bolby is developing and articulating a attachment theory and she at some point has a story about being the grad student who picks up Bolby from the airport and brings over to Harlow and hangs out while they have conversations and takes them back to the airport.

And um she she grows up in this crucible of attachment theory.

She's supervised for a time by Carl Rogers, so there's the humanistic piece represented in her work. Uh she is also working with some very deeply behavioral paradigms as well as psyodynamic paradigms. And uh her etethic has always been about having a scientific basis for what she saw some very charismatic therapists doing at the time.

And she said, you know, there's a a rhythm and a meaning to this and there's a science to it.

And so her um method of therapy actually evolves out of it is very autod didactic kind of space of taking copious notes and rough transcripts almost while she's doing therapy sessions and then going back and analyzing them afterwards for herself. And a part of that is applying what becomes the SASB model to understand relationship narratives and also the here and now process in therapy.

And and the real origins of this as we model is in observational studies of the Harlow's monkeys.

And I just want to say, and we're going to talk about your book a lot during this conversation.

Yeah, and we won't be able to get through much of it just because of the length the amount of time that we have. Uh But in the I know I have a couple points in the conversation I' planning on referencing it specifically, but I I think it's in your first chapter where you you talk about Lorna and you talk about sort of things.

And I I was just like as I was reading it, um first of all, for a for a, you know, a book written for a psychologist, it has a very like, you know, the the prose of it or much more engaging than often.

And when I was reading your um your part where you're talking about your relationship and Lauren and that sort I sort of like started to like, my eyes were misting up a little bit.

I was just sort of like, ah, you know, is just so I think that for anybody who wants to get a good sense of her her history, her sort of her academic intellectual, where where her work comes from, but also sort of more more of the personally meaningful stuff.

You know, it really, at least I felt it reading the book and frankly, much more than I expected to.

Well, thank you for that.

I think the point of all this work is that everything is is about relationships and and the relationship she and I formed is um incredibly important to me and I think it was to her too.

I I want to make sure that in all all these conversations, all the work that I do, that, um them keeping in line with what we have developed together, I really have a great respect for her.

And I don't know, I guess it's more than respect.

It's like we're family, though I know her family too, and I don't want to presume to jump that train.

It's just like we we have a relationship has been very meaningful.

And I tried to capture some of that in the in in that um opening piece because it feels like a an important moment for both of us to have this book come out after about 20 years of working together and um with her probably not being able to read it.

And so I want to honor everything we've done and I consider myself to be sort of standing on the shoulders of giants and she was as well, and hopefully the work can go on because it's bigger than either of us.

So as an entry point, because what I'd like to do if this seems reasonable and feel free to pivot me at any point, as I'm sure you've lectured on this many times and I'm sure you have the shorter version longer version.

But I was thinking before we got into the nuance of it, the nitty gritty of it, if we can try to do big picture conversation about the SASB?

Yes, sort of what it is, how it works.

And so in an attempt to sort of at least initially to give the listener a sense of what the SASB is, I have a quote from your book that I thought was very helpful, which is you say, SASB is a model for describing, organizing, and making predictions about interpersonal behavior.

I was thinking that's a that that sentence is really useful. Uh and then I was thinking then, could you sort of riff off of that in terms of helping us understand big picture what the SASB is?

Yes. The whenever I talk about SASB, I'm aware I'm possibly talking to two different audiences and one audience feels like this is um overwhelmingly nuanced and complex and I want to simplify it for that audience because I I don't fully agree with that view. Though I like words like nuanced and complex and sophisticated, like it can be all those things.

There's another audience where it's just like, so what?

It's it's sort of it's it's very basic and what do we do with that?

And I guess it's true the way in which both of those are true, hopefully it will make sense with this metaphor.

And that uh what's S ASI is is basically a measurement device. Um It's some fancy kind of ruler, basically, where, um what it allows you to do is measure, basically just describe how people relate to one another.

And that can be applied at whatever level you want to do, just like you can walk around with a ruler and measure whatever you want to measure. You can do that with SASB.

And so if you are trying to get a sentence of sentence by sentence, how you and I are relating to one another, you can use SASB to say, oh, say Ken just said this and it codes out this way.

Dan just said this, it codes out this way, and then you can watch our descriptive moments play out over time to create patterns.

You could also ask me to fill out a questionnaire using this Hasby thing as a model and I can give you a profile for how, you know, my relationship with someone looks over time or how I see this or that thing in interaction with it.

So it's it's really just a measurement system that lets you say what's happening in a relationship and that can be a narrative.

It can be something you watch.

It could be something you perceive and report about.

So this can be something to use to describe what's happening in psychotherapy in terms of what's happening between client and therapist, and that can be both in a given moment and then in general.

Isn't that right?

That's right.

That's right.

Absolutely.

And and the same for any sort of relationship story someone brings in or their history of their memories of relationships and important people in their lives, those can be characterized in the same model.

And and one of the very nice applications for therapy is is it's not too hard to get into a space where you understand people's histories, their interactions in the present, the nature of their problems, their therapy goals, and the way they're relating to you in a session, you can have all of that in the same metric. Uh, which is fabulous for research, um to have everything in the same metric and and oriented within a conceptual space.

It's also, I think, very grounding and centering from as a therapist to track everything relationally. Um that the IRT therapy model will make some claims about how um relationships with self and others have different kinds of symptoms as uh sort of a side effect for maladaptive ways of relating.

But just as a model of describing behavior, that's all SASB is.

Everything else is sort of applications and hypotheses and assertions about what different patterns mean.

And that was something, again, if we we're sort of talking broadly here, that, you know, the the underlying assumption, correct me if I'm wrong, is that yes, it does describe behavior, um and that there is uh there's a depth to that, though.

And you just said you said earlier in our conversation, um, you know, when we say relational, we mean emotional and we say emotional, we mean relational so that like that there is the idea of whether, you know, I guess what are some of those sort of broad conceptual frameworks in terms of like how you can make sense of those behaviors as they relate to underlying phenomena within the person?

Well, I mean, to answer that, this actually might be a good time to sort of introduce well what is this way of talking about behavior and what's meant and what isn't meant and what's measured.

And the SASB model really just boils down to three distinctions. Um We can do fancy things with those three distinctions, but I think of it like this.

It's like we're all used to navigating and looking at three dimensional space.

It's just three dimensions of space and it can hold that in mind.

And and Lorna's theory actually says this is a very primitive sort of orienting and perceiving system that we have, as primates probably all herd animals to some degree have this.

And the distinctions are these three that the labels for them are focus, affiliation and interdependence. Uh focus is basically who's this about?

Is it about you or me?

Um It can be fancy and that we can be jointly about us together, but typically, um, you you can think of any given interaction in terms of what's its intentional focus. Am I focused on you or am I focused on myself?

The second dimension is affiliation, which is how um friendly versus hostel is the space that we're in, where the way we're interacting.

And uh the third is interdependence versus independence.

It's like how much are we coordinated and and shaping each other's behavior as opposed to, you know, you go your way, I go mine.

And each of these is affiliation and interdependence are along a smooth continuum.

And so you put all those three together and every behavior has an attentional focus, a degree of friendliness versus hostility and a degree of interdependence versus independence.

And and that's the whole thing.

Lorna would say, you know, two monkeys meet in the jungle and they have to figure three things out really quickly.

Who's this about?

Are we friendly or hostile and are we together?

Are we separate?

And that's the whole thing.

So I was thinking the revalue in digging into this a little bit.

And as I was reading and really trying to get a strong understanding of these three dimensions and how they relate to one another. The way that I found, I was thinking about is, all right, let's sort of walk through or, you know, help the listener understand it.

So perhaps if we were to first start on the so there's sort of the um the focus.

So like other versus self and there's two parts to that self thing, but let's just leave that out for a moment.

So that if we were to walk through and maybe give a little bit of an example or some examples and help the listener understand and if we just start with the other focus, because in some ways, I feel like that's the easiest, so we get your head one's head wrapped around.

So what does on the affiliation dimension, what what does that sort of hostile or friendly look like when focusing to the other towards another?

Yeah.

Well, the um this dimension runs the entire possible range of human behavior.

That's the intent.

And so on the friendly side at the extreme, like it's a visual spatial model, uh on paper, right?

So this we're talking about a horizontal dimension and on the um this is my right hand, on the on the right is the extreme of loving, uh friendly connections.

So um these are direct expressions of love from one person to another.

It can be verbal like I love you.

It can be physical.

It can be a hug.

It can be, you know, laughing at telling jokes with each other.

It's it's wonderful connection.

It can be sexual, but sex can be all over the place, but like the prototype of something very, very loving and connecting would be over there. Um The opposite of this is the other pole of the dimension, which is the extreme of hostility.

This is like murderous attack and annihilation and destruction of one person focusing on another to do that to them.

So we we go from the extreme of love to the extreme of like destructive.

And if you're thinking from one person to another, that includes interpersonal violence, um you can expand this out to be, you know, thinking about nation states relating to each other or whatever, but you get kind of abstracted that point, but but that's the dimension.

And when it's focused on another, it's, well, until we talk about focus on self- I won't start distinguishing between things, but it's it's loving to hating.

So if I run into somebody I haven't seen in a while, what would the what would the what would I do?

What would be a behavior that I might elicit or that I might engage in, that would that you would code as loving and then what would be the one that you would code or on the uh the hostel or heating side?

Oh, you know, um, you know, to to welcome them and say hello and reach out your hand and shake the hand, give a hug and make eye contact.

Like this is all friendly stuff. Um Even much less intense more sedate, uh, like a a knowing nod and a look in the eye of of ICU and, you know, we'll talk later.

Like that's that's friendly too. Um There's sort of just shades and degrees and intensities of it.

There's a neutral point of neither friendly nor hostile, I just sort of being in the same space together and not saying or doing anything in particular about it.

And then we shade in the hostile direction towards um looking upset with someone as they walk in to, you know, making a rude gesture or something like that or launching into an attack when you see them.

Like it it really runs this extremity of of a range.

And it's it's context dependent too.

So like the example of I meet someone I haven't seen for a long time sets a certain kind of stage if you had set a different stage of um I'm a therapist and I am in the middle of a session with my patient and I ask, you know, I I'm sorry that you tell me more about that or I I feel some way about the thing that you're telling me.

Like these are friendly things to say that are are in that context, that um the therapy, um coding therapy transcripts is really interesting to me because there's an intimacy and a sort of like low intensity relatedness that's happening there that in other settings, it's like if you if you code marital interactions, that they're all over the place and be quite intense at times.

And therapeutic interactions, it's um they can be wide ranging, but they usually aren't.

It's usually much more like subtle degrees of friendliness happening or a withdrawal of friendliness instead of or even even hostility is pretty subtle in those settings.

And I would think that I mean part of the reason why the friendliness you wouldn't go too far to the extreme is because there is this professionalism.

Oh yeah, yeah.

It's it's very rare that you'll we have whole conversations about should I give my client a hug or not in this or that setting?

It's like, oh, because it's too unmoderated in its warmness and might imply other things.

Yeah.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, I was thinking that, you know, if I'm talking to my daughter and she's telling me something that's upsetting to her, like there's it's very likely I'm going to be holding her while she tells me, you know, that I'm going to write.

And so there's this like very overt, clear and intentional, right?

Like I am communicating while she's telling me this, I love you and I'm here for you and like right and where that's not typically the therapeutic, but what would be appropriate to do in the therapeutic context. .

That's right.

And and in the the SASB model was not developed just for therapeutic context.

It was intended to track all kinds of basically primate behavior that the original version of it in 1973, I found I have a copy of the book over here and the original language and it was straight out of the primate clinic.

It was like grooming behaviors and all this like non-verbal signs of connectedness.

Right.

Right.

So then then, okay, so that's the that's the affiliation dimension.

So now let's talk about the interdependence dimension when it comes to relating to others.

The prototype of extreme interdependence is one person exerting a lot of power, controlling another person and the other person submitting.

Like if you imagine, um that it doesn't have to be a hostile version.

It could be just sort of like a military order, sort of a context.

Is one person's in control and determines what happens and the other person uh does or must respond in kind.

That's an extreme of interdependence. That two people can almost be thought of as one functional unit together.

The extreme opposite of that is sort of like, um unrelated people passing each other on the sidewalk without comment or notice.

It's it's a neutral sort of you you're going your way.

I'm going mine. Um it's it's it's a type of relationship, but you might also think of it as a type of not having a relationship.

And um, those are the extremes.

The the dimension between them crosses a middle point that is neither separate nor connected, neither independent nor interdependent.

And as you move out from that zero of the neutral point, if you move towards the kind of control, submit configuration, you get degrees of coordination and responsiveness between two people.

And as you move uh up on the model towards independence from the zero point, you get degrees of more independent separate behavior and encouraging other person or allowing the other person to be themselves.

If you the parent thing, I think the parent to kid thing is is useful, uh because we can we can all empathize with it in one way or another, put ourselves in those shoes.

So oh, if the parent ahead this this the simple version is like if you think about a parent in relation to a child, you're going to tell the child what to do, you know, put those toys away, get over here. Versus allow the kid just to roam and do whatever they want to do is get the other extreme.

So that the parent that's moving in a determining action and specifying what must be done is a one part of the model and the opposite part of the model is just allowing the kid to do whatever or even encouraging them to go do whatever.

And within the SASB model, the classifying code and classifying of behavior is not dependent on what the other person does, right?

So if I'm the parent and I say, you know, go put your to you, go straighten up your room, that you would code that or classify that as a more, um, uh, uh controlling behavior regardless of if the kid did it or not.

Right?

Because my intention my behavior, my intention, everything behind it was I'm trying to control them.

They may or may not listen, but I'm trying to.

It's it's a verb.

Right.

And and so um then the kid, as we all know, you're you're pulling for compliance submission on the model. Uh, but people have their own minds and wills and they'll do whatever they want and and that can be characterized somewhere on the model as well.

And and if it is in a complementary mode to what you did.

So if you try to control and then they comply or submit, that is the language of a complementarity.

And there is some research about how one type of behavior pulls for another.

It even works the other way if you submit with someone there's a pull for the other person to control you.

So its sequences are interesting when this comes into play. Um but it's not the only determining feature of how someone will react to a given prompt so a kid could be told to put the toys away and then go run outside from you and and escape from you. Um or they could uh launch some kind of aggressive attack on you or they could uh you know, try to hug and love up on you instead of complying and that's a yet another move.

There's all sorts of um positions on the SAview model where you combine the degree of friendliness or hostility with the degree of interdependence or independence, and then you can describe what one partner is doing relative to the other and then what the other partner is doing in response.

And once you have the picture of both people, you can start to say certain things about what you predict or or how you how you see the system functioning over time.

So so so you can be controlling without necessarily having a submissive person around you.

It's sort of like the attempt to control.

Generally within SASB framework, do folks think about like um that in therapeutic context that if how my client responds to me that that I'm able to make sense of that behavior um in terms of their under more underlying personality types of dimensions or attachment types of dimensions or those sorts of things.

Yes.

Although, um, I want to preface that we say most therapy studies, um are probably exactly as you would imagine that that most therapists are being friendly, not to an extreme, but moderately so, and patients are responding to that with friendliness as well.

The focus is usually on the patient, so the therapist is focusing on the other person and the patient her client is their focusing on themselves in terms of what they're talking about and its implications.

And then um there's sort of a range on the vertical dimension for interdependence about sometimes it's uh something maybe from the therapist is a bit more didactic or interpretive and has some more power to it about what should be done, maybe an assignment of a homework or advice about how to understand something would be lower on the model, have more interdependence involved, where warm protection is pulling for warm trust. And then further up on the model with kind of the more regrian, I'm okay, you okay, space.

The therapist would be seeking understanding or showing affirmation, expressing empathy, um patience would be in a complimentary position of disclosing about themselves and their experience and being open, but but owning a self that's kind of separate, uh that can describe an experience without having that be determined by someone else.

And so like that that dance of mostly what's called Cluster two and cluster four on the formal model is most of therapy.

And and that includes when somebody's personality disordered or when somebody's depressed or when somebody's this or that, the the relational space when it's characterized by safety and a good alliance and collaboration is is basically just those two positions on the model.

And then, um, but part of what I I try to make a case for in the book is that where relationship problems happen, alliance ruptures, uh, signs of pathology or prior trauma histories or other similar influences when they show up in the relationship.

They usually show up as little deviations away from that that primary baseline.

So it's not like someone comes in and and they're just chronically mean to their therapist.

I mean, it happens, but it's not the baseline therapeutic experience. Um it's usually more something something slips.

A certain topic comes up, there's a frustration and and then uh the patient is sulking or the therapist becomes critical and it's not always or or misses something and is neglectful.

It's not exactly intentional.

It's more just behavior happens and it can be picked up on.

It's usually a little bit subtle, but it's present and can be talked about. Uh that that's the kind of thing that is often linked linkable back to uh early history or or some true error that happened in the therapeutic process where they just got afoul of each other misunderstanding something.

So we've talked about sort of these more other focused, sort of putting these the affiliation dimension and the independent interdependence dimension for the other focused.

And now focus on the self sort of the so there's two aspects to that.

I don't know if we should should we well, I like to frame it a little bit differently than that.

I think if we go down the road of two aspects, it'll become confusing.

I want to parse it a little bit differently.

So these um there is a third focus called the interject and it's something that I want to circle back to after we talk about the other two, because it's basically intracesychic.

It doesn't involve other people.

It's just one person in relation to themselves. Uh the the other two things we're talking about, focus on other and focus on self is in the context of a at least a two person interaction.

And so what we've talked about so far, focus on other is sort of prototypically parent-like in relation to a child.

Or you can think about it being mostly where a therapist is.

They're focused on another person.

And it's it's a deviation from the norm if a therapist is being very disclosing or focusing on their own lives in a in a therapy session.

So focus on other is very parent-like, therapist-like transitive attention on the other person is the definition.

Focus on self is the kind of complementary position of of the prototypically childlike set of behaviors or the in some ways prototypically patient or clientlike role, where the focus is on the self, the sort of the content and the concerns have to do with the person doing the behaving.

And so it's a technically intransitive positions, intransitive verbs.

So submitting to another person is the complement of control that we've talked about.

So maybe if we sort of start there, um trusting is something I brought up earlier as kind of the self-focused complement of protecting.

So if you protect me and you're focused on me, I would trust in you it's about me, so it's labeled uh focus on self and trust.

This is where I think it gets confusing for folks because language gives a bunch of prototypes for the work, what the word trust might look like, and who trust would be about.

This this is a particular challenge, I think, for for research coding and for initial training in the SASB model is just getting used to how this something like trusting would be about the person doing the trusting, instead of about the person they're trusting in.

And so I want to acknowledge that there's some confusion there that's in potential with the slipperiness of words.

But the the meaning is focused on the self, as in it's about me, it's about my concerns that makes trust relevant.

So I so in in reading this and trying to get my head fully wrapped around it, what I wrote down in my notes was for for focus on self was I wrote response to the other.

Is that reasonable?

It's reasonable with a bunch of caveats.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

No, the caveats are that it doesn't have to be in a sequence or anything like that, but it's it's prototypically reactive and responsive.

That's arap on part one of my my conversation with Dr. Ken Critchfield.

As I noted at the top of the show, please send me your questions and thoughts using the links in the show notes.

Until next time Broadcasting from the world. Host Dr. Dan Cox, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia.

Welcome to episode number 20 of psychotherapy and applied psychology, where we dive deep with the world's leading applied psychology researchers to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and hopefully have some fun along the way.

I'd love for you to send in your questions, whether they're for me on any topic or for past guests.

I'd be happy to reach out to them and share their answers in future episodes.

In the show notes you'll find several ways to get in touch with me.

You can leave me a voice message, send me a text, drop me an email or connect on social media.

Today I couldn't be more excited to welcome one of the world's foremost experts on the science of human interaction.

My guest is an associate professor and program director of clinical psychology at Yashhea University.

He's a a fellow of APA society for the advancement of.