20th February 2015
This refers to the second stage of
, in which the KeyWorker exerts effort to make EXPLICIT his or her Intentional stance to the young person. It is a key aspect of Active Planning, one of the Core Features of AMBIT.
The point of making an explicit effort to broadcast our intentions is that we cannot assume that our clients' will have the kind of Relationship to help that would easily or implicitly assume that our approaches are well-intentioned. So the AMBIT KeyWorker is encouraged to verbalise his/her intentions: in the anxiety of the therapeutic encounter it is often hard for young people to Mentalize their therapist accurately.
This may occur in terms of their general aims of the intervention such as "being helpful" to the young person, or the specifics, such as "to register for a college course"... it may be self-evident to ME, as therapist, why I am saying and doing what I am... but the young person may have a rather different Relationship to help, which may bias the way that s/he responds to my innocent cues. My invitation to consider registering for a college course might be well-intended, but might be read my client as a move to separate her from her boyfriend, or to humiliate her mother, etc... If those were my true intentions, then it would make sense for my client to resist them, and I am unlikely to have any influence in that sphere!
This is a key element of what is required in the process of Engagement:
Intention can be expressed in moment to moment interactions, for instance:
Go to this link to download this in PDF format, or just use the back of an envelope!
Also, after writing about broadcasting intentions, we discovered a commercial site that, building on an I.T. Masters study, uses the idea of broadcasting intentions in a slightly different way but one which overlaps with our own ideas; that this is about increasing the "hit rate" of effective communications...
Von Kaufman's work doesn't really address the fact that in AMBIT we are particularly concerned with the idea that the OTHER PERSON (ie our client) may be having particular difficulty in mentalizing us (the worker) accurately, but we put it here because it is quite interesting (the academic paper supporting this is quoted and linked to below):
The academic thesis supporting this work is here: Intention Broadcasting. Proceedings of I-KNOW ’09 and I-SEMANTICS ’09 - Von Kaufman, Richard (2009)
The point of making an explicit effort to broadcast our intentions is that we cannot assume that our clients' will have the kind of Relationship to help that would easily or implicitly assume that our approaches are well-intentioned. So the AMBIT KeyWorker is encouraged to verbalise his/her intentions: in the anxiety of the therapeutic encounter it is often hard for young people to Mentalize their therapist accurately.
This may occur in terms of their general aims of the intervention such as "being helpful" to the young person, or the specifics, such as "to register for a college course"... it may be self-evident to ME, as therapist, why I am saying and doing what I am... but the young person may have a rather different Relationship to help, which may bias the way that s/he responds to my innocent cues. My invitation to consider registering for a college course might be well-intended, but might be read my client as a move to separate her from her boyfriend, or to humiliate her mother, etc... If those were my true intentions, then it would make sense for my client to resist them, and I am unlikely to have any influence in that sphere!
This is a key element of what is required in the process of Engagement:
How to broadcast our intentions:
Intention can be expressed in moment to moment interactions, for instance:
"My intention here is just to try to understand more accurately what you are feeling, and why."or
"What I am trying to do here is to be helpful, or at least to think of some new ideas about this familiar problem, and definitely to to avoid being unhelpful!"Being clear about moment to moment interactions would be adopting an explicitly intentional stance.
"I may not have got things quite right yet, but these are the things that at the moment seem to me the most important ones for me to try to help you deal with... ...I would like to hear from you which bits you think I have got about right, and which bits I still need to work on so that you can recognise them more clearly..."
A tool to help this:
The important point is to get to the sharing of your "first effort" - and to invite the young person to help you improve it. When you are sharing your first effort, that is Broadcasting Intentions!.Go to this link to download this in PDF format, or just use the back of an envelope!
Theory - why do this?
- See one of the Videos - at Active Planning for a description of this.
- Making intentions explicit addresses the likelihood that the young person who is help-seeking may well also anticipate mixed, even hostile or manipulative intentions in the helper (see Relationship to help for more exploration of this.)
- This also relates to the notion of Marked mirroring in which the carer's "marking" (accurate mentalizing of the predicament of this moment) opens the young person's mind to accept the communication that follows as being interesting or important.
- For those interested in the technical theory behind this, it is a good example of what is referred to as Ostensive communication - see work by Gyorgy Gergely in Academic references.
- The broadcasting of our intentions is also a feature of the tentativeness, and not-knowing that characterise The Therapist's Mentalizing Stance
More examples of Broadcasting intentions:
“I need to get a picture in my head about the things that make you YOU, so that if you could look inside my head you might say… he’s just about got it!”
“My job is to make sure that I have got a really ACCURATE idea of the sorts of things that make your life hard, or that help you get by…”
“Some of the things I may ask you won’t have anything to do with you… but we find that if we don’t ask at all, often these things get left out - we miss stuff that might be important…”
“I don’t know you at all well, so if I ask you anything you don’t want to talk about, will you please let me know? I don't want to upset you at all.”
Broadcasting intentions... other people's takes...
See Tomasello et al (2005) Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition for an interesting account of this from the stand point of evolutionary anthropology.Also, after writing about broadcasting intentions, we discovered a commercial site that, building on an I.T. Masters study, uses the idea of broadcasting intentions in a slightly different way but one which overlaps with our own ideas; that this is about increasing the "hit rate" of effective communications...
Von Kaufman's work doesn't really address the fact that in AMBIT we are particularly concerned with the idea that the OTHER PERSON (ie our client) may be having particular difficulty in mentalizing us (the worker) accurately, but we put it here because it is quite interesting (the academic paper supporting this is quoted and linked to below):
The academic thesis supporting this work is here: Intention Broadcasting. Proceedings of I-KNOW ’09 and I-SEMANTICS ’09 - Von Kaufman, Richard (2009)