Hi Christeine,

Here is an excerpt from the FAP manual that we have been working on. I'm
of course interested in feedback anyone on this list has to offer as
well. It is something I came up with fairly quickly and am not really
committed to it - just wanted to get something on paper. As you will
see, I tried to incorporate varioius views and positions of the FAP
community in it.

Jonathan

FAP Therapist Qualities
FAP therapists are expected to have established in their repertoires the
repertoires they are trying to shape in their clients  without them the
FAP therapist may not be able to identify and respond to client CRBs
naturally and at the right time. Just as we expect client behavior to
generalize from outside the session to the therapy relationship,
therapist behaviors will generalize as well. Thus, perhaps the most
important therapeutic skill in FAP  noticing and appropriately
responding to CRB2s  requires that FAP therapists have solid
repertoires related to noticing positive qualities in other individuals
and sharing with those individuals how one is reacting to those
qualities. Certain repertoires, difficult to operationalize
behaviorally, related to charity, giving, and being kind and loving, are
important to FAP therapists. Our behavioral model holds that these
repertoires will not show up reliably in therapy unless they reliably
occur outside of therapy. In short, FAP therapists should be good,
caring, loving people.

A considerable degree of interpersonal sensitivity and empathy appears
to be required of FAP therapists in detecting and responding to CRBs.
The process of discussing interpersonal repertoires as they happen live,
providing explicit feedback to clients about the impact these
repertoires have on the therapist as it is happening, requires
considerable sensitivity and skill in identifying, contacting and
responding to interpersonal contingencies as they are occurring.
Providing negative feedback well, without being overly punishing,
requires therapists to truly care deeply about their clients and to
demonstrate strong resolve in the face of avoidance tendencies that may
be evoked by difficult, intimate conversations and connection.
Therapists must have well-developed repertoires for discussing conflict
and intimacy. Thus, therapists who lack interpersonal sensitivity, have
difficulty with self-disclosure, or tend to become avoidant in
emotionally-demanding situations may have difficulty fully implementing
FAP.

How to achieve these qualities, and how to define them behaviorally,
remain open questions in the FAP community. Callaghan (2001) has
developed the Functional Assessment of Skills for Therapists (FAST) that
therapists and supervisors can use to develop a conceptualization of
therapist Os and CRBs that can be applied to training FAP therapists,
but most FAP trainers have yet to incorporate or try this system. Some
senior FAP therapists have become interested in mindfulness practices as
a way to facilitate the acquisition of some of these qualities; however
other senior FAP therapists disagree about the usefulness of such
practices. It is clear that mindfulness practices have yet to be fully
understood functionally. Thus, currently only loose agreement among
senior FAP therapists and trainers exists about the exact nature of
important FAP therapist qualities such as those described above and how
to achieve them. The discussion has not achieved technical precision or
complete consensus.


C. Terry wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I'm currently in the process of developing my Generals paper and one of
>the topics that I'm interested in is whether there are therapist
>characteristics/behaviors that make a person more amenable or capable of
>doing FAP. Can anyone do FAP? Or, are there individual
>characteristics/behavioral repetoires that are required in order to do
>FAP? What behaviors/characteristics make a person more likely to do FAP
>and moreover, to do FAP well?
>
>Thanks for your help,
>-Christeine
>
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>Christeine M. Terry
>Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Research Group
>University of Washington
>Department of Psychology
>Guthrie Annex 1 Room 134
>Box 351525
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>206-685-7462
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--
Jonathan W. Kanter, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor and Clinic Coordinator
Department of Psychology
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201
Office: Garland Hall 238C
(414) 229-3834