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Karin Schlanger, LMFT - Guest
Karin Schlanger, LMFT, was the Director of the Brief Therapy Center in MRI since 2008 until the sale of the building in 2019. She continues to be the director of the BTC currently. She has worked as a psychologist, supervisor in the Brief Therapy Model and professor at several universities internationally. She studied Psychology in the Universidad of Buenos Aires – Argentina and graduated in 1982. She arrived at the MRI in 1983 having heard of the work of John Weakland, Dick Fisch and Paul Wazlawick and worked with them until the end of their days. In 1990, she opened the Centro Latino de Terapia Breve to do research on how this pure American model of Problem solving can be applied in other cultures. This project continues today, working with low income Spanish-speaking families, who are at the worse end of society’s inequality. In 2012, she founded a NGO, Room to Talk, to offer psychological services to students, families and school staff at the school. She was the Executive Director. She has been a professor in several local Universities — University of San Francisco, Stanford University, School of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, College of Notre Dame de Namur, and other Universities of Spain — Valencia International University, Universidad de Abat Oliva, Institute Systemic de Barcelona. She is a supervisor in the Hospital of San Pau, in Barcelona. Karin is the author of a book that has been translated to 5 languages, and the author of many articles and chapters of lots of books throughout the years. Also, in 2012, she has started the Grupo Palo Alto Internacional, which was officially launched in Mexico, January – 2016. Currently, Karin trains and supervises therapists internationally as well as locally through county mental health programming. She provides trainings through the https://www.brieftherapycenter.org/ |
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W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. - Host
Dr. Sutton has always had an interest in learning from multiple theoretical perspectives, and keeping up to date on innovations and integrations. He is interested in the development of ideas, and using research to show effectiveness in treatment and refine treatments. In 2009 he started the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing a one-way mirror training in family therapy with James Keim, LCSW. Next, he added a trainer and one-way mirror training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and an additional trainer and mirror in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. The participants enjoyed analyzing cases, keeping each other up to date on research, and discussing what they were learning. This focus on integrating and evolving their approaches to helping children, adolescents, families, couples, and individuals lead to the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy's training program for therapists, and its group practice of like-minded clinicians who were dedicated to learning, innovating, and advancing the field of psychotherapy. Our podcast, Therapy on the Cutting Edge, is an extension of this wish to learn, integrate, stay up to date, and share this passion for the advancement of the field with other practitioners. |
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (00:22)
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Today I'll be speaking with Karen Langer, licensed Marriage and family therapist, who is the director of the Brief Therapy Center at the Mental Research Institute since 2008 until the building was sold in 2019. She continues to be the director of the Brief Therapy Center and has worked as a psychologist, supervisor, and professor at several universities internationally. She studied psychology in the Universidad of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and graduated in 1982. She arrived at the Mental Research Institute in 1983, having heard of the work of John Weakland, Dick Fisch, and Paul Watzlawick, and worked with them until their end of their days.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (01:17)
In 1990, she opened the Centro Latino De Terapia to do research on how this pure American model of problem-solving can be applied in other cultures. This project continues today working with low-income, Spanish-speaking families who are at the worst end of society's inequality. In 2012, she founded an NGO Room to Talk to offer psychological services to students, families, and school staff at the school. She was the executive director and she has been a professor in several local universities, University of San Francisco, Sanford University School of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, College of Notre Dame, and other universities of Spain, Valencia International University, Universidad de Abat Oliva, Institute Systemic de Barcelona. She's a supervisor in the hospital of San Paulo and Barcelona, and Karen is the author of a book that has been translated into five languages and the author of many articles and chapters of lots of books throughout the year. Also, in 2012, she has started the Grupo Palo Alto International, which was officially launched in Mexico, January 2016. Currently, Karen trains and supervises therapists internationally, as well as locally through county mental health programming. She provides trainings through her brief therapy at brieftherapycenter.org. Let's listen to the interview. Hi, Karen. Welcome.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (02:46)
Hi, Keith. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you again and to be able to have this chat.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (02:52)
Yeah, definitely. So, Karin, gosh, I first met you years ago. You were just teaching the workshops. I didn't get to know you very much back then when I went down to the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto and did some training with the Brief Therapy team. Then later on when I was with the Strategic Family Therapy team at MRI, we got to know each other and I was able to sit in on the one-way mirror you were doing, which was really great. And now we've kind of reconnected many years later as I've started the family institute of Berkeley and we're doing some one-way mirror trainings there. And I've been kind of reaching out to folks that were involved with MRI kind of trying to bring some of that spirit back since MRI closed some years ago. So I would love to hear about the brief therapy model and kind of what you guys are doing now. But before we even get into that, I always like to kind of hear the story of how you got to doing what you're doing, kind of the evolution of your thinking to kind of get here.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (03:51)
Well, how far back would you like to go? 'cause I'm old.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (03:58)
Yeah. Whatever you think is relevant.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (04:01)
Well, so I think what's interesting is becoming a psychologist in Argentina is a five-year endeavor after high school as opposed to the four and then some here. So during my training, I read the first four chapters of Pragmatics of Han Communication. And, in Buenos Aires, the majority of what was done in school is psychodynamic. In South America, Argentina produced a lot of psychoanalysts that the rest of the Latin Americans read. So we had our own crop of psychoanalysts that were very famous. So within that reading, pragmatics was like, “Oh, that's what I wanna be when I grow up.” So I held onto that, and then the way life takes you.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (05:09)
I re-met somebody who was actually studying at Stanford, and so I finished my degree in Argentina amidst the Dirty War. So that's where the military Junta was exterminating students that were smart. They would drug you, kidnap you, and then throw you in the river after torturing you, Courtesy of the School of the Americas. We could go on that tangent for a while if you want to. So I finished my degree in December of ‘82, and I had a ticket to come to MRI and to Stanford in January of ‘83. And, because I'd heard of course of Watzlawick and Weakland and Fisch and what they were doing, I arrived here and I went to the MRI. It was a rainy, nasty day.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (06:09)
It happened because again, life works that way. Carlos Sutsky was in that front office, and he heard me and he said, “Oh, who are you?” And I said, “well, I’ve just arrived from Argentina.” He said, “Come up to my office.”–This was January of '83–and it turns out he had gone, I didn't know who he was. And so he said, “Ah, come on up with me.” He said, “Well, who are you?” And so I said, “I'm Karen.” And he said, “Well, I went to school with your father in medical school,” which I had known, so I said, “So therefore you must be the director. You must be Carlos Sutsky.” That was my introduction to the MRI. So when people challenge me nowadays about what my credibility is with the Pre-Therapy Center, I just go back and tell that story. And so then Carlos left soon after that, and I went straight into John Len's office and I said, “I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. Would you let me come into your mirror?” And John, in his inimitable, generous-spirited way, said, “Of course, come on in.”
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (07:30)
Great.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (07:31)
And so that's how my story happened. And then I never left because this model, I always say, it's one of the good addictions that you can get. I have it fiercely. I love what I do. So then I started learning because once you are sitting behind a mirror with Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch, you cannot not learn.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (08:03)
And for people that maybe don't know of the Mental Research Institute, can you give just a quick explanation of MRI?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (08:10)
So the Mental Research Institute is this place that was founded by Don Jackson in 1959, at the same time as the Ackerman Institute was starting one year before. As the Ackerman Institute was starting in New York, Don Jackson and Nathan Ackerman started Family Process. Jay Haley was the first editor of that journal, which still exists. So when, when Carlos left the MRI, he was the editor at Family Process at the time. So I would schlep up to San Francisco and help him in the basement of one of the Painted Ladies. He lived in one of those. And so I was in a very beautiful, illuminated basement, and he would make me lunch every day, and I would correspond with all of the big people of the time.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (09:13)
So I had correspondence with Carl Whitaker and with Marie Bowen. All of the people that we know in family therapy would send their articles to Family Therapy, and Carlos needed to respond. So that's what I was doing when I first arrived, working with Carlos in the Family Process. So the MRI, it's an interesting thing because it was started in 1959 with Don Jackson who was at the time working for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation but was also in touch with the Bateson group. So when the Bateson group's financing for the NIMH dried up, Don Jackson invited Jay Haley, John Weakland, and Bill Fry to join the MRI there for a couple of years.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (10:16)
And they were bringing all the systems thinking and the cybernetics.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (10:19)
They were bringing Bateson in. But they were also going to Phoenix, Arizona to meet with Milton Erickson. And so there was this huge, rich culture of exchanges, of ideas, done. Gregory Bateson had Thursday night open houses, also. And so Watts came through and Fritz Pearls came through. Everybody that was just being somebody at Esalen would come through and they would all exchange ideas on Thursday nights. So just imagine the richness. And that's where the Brief Therapy model evolved from. So I still have this memo that Dick Fisch wrote to Don Jackson in 1965, wanting to start the Brief Therapy Center in which they were going to see in an environment in which the prevailing model was psychodynamics what changes they could implement in 10 sessions. These are the 10 sessions that I would argue still are the fundamental basis for all of the insurance models. So the pre-therapy started which was the Mental Research Institute. Virginia Satir was around at the time. She left soon after. Bill Fry left almost immediately because he got drafted to go to some war that the US was fighting someplace in the world.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (12:15)
And there were other people like Steve DeHeer. I think he was there.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (12:18)
Steve came much later. So then Jay Haley left in ‘67 to go work with Salian who was the director of training there. He worked with Sal Mnuchin for a while, and then he and Chloe Madani started the Family Institute in Washington, DC many years later. Tthe Brief Therapy Center started in ‘66. I'll argue, and stand by my argument, that it's actually the Brief Therapy Center that made the MRI famous. Because when you talk about the BRI, about MRI, you talk about Watzlawick, you talk about Weakland, you talk about what they were doing at the Brief Therapy Center. If the Breathe Therapy Center had not existed, the MRI would not have survived because it was a bunch of different people doing things of their own in their own offices.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (13:23)
And when Jackson died in ‘71, he was the one who held all of the groups together. And when he was gone, the whole thing would've fallen apart. And so what kept the ship going was the Brief Therapy Center. So that's why I am so passionate about sort of setting the record straight. So the MRI building was sold in 2019. In 2020, I started the Brief Therapy Center. I was the director of the Brief Therapy Center, already named in 2008 when Dick Fisch retired. So it's sort of a continuation of what we were doing at the MRI and we haven't gone away. Now it's a matter of convincing people that we know what we're doing, and they should learn about systemic and Brief Therapy.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (14:27)
So you mentioned Steve DeHeer. I met Steve. So we had a big conference at the MRI, one of the, what did they call them? I think it was the Milton Erickson Conference. They had a conference and they did them every other year. And there was a very big one that happened in 1983 in San Francisco. And at that conference, Carl Whitaker was there, Ronnie Lang was there, Dick and John and Paul, Peggy Pap. What is the name of the Berkeley German guy?
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (15:20)
Oh, I know, Marty? No.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (15:23)
No, no. Before him.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (15:27)
Blanking on it. I know what you're talking about though.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (15:30)
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (15:33)
Anyway, I can't remember. Marty Christba. Nope. No, he came later. Okay. Anyway, it'll come back. And if not, I will text you. I can't remember what his name was. I want to say Fritz, but I don't remember what his name is. I can see his face, of course. Anson Feld, constructivism Heinz Fund, all of these people that were founding ideologies in this model. So Anson Feld, he's got the chapter, I believe in the invented reality about constructivism. I was just sitting there, I was 25, and I got to meet all of these people. There were some funny interactions in the evening. There was a dinner set up and there were all these big rounds for all the presenters. And once the alcohol had circulated a little bit, there were some interesting interactions between those tables.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (16:44)
We had another conference in, ‘86 ‘87, I wanna say, where we had Michael White, and he came to Stanford.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (16:59)
Yeah, I was gonna say Michael White was there for a little bit.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (17:01)
Michael White was there, but later. And then, of course, Steve and Su met at John Len's House because both Steve and John Weakland were married to Chinese women. Anna was Chinese, and Sue was Korean, I believe. So they immediately clicked, and that's where that relationship started. In the late eighties, early nineties, Steve DeHeer kept coming back for supervision with John until he died. Yeah. He was the one that was very, very honest and upfront and said that when solution focus didn't work, he always went back to problem solving and having John Weakland in his head. And I really appreciate his candor and his honesty, because a lot of other people just took bits and pieces, and made them into big models but never really gave the credit where the credit was due.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (18:09)
Well, the way I've learned of Solution from Brief model is that attempted solution has become the problem. So to the 180 degree difference, and then solution-focused Steve Deheer and Sue Kimberg is the attempted solution is the problem. So instead go back to the strengths or whatever is working and do more of what was working. But similar in changing the system, but different, like you're saying and kind of different angles to it.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (18:39)
Exactly.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (18:40)
So systems theory and working systemically, are those synonymous with the Brief therapy? No. Or is that okay?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (18:52)
It's synonymous. To quote John Weakland, he always said that the Brief therapy, the problem-solving Brief therapy, which is what we are and what we do, is the minimalistic family therapy systems therapy way of promoting change. We don't need to see everybody in the system or in the family in order for change to occur. And what do we mean by that? He was a big tennis player, so of course he used tennis analogies. If you have a singles volley, you don't need for both of them to stop playing tennis. You just pick. If you want the game to end, you pick the person who seems the most tired and convince them to put down their racket and the match is over.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (19:52)
Yes.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (19:53)
So when you think in terms of systems and when you have Gregory Bateson in your head, you are constantly thinking in terms of interactions. You cannot not think of interactions. So immediately, even if it's something that sounds like an individual problem in your head, you're formulating these questions about who is this impacting? Who is it affecting? And what would they be saying about this? So you can promote change in the system because you cannot communicate without seeing anybody else in the system.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (20:50)
In a couple's situation, you don't need to see both members of the couple, one of whom is very often going to be very reluctant to be there. You can just work with the person who's the most motivated to promote change, and that will promote change in the system. So when you talk about systems, it's a way of thinking, it's a way in which you listen to the people that you are talking with. And almost immediately thinking, what would the other person or the other people in their surroundings be saying or be doing? What are they losing? What could they gain? And that is happening in your head as a problem solver with therapy.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (21:44)
So you can already kind of see how it's playing out in a context. In some ways, it's not just existing in a vacuum. But you can really kind of almost see that dance that's happening within the system.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (21:58)
A dance is a nice way of putting it. Absolutely. Yeah.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (22:02)
And one of the things that was interesting when I was at your training–somebody was discussing a case. They were an organizational psychologist, and they were talking about a work situation and how systems really applied in that work dynamic. And again, working with the individual in that. So it was really nice to take it beyond even just the system of the family, but the system of work.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (22:24)
Oh, absolutely.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (22:25)
Or larger systems that is.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (22:26)
Absolutely, absolutely. It's a method, it's a model that works very well in larger organizations. And what is interesting there is because the organization in the economy has to survive, the people that you're working with know at some level–and they're also less emotionally involved, I would argue–that they have to make a change. So it's much easier to get somebody to do something differently with their boss than it is to do with their spouse or with their child.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (23:08)
Yes.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (23:12)
Yeah. There's not that unconditional love, and they're just gonna be stuck with each other for better.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (23:17)
Absolutely. So it's a much more fun puzzle to solve because you can move faster, in my opinion. Because time is money, especially in the US. And so it does apply because it applies to any organization where there are hands involved. So everything is related to everything else, and so it just gets hard to make it linear sometimes.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (24:03)
So when working with clients, you don't necessarily have to be working with the whole system. You'd be working with part of the system, but you're always seeing the system as you're working and seeing as people are describing interactions and thinking about how those interactions are playing off of others. Can you talk about the model and kind of how you're starting off or what you're looking for, where you're looking to go in on change? You've been mentioning a lot about kind of who's most kind of motivated or, or kind of, you know, where, where you might have the most effect. I think you're talking about like that example with the tennis and finding the one that's most tired to put the racket down. Yeah.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (24:41)
Right. Right. So, the fact that we can work with individuals doesn't mean that we always choose to work with one individual. So, for example, so say somebody calls me, and I'm going back to couples therapy, just 'cause that example is fresh in my mind. And I was just talking to somebody who had seen two other therapists who said, “Well, if your partner isn't willing to come in, then there's nothing I can do. This is the end of the line.” And I, on the contrary, got excited – “No. Let me tell you what we can do.” At the beginning, they were very surprised, but changes were happening. So, because, so our, one of our concepts that there, that's, that's interesting is who is our client? We talk about clients, we don't talk about patients.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (25:40)
Patience has its roots in the same place as patients. And when people are hurting, patience is in short supply because people won't change as quickly as possible because something hurts. So we try to get the person that's the most motivated, the one that's hurting the most, to see us as soon as possible. And that will usually not be the child. Usually not more so with a teenager, but when you have a five-year-old, that poor 5-year-old, it, I'm sure it's having a rough time. I'm not saying they're not unhappy, but they have very little power in a family to make changes. So we, as quickly as possible, want to see both parents or a parent because they're the ones who will be able to implement the changes necessary so that everybody is having a better time in life.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (26:47)
Sure.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (26:48)
This is also an interesting way of looking at things because in more modern families what comes through our doors right now is fairly “easy” to adapt to seeing whoever is having the most difficulty. So I worked a lot in East Palo Alto with the families in the school there. I worked there for 20 years. So sometimes you have a grandma who's living at home with, I don't know, a 15-year-old son and three or four other kids because mom is in jail and dad has run off. And so if you are waiting for somebody else to show up, and the 15-year-old is being too protective of their younger siblings and helping grandma, that's what there is. And who am I to say as a therapist or as a consultant or anybody that that's not good? It's functional. So one of the things that I like about this model is that it's a functional way of helping people to get out of the hole that by definition they're in when they come asking for help.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (28:20)
So the function of the system kind of seeing all the different parts, and rather than kind of imposing any kind of judgments you have on how it should be, you're more seeing the system for what it is and how it's functioning.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (28:33)
You have what people bring in to you, yes. And then you make the best out of that. We're not trying to say that perfection is what we're trying to achieve. What we're trying to do is help people get out of a hole. And again, John Weakland would say, “When you have a problem, life is the same thing over and over again. And when you no longer have a problem, life is one thing after another.”
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (29:08)
We have a blog coming out that's gonna be on the pre therapy center website about how the holidays is a rough time for a lot of people because you are not allowed to be sad. You are not allowed to be blue. You have to be happy, you have to have the best decorations. You have to give the best gifts. Well, if you've recently lost a child, or you are aware of what is happening in the world, and you are not able to match the joy that's expected that's also functional. Who are we to say that those things are not important?
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (29:53)
Yes.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (29:54)
Right. So it's thinking about the system as the overarching it's about what we can do to help the person who's asking for help for their lives to be better. What change can we help them achieve that is achievable and will help them get the step in the right direction so that they're not in as much pain?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (30:29)
And so we do that by trying to work with the person who's the most motivated, but also with starting from the very beginning with what's the problem that brings you in here today? The problem we address head-on. There's nothing that people can tell us that we're going to be shocked at especially once you've been in business for 40 years, you've heard a lot of things. Also, we focus on the here and now, and that's what makes us effective and brief.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (31:04)
Yeah.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (31:05)
We try not to open doors because once you open doors in the past, you inevitably have to close them up. So that immediately extends therapy. That doesn't mean that we see people in a vacuum. We believe that people are the sum of all their past experiences, they bring their culture to the table. All of that is part of what we are thinking and we're finding out as we need to, but we're not going to go dig, we're not going to go find why. We're going to try to find out what the how is in the here and now and move forward. So we're trying to help people construct something in the future that will be more productive and less painful.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (32:04)
And you were saying too about engaging the person that's hurting the most, and I forget if it was the training I went to with you or somebody was talking about who's your customer versus kind of the window shopper and really identifying who is gonna be potentially the person you really need to connect with and the agent of change.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (32:28)
Yeah, you get the feeling of that very quickly. For example, you get a lady who's there sitting there who is there because she wants to reduce how much she drinks. You get this feeling of “I'm not getting the whole story,” or she's hesitant, or her stories are conflictual. So you really get the feeling that while she's not happy with her drinking, she's not unhappy enough to change it. So then the question becomes, “why are you here today?” And so then the why question in that situation is not really what, because we want to know the why, but it's because we want to sort of get a good idea of what made her pick up the phone that day as opposed to three months before or in two weeks.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (33:31)
What it gives you an idea of what's most important.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (33:34)
And so very often you are gonna get: “Well because my husband said that if I didn't come, he was divorcing me.” So that gives me an idea that per my client, the person who's really hurting is at home. But now my story needs to be in my head. How do I get him in here at least once to give me that point of view? So then what a question that I would ask is, “well, so if he hadn't said that, would you be here?” And the answer would most times be, “well, probably not.”
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:13)
Yeah. Yeah.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (34:14)
So that dialogue and the conversation that starts to happen in therapy then informs what is your next step as a therapist. So it's very much, and I sort of hesitate because I don't want to call it a game, but it's really a match of chess. Where you're thinking about the current situation, but you're also thinking about what your many next moves are going to be.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:48)
And being efficient with those moves.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (34:50)
Absolutely.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:51)
Yeah. What move is gonna have the most impact.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (34:54)
Absolutely. Yeah. Because what we want to do is to promote change in a painful situation.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (35:00)
Yeah.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (35:01)
So, yeah.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (35:02)
Okay. So yeah. So once you've got that engagement, they've put on the table what the problem is, what's your next move or what's your strength?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (35:10)
You're alluding that we should talk about the attempted solutions. So a piece of our lingo and our model is that people try and do and say things to alleviate the problem that brings them in with the best of intentions. But they're not working. It's usually a common sense solution for a kid who doesn't do their homework to say, “you need to do your homework. If you do your homework well, I will buy you more ice cream–” or, in Palo Alto, “–a Porsche or a Rivian. But if you don't do your homework, I will punish you by taking away the Rivian, the Tesla, or the Porsche.” But always the message continues to be you need to do your homework. And from our point of view, that common sense response by everybody around the kid, the teachers, the principal, the parents, the aunt, the doctor, everybody is what is actually keeping the problem alive.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (36:29)
It's the fuel that's keeping the fire going. So we have this thing where if we want the fire to go away, we stop doing what we call the attempted solutions. But that gets kind of tricky because you're basically going to ask this mom to tell their kid to not do their homework. That is not going to land well unless you have done your homework which is to really understand and to hear and to listen to how this person views the world and help them fit this new crazy reality that I would like them to try in words and in a reality in which she couldn't believe. And I'm talking about a mom in this case because that's what I picked. It would go something along the lines of, “well, you've done this, you've said this, you've tried this, you've tried that. It hasn't worked, and you are saying that you would like your child to become a good citizen. You want them to go to a good college. You want them to be responsible.” We have this crazy idea that in order to make him your son, your daughter, more them more responsible and better humans, they have to start to see the consequences of their actions. And so we would like you to think about telling your person that you've thought about how much responsibility you have taken on for their lives. And you don't wanna do that anymore because it's not teaching them the main values in life.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (38:38)
Now this of course, as I say, has to be said in a culturally appropriate way, couched in a way where this nice person who's asking for help can hear you. There is no such thing as resistance in our bottle. It's how much the therapist works to put it in a way where the recipient of this crazy message can hear it.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (39:06)
Yeah. Kind of helping put it in their language or reframe it in a way that makes sense. And that kind of goes with their motivations or their sensibilities.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (39:15)
Yes, especially if what you're gonna ask them to do is gonna sound bananas. Like, go home and tell your child not to do the homework and see what happens for the week, and then we can talk about it. So as opposed to many other models of systemic therapy, the strategic or the structural model, a lot of what happens with Terry and his interventions change happens outside of the session, not inside the session. We will build a scaffolding for the person to be able to go build a different reality, if you will, outside of our session. We're asking them to think about things and to maybe try something differently, and then come back and report. Then we will do the fine-tuning. So that's another way in which we're different from other systemic models.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (40:18)
So you're trying to get the thinking to shift in session. And then you're having them do something differently outside of the session and then bringing that information back.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (40:29)
Because hopefully that will produce a different and better result. So then what you're doing is you are building on the strengths of what they have done differently, and you can give them the credibility for what they have tried to do differently. So we're a very able bunch. We never know better than you.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (40:55)
You're not being as prescriptive about what they do outside. You're saying more like you're helping them see it differently, and then they have kind of the freedom to figure out how they're going to implement it.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (41:06)
Exactly. Got it. Got it. Exactly. So because, and they then get the credit because they're the ones who are doing the difficult, hard work of implementing this new way of looking at reality. So they get the credit, they get the laurels. We're just sort of mechanics behind how they were able to construct this different reality that hopefully is gonna work better for them.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (41:29)
Got it. Okay. Great.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (41:32)
So it has a lot of reminiscence. If Esther were here, she would be able to give you a lot more of the whole wellness thing that is based on people's strengths. There’s a lot of echoes of that in our model. There's a lot of listening to what people are able to do Yeah. And build on that. So in that sense, we are first cousins with the solution focused. We just have a little bit more mobility when the “hooray, hooray, hooray” doesn't work, we have a way of getting back on our feet.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (42:10)
Sure.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (42:10)
Having a different path forward, if you will.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (42:14)
And now is this, are these interventions kind of paradoxical? Or is that kind of a different approach?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (42:22)
I don't like the word paradoxical because it's been given a bad name. What we are doing from our point of view is carefully and painstakingly building something that hasn't worked and not encouraging people to do more of what hasn't worked. We're providing them with an alternative. The alternative usually is a non-common sense way of looking at things. And that's where the word paradoxical comes in. So, somebody who's been drinking too much, we're not gonna tell them to drink more. But we're going to set it up in a way in which instead of the wife throwing out all of the liquor in the house, she might wait for the husband to come back and say something like, “Wanna beer with me tonight?” Instead of her doing the abstinence, or so it's not paradoxical, it's doing less of what hasn't worked. Yes. And getting people to think about it that way.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (43:35)
Is this going into the concept of kind of any change to the system is gonna help kind of get it out of this kind of stuck place? That oftentimes kind of creating some change, some flexibility in the system is gonna help it to shift out of this kind of rigid, stuck, repetitive kind of sequencing?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (43:57)
We're always looking for the smallest change possible, because that's all we need to do, all as underlined and with our fingers crossed. So we're not trying to fix people's lives where they're never gonna have it better in their lives again. Right. Right. We're just trying to get them unstuck. Your words are the best ones. People come to us because they're stuck. We're trying to get them unstuck. And then life will be one thing after another. There you go.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (44:30)
The way I think about it too is that when you're thinking from an individual perspective, you're thinking, “oh, I have to work with that wife for like a year and doing psychotherapy or whatever, and then we'll do the couples therapy, etc.” It can be very overwhelming. But when thinking systemically small changes in different parts of the system can create big change because it helps kind of shift the system in a whole different direction. And it's not as much work as say, oh, that person's borderline, I have to do years of therapy with them, and then I have to do individual therapy, play therapy with the child for two years before they can get okay to talk to the parent and so on. So it's really that thinking that is a different way of thinking.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (45:16)
Correct. And the beauty of the way I see it, to expand on what you're talking about is, this model of therapy–or of change making–works for almost anybody or anything that walks through your door. And that keeps it interesting. If I had to see the same kind of people over and over again, I would just shoot myself with boredom. I'd be so bored. So this keeps it fun and it keeps it entertaining because of each puzzle. One of the things that I repeat over and over is that each case is its own best explanation. And so in that sense, each case is a new case. I was in Spain recently, and they made me a cup that says. Oh, so it says, in Spanish, each case is its own best explanation. I use that cup now.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (46:27)
That's great.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (46:28)
But you don't need to say, well, in this case I'm gonna do this in that case I'm gonna do blah, blah, blah, or in that case I'm gonna do EMD. You can, at least at the beginning, take what comes in and look at it as a new puzzle to fixl. And to change and to see how things are gonna match. So that's what I'm trying to reintroduce to this crazy United States of America.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (47:01)
It's something that backs the simplifying down rather than all these mixes and arrays of eclectic all over the place. Well, we're about out of time. Tell us about what you've been doing lately and what's kind of going on now with the Brief Therapy.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (47:18)
So the Brief Therapy, one of the things that Paul Watzlawick said that is it's most famous with the mile that you are away from Palo Alto. So we've been doing a lot of trainings online in Spanish, in Latin America, in Spain, and then, Spaniards and English and Spanish speakers who live around the world, which has been super fun. We have these groups that are mixed groups of therapists and teachers and sports people. We have a couple of artists. And they live around the world. They speak Spanish. And we've got a few people in Europe waiting for us to do it in English because they can speak some Spanish but not well enough. So we've done a few groups. We've up to the sixth generation of Spanish speakers.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (48:17)
We've got 50 people online, every Wednesday. That's been fun. We've been doing some trainings with a local county, and God knows they can use the ability to not see their revolving door clients that we're all paying for with our taxes. And then I've been doing a lot of work in China. So in China, you get these just ridiculous numbers. We did an open session, and we had 5,000 people on the Zoom. And from those 5,200 registered to do a five-week intensive training.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (48:59)
Great. Yeah. Can people that are listening to your trainings just sign up for other different workshops or intent?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (49:08)
Absolutely. We've been offering one a month. If you go to our website, the brieftherapycenter.org, it's all one word, the website is a little glitchy, but be patient. There's blogs on there that we try to put up every couple of weeks. There's a history of what happened with the MRI and that's where we tell you about our upcoming workshops. So we had one in November, they're free. So you registered through Eventbrite for the moment. There was one on paradoxes, and on December 8th, we're going to do one on the holiday blues.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (49:53)
Good.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (49:53)
And then you can always email Ether Kronner or you can get in touch with me. And we're always looking for new addicts. It's a fun addiction to have.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:07)
Well, I'm excited for you to do the Mirror with us in Our Family Institute of Berkeley, and we're gonna be doing that online on Zoom, so that's also available to folks, clinicians that can join and graduate students.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (50:20)
That would be so fun.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:21)
Yeah. I'm excited to sit in and go through another mirror with you and get that experience and refresh on my own kind of groundings in the Brief model.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (50:32)
We're looking forward to doing that together. It's always fun to embark in new projects.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:37)
Definitely. Yeah. Well, great. Thank you so much, Karin, for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (50:41)
Thank you for having me, Keith. It's been fun.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:44)
Take care. Bye-Bye
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (50:46)
Bye.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:47)
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Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Today I'll be speaking with Karen Langer, licensed Marriage and family therapist, who is the director of the Brief Therapy Center at the Mental Research Institute since 2008 until the building was sold in 2019. She continues to be the director of the Brief Therapy Center and has worked as a psychologist, supervisor, and professor at several universities internationally. She studied psychology in the Universidad of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and graduated in 1982. She arrived at the Mental Research Institute in 1983, having heard of the work of John Weakland, Dick Fisch, and Paul Watzlawick, and worked with them until their end of their days.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (01:17)
In 1990, she opened the Centro Latino De Terapia to do research on how this pure American model of problem-solving can be applied in other cultures. This project continues today working with low-income, Spanish-speaking families who are at the worst end of society's inequality. In 2012, she founded an NGO Room to Talk to offer psychological services to students, families, and school staff at the school. She was the executive director and she has been a professor in several local universities, University of San Francisco, Sanford University School of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, College of Notre Dame, and other universities of Spain, Valencia International University, Universidad de Abat Oliva, Institute Systemic de Barcelona. She's a supervisor in the hospital of San Paulo and Barcelona, and Karen is the author of a book that has been translated into five languages and the author of many articles and chapters of lots of books throughout the year. Also, in 2012, she has started the Grupo Palo Alto International, which was officially launched in Mexico, January 2016. Currently, Karen trains and supervises therapists internationally, as well as locally through county mental health programming. She provides trainings through her brief therapy at brieftherapycenter.org. Let's listen to the interview. Hi, Karen. Welcome.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (02:46)
Hi, Keith. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you again and to be able to have this chat.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (02:52)
Yeah, definitely. So, Karin, gosh, I first met you years ago. You were just teaching the workshops. I didn't get to know you very much back then when I went down to the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto and did some training with the Brief Therapy team. Then later on when I was with the Strategic Family Therapy team at MRI, we got to know each other and I was able to sit in on the one-way mirror you were doing, which was really great. And now we've kind of reconnected many years later as I've started the family institute of Berkeley and we're doing some one-way mirror trainings there. And I've been kind of reaching out to folks that were involved with MRI kind of trying to bring some of that spirit back since MRI closed some years ago. So I would love to hear about the brief therapy model and kind of what you guys are doing now. But before we even get into that, I always like to kind of hear the story of how you got to doing what you're doing, kind of the evolution of your thinking to kind of get here.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (03:51)
Well, how far back would you like to go? 'cause I'm old.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (03:58)
Yeah. Whatever you think is relevant.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (04:01)
Well, so I think what's interesting is becoming a psychologist in Argentina is a five-year endeavor after high school as opposed to the four and then some here. So during my training, I read the first four chapters of Pragmatics of Han Communication. And, in Buenos Aires, the majority of what was done in school is psychodynamic. In South America, Argentina produced a lot of psychoanalysts that the rest of the Latin Americans read. So we had our own crop of psychoanalysts that were very famous. So within that reading, pragmatics was like, “Oh, that's what I wanna be when I grow up.” So I held onto that, and then the way life takes you.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (05:09)
I re-met somebody who was actually studying at Stanford, and so I finished my degree in Argentina amidst the Dirty War. So that's where the military Junta was exterminating students that were smart. They would drug you, kidnap you, and then throw you in the river after torturing you, Courtesy of the School of the Americas. We could go on that tangent for a while if you want to. So I finished my degree in December of ‘82, and I had a ticket to come to MRI and to Stanford in January of ‘83. And, because I'd heard of course of Watzlawick and Weakland and Fisch and what they were doing, I arrived here and I went to the MRI. It was a rainy, nasty day.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (06:09)
It happened because again, life works that way. Carlos Sutsky was in that front office, and he heard me and he said, “Oh, who are you?” And I said, “well, I’ve just arrived from Argentina.” He said, “Come up to my office.”–This was January of '83–and it turns out he had gone, I didn't know who he was. And so he said, “Ah, come on up with me.” He said, “Well, who are you?” And so I said, “I'm Karen.” And he said, “Well, I went to school with your father in medical school,” which I had known, so I said, “So therefore you must be the director. You must be Carlos Sutsky.” That was my introduction to the MRI. So when people challenge me nowadays about what my credibility is with the Pre-Therapy Center, I just go back and tell that story. And so then Carlos left soon after that, and I went straight into John Len's office and I said, “I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. Would you let me come into your mirror?” And John, in his inimitable, generous-spirited way, said, “Of course, come on in.”
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (07:30)
Great.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (07:31)
And so that's how my story happened. And then I never left because this model, I always say, it's one of the good addictions that you can get. I have it fiercely. I love what I do. So then I started learning because once you are sitting behind a mirror with Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch, you cannot not learn.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (08:03)
And for people that maybe don't know of the Mental Research Institute, can you give just a quick explanation of MRI?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (08:10)
So the Mental Research Institute is this place that was founded by Don Jackson in 1959, at the same time as the Ackerman Institute was starting one year before. As the Ackerman Institute was starting in New York, Don Jackson and Nathan Ackerman started Family Process. Jay Haley was the first editor of that journal, which still exists. So when, when Carlos left the MRI, he was the editor at Family Process at the time. So I would schlep up to San Francisco and help him in the basement of one of the Painted Ladies. He lived in one of those. And so I was in a very beautiful, illuminated basement, and he would make me lunch every day, and I would correspond with all of the big people of the time.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (09:13)
So I had correspondence with Carl Whitaker and with Marie Bowen. All of the people that we know in family therapy would send their articles to Family Therapy, and Carlos needed to respond. So that's what I was doing when I first arrived, working with Carlos in the Family Process. So the MRI, it's an interesting thing because it was started in 1959 with Don Jackson who was at the time working for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation but was also in touch with the Bateson group. So when the Bateson group's financing for the NIMH dried up, Don Jackson invited Jay Haley, John Weakland, and Bill Fry to join the MRI there for a couple of years.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (10:16)
And they were bringing all the systems thinking and the cybernetics.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (10:19)
They were bringing Bateson in. But they were also going to Phoenix, Arizona to meet with Milton Erickson. And so there was this huge, rich culture of exchanges, of ideas, done. Gregory Bateson had Thursday night open houses, also. And so Watts came through and Fritz Pearls came through. Everybody that was just being somebody at Esalen would come through and they would all exchange ideas on Thursday nights. So just imagine the richness. And that's where the Brief Therapy model evolved from. So I still have this memo that Dick Fisch wrote to Don Jackson in 1965, wanting to start the Brief Therapy Center in which they were going to see in an environment in which the prevailing model was psychodynamics what changes they could implement in 10 sessions. These are the 10 sessions that I would argue still are the fundamental basis for all of the insurance models. So the pre-therapy started which was the Mental Research Institute. Virginia Satir was around at the time. She left soon after. Bill Fry left almost immediately because he got drafted to go to some war that the US was fighting someplace in the world.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (12:15)
And there were other people like Steve DeHeer. I think he was there.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (12:18)
Steve came much later. So then Jay Haley left in ‘67 to go work with Salian who was the director of training there. He worked with Sal Mnuchin for a while, and then he and Chloe Madani started the Family Institute in Washington, DC many years later. Tthe Brief Therapy Center started in ‘66. I'll argue, and stand by my argument, that it's actually the Brief Therapy Center that made the MRI famous. Because when you talk about the BRI, about MRI, you talk about Watzlawick, you talk about Weakland, you talk about what they were doing at the Brief Therapy Center. If the Breathe Therapy Center had not existed, the MRI would not have survived because it was a bunch of different people doing things of their own in their own offices.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (13:23)
And when Jackson died in ‘71, he was the one who held all of the groups together. And when he was gone, the whole thing would've fallen apart. And so what kept the ship going was the Brief Therapy Center. So that's why I am so passionate about sort of setting the record straight. So the MRI building was sold in 2019. In 2020, I started the Brief Therapy Center. I was the director of the Brief Therapy Center, already named in 2008 when Dick Fisch retired. So it's sort of a continuation of what we were doing at the MRI and we haven't gone away. Now it's a matter of convincing people that we know what we're doing, and they should learn about systemic and Brief Therapy.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (14:27)
So you mentioned Steve DeHeer. I met Steve. So we had a big conference at the MRI, one of the, what did they call them? I think it was the Milton Erickson Conference. They had a conference and they did them every other year. And there was a very big one that happened in 1983 in San Francisco. And at that conference, Carl Whitaker was there, Ronnie Lang was there, Dick and John and Paul, Peggy Pap. What is the name of the Berkeley German guy?
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (15:20)
Oh, I know, Marty? No.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (15:23)
No, no. Before him.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (15:27)
Blanking on it. I know what you're talking about though.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (15:30)
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (15:33)
Anyway, I can't remember. Marty Christba. Nope. No, he came later. Okay. Anyway, it'll come back. And if not, I will text you. I can't remember what his name was. I want to say Fritz, but I don't remember what his name is. I can see his face, of course. Anson Feld, constructivism Heinz Fund, all of these people that were founding ideologies in this model. So Anson Feld, he's got the chapter, I believe in the invented reality about constructivism. I was just sitting there, I was 25, and I got to meet all of these people. There were some funny interactions in the evening. There was a dinner set up and there were all these big rounds for all the presenters. And once the alcohol had circulated a little bit, there were some interesting interactions between those tables.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (16:44)
We had another conference in, ‘86 ‘87, I wanna say, where we had Michael White, and he came to Stanford.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (16:59)
Yeah, I was gonna say Michael White was there for a little bit.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (17:01)
Michael White was there, but later. And then, of course, Steve and Su met at John Len's House because both Steve and John Weakland were married to Chinese women. Anna was Chinese, and Sue was Korean, I believe. So they immediately clicked, and that's where that relationship started. In the late eighties, early nineties, Steve DeHeer kept coming back for supervision with John until he died. Yeah. He was the one that was very, very honest and upfront and said that when solution focus didn't work, he always went back to problem solving and having John Weakland in his head. And I really appreciate his candor and his honesty, because a lot of other people just took bits and pieces, and made them into big models but never really gave the credit where the credit was due.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (18:09)
Well, the way I've learned of Solution from Brief model is that attempted solution has become the problem. So to the 180 degree difference, and then solution-focused Steve Deheer and Sue Kimberg is the attempted solution is the problem. So instead go back to the strengths or whatever is working and do more of what was working. But similar in changing the system, but different, like you're saying and kind of different angles to it.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (18:39)
Exactly.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (18:40)
So systems theory and working systemically, are those synonymous with the Brief therapy? No. Or is that okay?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (18:52)
It's synonymous. To quote John Weakland, he always said that the Brief therapy, the problem-solving Brief therapy, which is what we are and what we do, is the minimalistic family therapy systems therapy way of promoting change. We don't need to see everybody in the system or in the family in order for change to occur. And what do we mean by that? He was a big tennis player, so of course he used tennis analogies. If you have a singles volley, you don't need for both of them to stop playing tennis. You just pick. If you want the game to end, you pick the person who seems the most tired and convince them to put down their racket and the match is over.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (19:52)
Yes.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (19:53)
So when you think in terms of systems and when you have Gregory Bateson in your head, you are constantly thinking in terms of interactions. You cannot not think of interactions. So immediately, even if it's something that sounds like an individual problem in your head, you're formulating these questions about who is this impacting? Who is it affecting? And what would they be saying about this? So you can promote change in the system because you cannot communicate without seeing anybody else in the system.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (20:50)
In a couple's situation, you don't need to see both members of the couple, one of whom is very often going to be very reluctant to be there. You can just work with the person who's the most motivated to promote change, and that will promote change in the system. So when you talk about systems, it's a way of thinking, it's a way in which you listen to the people that you are talking with. And almost immediately thinking, what would the other person or the other people in their surroundings be saying or be doing? What are they losing? What could they gain? And that is happening in your head as a problem solver with therapy.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (21:44)
So you can already kind of see how it's playing out in a context. In some ways, it's not just existing in a vacuum. But you can really kind of almost see that dance that's happening within the system.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (21:58)
A dance is a nice way of putting it. Absolutely. Yeah.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (22:02)
And one of the things that was interesting when I was at your training–somebody was discussing a case. They were an organizational psychologist, and they were talking about a work situation and how systems really applied in that work dynamic. And again, working with the individual in that. So it was really nice to take it beyond even just the system of the family, but the system of work.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (22:24)
Oh, absolutely.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (22:25)
Or larger systems that is.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (22:26)
Absolutely, absolutely. It's a method, it's a model that works very well in larger organizations. And what is interesting there is because the organization in the economy has to survive, the people that you're working with know at some level–and they're also less emotionally involved, I would argue–that they have to make a change. So it's much easier to get somebody to do something differently with their boss than it is to do with their spouse or with their child.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (23:08)
Yes.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (23:12)
Yeah. There's not that unconditional love, and they're just gonna be stuck with each other for better.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (23:17)
Absolutely. So it's a much more fun puzzle to solve because you can move faster, in my opinion. Because time is money, especially in the US. And so it does apply because it applies to any organization where there are hands involved. So everything is related to everything else, and so it just gets hard to make it linear sometimes.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (24:03)
So when working with clients, you don't necessarily have to be working with the whole system. You'd be working with part of the system, but you're always seeing the system as you're working and seeing as people are describing interactions and thinking about how those interactions are playing off of others. Can you talk about the model and kind of how you're starting off or what you're looking for, where you're looking to go in on change? You've been mentioning a lot about kind of who's most kind of motivated or, or kind of, you know, where, where you might have the most effect. I think you're talking about like that example with the tennis and finding the one that's most tired to put the racket down. Yeah.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (24:41)
Right. Right. So, the fact that we can work with individuals doesn't mean that we always choose to work with one individual. So, for example, so say somebody calls me, and I'm going back to couples therapy, just 'cause that example is fresh in my mind. And I was just talking to somebody who had seen two other therapists who said, “Well, if your partner isn't willing to come in, then there's nothing I can do. This is the end of the line.” And I, on the contrary, got excited – “No. Let me tell you what we can do.” At the beginning, they were very surprised, but changes were happening. So, because, so our, one of our concepts that there, that's, that's interesting is who is our client? We talk about clients, we don't talk about patients.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (25:40)
Patience has its roots in the same place as patients. And when people are hurting, patience is in short supply because people won't change as quickly as possible because something hurts. So we try to get the person that's the most motivated, the one that's hurting the most, to see us as soon as possible. And that will usually not be the child. Usually not more so with a teenager, but when you have a five-year-old, that poor 5-year-old, it, I'm sure it's having a rough time. I'm not saying they're not unhappy, but they have very little power in a family to make changes. So we, as quickly as possible, want to see both parents or a parent because they're the ones who will be able to implement the changes necessary so that everybody is having a better time in life.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (26:47)
Sure.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (26:48)
This is also an interesting way of looking at things because in more modern families what comes through our doors right now is fairly “easy” to adapt to seeing whoever is having the most difficulty. So I worked a lot in East Palo Alto with the families in the school there. I worked there for 20 years. So sometimes you have a grandma who's living at home with, I don't know, a 15-year-old son and three or four other kids because mom is in jail and dad has run off. And so if you are waiting for somebody else to show up, and the 15-year-old is being too protective of their younger siblings and helping grandma, that's what there is. And who am I to say as a therapist or as a consultant or anybody that that's not good? It's functional. So one of the things that I like about this model is that it's a functional way of helping people to get out of the hole that by definition they're in when they come asking for help.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (28:20)
So the function of the system kind of seeing all the different parts, and rather than kind of imposing any kind of judgments you have on how it should be, you're more seeing the system for what it is and how it's functioning.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (28:33)
You have what people bring in to you, yes. And then you make the best out of that. We're not trying to say that perfection is what we're trying to achieve. What we're trying to do is help people get out of a hole. And again, John Weakland would say, “When you have a problem, life is the same thing over and over again. And when you no longer have a problem, life is one thing after another.”
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (29:08)
We have a blog coming out that's gonna be on the pre therapy center website about how the holidays is a rough time for a lot of people because you are not allowed to be sad. You are not allowed to be blue. You have to be happy, you have to have the best decorations. You have to give the best gifts. Well, if you've recently lost a child, or you are aware of what is happening in the world, and you are not able to match the joy that's expected that's also functional. Who are we to say that those things are not important?
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (29:53)
Yes.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (29:54)
Right. So it's thinking about the system as the overarching it's about what we can do to help the person who's asking for help for their lives to be better. What change can we help them achieve that is achievable and will help them get the step in the right direction so that they're not in as much pain?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (30:29)
And so we do that by trying to work with the person who's the most motivated, but also with starting from the very beginning with what's the problem that brings you in here today? The problem we address head-on. There's nothing that people can tell us that we're going to be shocked at especially once you've been in business for 40 years, you've heard a lot of things. Also, we focus on the here and now, and that's what makes us effective and brief.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (31:04)
Yeah.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (31:05)
We try not to open doors because once you open doors in the past, you inevitably have to close them up. So that immediately extends therapy. That doesn't mean that we see people in a vacuum. We believe that people are the sum of all their past experiences, they bring their culture to the table. All of that is part of what we are thinking and we're finding out as we need to, but we're not going to go dig, we're not going to go find why. We're going to try to find out what the how is in the here and now and move forward. So we're trying to help people construct something in the future that will be more productive and less painful.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (32:04)
And you were saying too about engaging the person that's hurting the most, and I forget if it was the training I went to with you or somebody was talking about who's your customer versus kind of the window shopper and really identifying who is gonna be potentially the person you really need to connect with and the agent of change.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (32:28)
Yeah, you get the feeling of that very quickly. For example, you get a lady who's there sitting there who is there because she wants to reduce how much she drinks. You get this feeling of “I'm not getting the whole story,” or she's hesitant, or her stories are conflictual. So you really get the feeling that while she's not happy with her drinking, she's not unhappy enough to change it. So then the question becomes, “why are you here today?” And so then the why question in that situation is not really what, because we want to know the why, but it's because we want to sort of get a good idea of what made her pick up the phone that day as opposed to three months before or in two weeks.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (33:31)
What it gives you an idea of what's most important.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (33:34)
And so very often you are gonna get: “Well because my husband said that if I didn't come, he was divorcing me.” So that gives me an idea that per my client, the person who's really hurting is at home. But now my story needs to be in my head. How do I get him in here at least once to give me that point of view? So then what a question that I would ask is, “well, so if he hadn't said that, would you be here?” And the answer would most times be, “well, probably not.”
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:13)
Yeah. Yeah.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (34:14)
So that dialogue and the conversation that starts to happen in therapy then informs what is your next step as a therapist. So it's very much, and I sort of hesitate because I don't want to call it a game, but it's really a match of chess. Where you're thinking about the current situation, but you're also thinking about what your many next moves are going to be.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:48)
And being efficient with those moves.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (34:50)
Absolutely.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (34:51)
Yeah. What move is gonna have the most impact.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (34:54)
Absolutely. Yeah. Because what we want to do is to promote change in a painful situation.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (35:00)
Yeah.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (35:01)
So, yeah.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (35:02)
Okay. So yeah. So once you've got that engagement, they've put on the table what the problem is, what's your next move or what's your strength?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (35:10)
You're alluding that we should talk about the attempted solutions. So a piece of our lingo and our model is that people try and do and say things to alleviate the problem that brings them in with the best of intentions. But they're not working. It's usually a common sense solution for a kid who doesn't do their homework to say, “you need to do your homework. If you do your homework well, I will buy you more ice cream–” or, in Palo Alto, “–a Porsche or a Rivian. But if you don't do your homework, I will punish you by taking away the Rivian, the Tesla, or the Porsche.” But always the message continues to be you need to do your homework. And from our point of view, that common sense response by everybody around the kid, the teachers, the principal, the parents, the aunt, the doctor, everybody is what is actually keeping the problem alive.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (36:29)
It's the fuel that's keeping the fire going. So we have this thing where if we want the fire to go away, we stop doing what we call the attempted solutions. But that gets kind of tricky because you're basically going to ask this mom to tell their kid to not do their homework. That is not going to land well unless you have done your homework which is to really understand and to hear and to listen to how this person views the world and help them fit this new crazy reality that I would like them to try in words and in a reality in which she couldn't believe. And I'm talking about a mom in this case because that's what I picked. It would go something along the lines of, “well, you've done this, you've said this, you've tried this, you've tried that. It hasn't worked, and you are saying that you would like your child to become a good citizen. You want them to go to a good college. You want them to be responsible.” We have this crazy idea that in order to make him your son, your daughter, more them more responsible and better humans, they have to start to see the consequences of their actions. And so we would like you to think about telling your person that you've thought about how much responsibility you have taken on for their lives. And you don't wanna do that anymore because it's not teaching them the main values in life.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (38:38)
Now this of course, as I say, has to be said in a culturally appropriate way, couched in a way where this nice person who's asking for help can hear you. There is no such thing as resistance in our bottle. It's how much the therapist works to put it in a way where the recipient of this crazy message can hear it.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (39:06)
Yeah. Kind of helping put it in their language or reframe it in a way that makes sense. And that kind of goes with their motivations or their sensibilities.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (39:15)
Yes, especially if what you're gonna ask them to do is gonna sound bananas. Like, go home and tell your child not to do the homework and see what happens for the week, and then we can talk about it. So as opposed to many other models of systemic therapy, the strategic or the structural model, a lot of what happens with Terry and his interventions change happens outside of the session, not inside the session. We will build a scaffolding for the person to be able to go build a different reality, if you will, outside of our session. We're asking them to think about things and to maybe try something differently, and then come back and report. Then we will do the fine-tuning. So that's another way in which we're different from other systemic models.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (40:18)
So you're trying to get the thinking to shift in session. And then you're having them do something differently outside of the session and then bringing that information back.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (40:29)
Because hopefully that will produce a different and better result. So then what you're doing is you are building on the strengths of what they have done differently, and you can give them the credibility for what they have tried to do differently. So we're a very able bunch. We never know better than you.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (40:55)
You're not being as prescriptive about what they do outside. You're saying more like you're helping them see it differently, and then they have kind of the freedom to figure out how they're going to implement it.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (41:06)
Exactly. Got it. Got it. Exactly. So because, and they then get the credit because they're the ones who are doing the difficult, hard work of implementing this new way of looking at reality. So they get the credit, they get the laurels. We're just sort of mechanics behind how they were able to construct this different reality that hopefully is gonna work better for them.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (41:29)
Got it. Okay. Great.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (41:32)
So it has a lot of reminiscence. If Esther were here, she would be able to give you a lot more of the whole wellness thing that is based on people's strengths. There’s a lot of echoes of that in our model. There's a lot of listening to what people are able to do Yeah. And build on that. So in that sense, we are first cousins with the solution focused. We just have a little bit more mobility when the “hooray, hooray, hooray” doesn't work, we have a way of getting back on our feet.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (42:10)
Sure.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (42:10)
Having a different path forward, if you will.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (42:14)
And now is this, are these interventions kind of paradoxical? Or is that kind of a different approach?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (42:22)
I don't like the word paradoxical because it's been given a bad name. What we are doing from our point of view is carefully and painstakingly building something that hasn't worked and not encouraging people to do more of what hasn't worked. We're providing them with an alternative. The alternative usually is a non-common sense way of looking at things. And that's where the word paradoxical comes in. So, somebody who's been drinking too much, we're not gonna tell them to drink more. But we're going to set it up in a way in which instead of the wife throwing out all of the liquor in the house, she might wait for the husband to come back and say something like, “Wanna beer with me tonight?” Instead of her doing the abstinence, or so it's not paradoxical, it's doing less of what hasn't worked. Yes. And getting people to think about it that way.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (43:35)
Is this going into the concept of kind of any change to the system is gonna help kind of get it out of this kind of stuck place? That oftentimes kind of creating some change, some flexibility in the system is gonna help it to shift out of this kind of rigid, stuck, repetitive kind of sequencing?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (43:57)
We're always looking for the smallest change possible, because that's all we need to do, all as underlined and with our fingers crossed. So we're not trying to fix people's lives where they're never gonna have it better in their lives again. Right. Right. We're just trying to get them unstuck. Your words are the best ones. People come to us because they're stuck. We're trying to get them unstuck. And then life will be one thing after another. There you go.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (44:30)
The way I think about it too is that when you're thinking from an individual perspective, you're thinking, “oh, I have to work with that wife for like a year and doing psychotherapy or whatever, and then we'll do the couples therapy, etc.” It can be very overwhelming. But when thinking systemically small changes in different parts of the system can create big change because it helps kind of shift the system in a whole different direction. And it's not as much work as say, oh, that person's borderline, I have to do years of therapy with them, and then I have to do individual therapy, play therapy with the child for two years before they can get okay to talk to the parent and so on. So it's really that thinking that is a different way of thinking.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (45:16)
Correct. And the beauty of the way I see it, to expand on what you're talking about is, this model of therapy–or of change making–works for almost anybody or anything that walks through your door. And that keeps it interesting. If I had to see the same kind of people over and over again, I would just shoot myself with boredom. I'd be so bored. So this keeps it fun and it keeps it entertaining because of each puzzle. One of the things that I repeat over and over is that each case is its own best explanation. And so in that sense, each case is a new case. I was in Spain recently, and they made me a cup that says. Oh, so it says, in Spanish, each case is its own best explanation. I use that cup now.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (46:27)
That's great.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (46:28)
But you don't need to say, well, in this case I'm gonna do this in that case I'm gonna do blah, blah, blah, or in that case I'm gonna do EMD. You can, at least at the beginning, take what comes in and look at it as a new puzzle to fixl. And to change and to see how things are gonna match. So that's what I'm trying to reintroduce to this crazy United States of America.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (47:01)
It's something that backs the simplifying down rather than all these mixes and arrays of eclectic all over the place. Well, we're about out of time. Tell us about what you've been doing lately and what's kind of going on now with the Brief Therapy.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (47:18)
So the Brief Therapy, one of the things that Paul Watzlawick said that is it's most famous with the mile that you are away from Palo Alto. So we've been doing a lot of trainings online in Spanish, in Latin America, in Spain, and then, Spaniards and English and Spanish speakers who live around the world, which has been super fun. We have these groups that are mixed groups of therapists and teachers and sports people. We have a couple of artists. And they live around the world. They speak Spanish. And we've got a few people in Europe waiting for us to do it in English because they can speak some Spanish but not well enough. So we've done a few groups. We've up to the sixth generation of Spanish speakers.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (48:17)
We've got 50 people online, every Wednesday. That's been fun. We've been doing some trainings with a local county, and God knows they can use the ability to not see their revolving door clients that we're all paying for with our taxes. And then I've been doing a lot of work in China. So in China, you get these just ridiculous numbers. We did an open session, and we had 5,000 people on the Zoom. And from those 5,200 registered to do a five-week intensive training.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (48:59)
Great. Yeah. Can people that are listening to your trainings just sign up for other different workshops or intent?
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (49:08)
Absolutely. We've been offering one a month. If you go to our website, the brieftherapycenter.org, it's all one word, the website is a little glitchy, but be patient. There's blogs on there that we try to put up every couple of weeks. There's a history of what happened with the MRI and that's where we tell you about our upcoming workshops. So we had one in November, they're free. So you registered through Eventbrite for the moment. There was one on paradoxes, and on December 8th, we're going to do one on the holiday blues.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (49:53)
Good.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (49:53)
And then you can always email Ether Kronner or you can get in touch with me. And we're always looking for new addicts. It's a fun addiction to have.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:07)
Well, I'm excited for you to do the Mirror with us in Our Family Institute of Berkeley, and we're gonna be doing that online on Zoom, so that's also available to folks, clinicians that can join and graduate students.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (50:20)
That would be so fun.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:21)
Yeah. I'm excited to sit in and go through another mirror with you and get that experience and refresh on my own kind of groundings in the Brief model.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (50:32)
We're looking forward to doing that together. It's always fun to embark in new projects.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:37)
Definitely. Yeah. Well, great. Thank you so much, Karin, for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (50:41)
Thank you for having me, Keith. It's been fun.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:44)
Take care. Bye-Bye
Karin Schlanger, LMFT: (50:46)
Bye.
Keith Sutton, PsyD: (50:47)
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