What Are You Like/Personal Constructs
As its name suggests, this session is all about getting to know the YP you are working with. This is an important part of relationship building. You may know the YP quite well already, but you may not know much about their views on relationships or have explored how they feel about the relationships in their own family. In this module there are some fun and interactive exercises for finding out more about the YP without asking direct questions which can feel intrusive and uncomfortable for YP. You can share little pieces of information about your own family and relationships to help strengthen your bond prior to doing the work. As always only share what is safe and comfortable to do so.
From Session 3 onwards, this programme is designed to be run as either group or individual sessions for flexibility. The pre-work (Sessions 1 and 2) on the other hand, is best completed on an individual basis as a preparation for the following sessions or to prepare the YP for groupwork.
It may be that information arises from this pre-work session that makes you feel that someone is or could be at risk from the YP you are working with. If this occurs then refer back to Session 1 regarding safety to ensure you have covered what you need to. This might involve helping the YP to put a Time Out Plan in place, as well as completing a Safety Risk Indicator Checklist and a Safety Plan with any potential victims if you are able to contact them.
- To continue to build the relationship with the YP
- To increase YP motivation to engage and consider change
- For the YP to explore their world view on a deeper level
- For the YP to see where change needs to happen by creating dissonance
- For the YP to feel some motivation to make changes if they need to
This exercise uses the idea of polar constructs to help you as the practitioner learn more about the YP’s inner world so you can facilitate them in identifying their own goals for change. The YP completes a series of constructs and marks themselves along the continuum both at their worst and ideally.
The idea of polar constructs is to explore something’s meaning by exploring its opposite. For example, we can only understand what “warm” is by first defining what it means to be cold and vice versa. The concept of night and day is another example.
In helping the YP to explore what their opposites are in relation to the qualities outlined in the handout you get a much clearer understanding of what the original quality means to them. For example, if the YP says that the opposite of kind is selfish then the word “kind” suggests to them something about being generous. However, if they say that the opposite of kind is cruel, then kind seems to mean something akin to gentle rather than generous. It is not until we explore the opposite of the word in the person’s own terms that we can fully understand what that word means to them.
