Ein – reales oder digitales – Treffen mit Wolfgang Loth ist immer wunderbar, weil man mit einer Vielzahl neuer Ideen, Hinweisen und Fragestellungen versorgt und beglückt wird – aber natürlich auch reich an Herausforderungen, weil man zu einer Vielzahl von Ideen, Hinweisen und Fragestellungen Stellung nehmen muss. Also ist Anregung garantiert. So auch gestern und heute, als wir beide nach Stuttgart zum Treffen des Editorial Boards der Familiendynamik reisten. Im Gespräch über dies und jenes und alles und nichts und Gott und die Welt wies mich Wolfgang Loth auch auf ein Gespräch hin, dass Tapio Malinen aus Finnland sowie Scot Cooper und Ian Bennet mit Yvonne Dolan (Foto: brieftherapynetwork.com) 2002 führten und das im Internet zu lesen ist. Yvonne Dolan, die hierzulande zuletzt als Co-Autorin des letzten, posthum erschienenen Buches von Steve de Shazer„Mehr als ein Wunder“ in Erscheinung getreten ist, äußert sich in diesem interessanten Gespräch auf eine sehr persönliche Art und Weise, die ihre Kunst, das lösungsorientierte Vorgehen nicht zur Abarbeitung eines Fragekatalogs reduzieren zu lassen, sondern sorgfältig auf die affektive Situation der Klienten und das Timing der therapeutischen Konstellation zu achten, deutlich werden lässt.
„Yvonne Dolan: It is the stance that gets in the way; at least it has for me at times. In this field I think traditionally we are trained to place more importance on the bad things that happen to people than the good things. So we have in the field of abuse people still defined as victims and survivors.
Scot Cooper: Defined by the event?
YD: Yes, as opposed to becoming people to whom a variety of things have happened and one of them is abuse. Another one might be falling in love, another one might be planting a garden, another might be becoming a mother or a father, wanting to do pole vaulting or who know what. I think that one of the things that interferes is training to place more emphasis on the negative than the positive one.
SC: How strange that sounds when we talk about it.
YD: We actually imprison the person in the problem in a sense. Even calling someone a survivor implies that for the rest of their lives they will live in reaction to that event.
IB: They will never get over it?
TM: You also show the third possibility that you called the Authentic Self.
YD: I think that people in our field have been alluding to that for a while. It is not a unique idea to me. I do think that I am perhaps more attached to the importance of the third stage because I see the legacy of defining clients as living in reaction to their problems as opposed to living in reaction to their hopes. I always want to ask&ldots; even if someone is giving me a history of awful things that have happened, I always want to ask„what else matters to you“?
IB: And if they can’t think of anything?
YD: I have never had that happen. You would think it would but I never have. I used to work in rural mental health and you would see people in one way in your office and then go somewhere else and see them entirely differently. There was this family that from the first day I was warned about. I was working in this really small town and I was told that this is a family with a lot of abuse, the parents are shiftless, they don’t work, the family has been on welfare for several generations, there is a lot of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, physical abuse, very negligent. They said just be really careful with this family because you really have to pay a lot of attention so they don’t do anything else to their children. The implication was that their children had been badly neglected. Right about at that time I was really getting used to living in a small town and I had only met one person that I was getting to know outside the professional field. He was an artist and he had these wonderful paintings he had done. He had a little art gallery and some of the more remarkable paintings were the ones he had done. He did portraits of a family. One of a woman carrying a loaf of bread and this family sitting around on a big old front porch and I remarked on them and he said„you need to meet these people, they are some of the most wonderful families I have ever met“. He talked about how there was a musical festival that weekend and if I attended it I would for sure see them there because they always went to it and they all played differed musical instruments. Well of course I did go and it was the family I had been warned against. All these people there were saying„oh yea this family would give you the shirt off their backs“,„their door is always open to anyone who is hungry or needs anything“. It was a completely different picture and I realized that I had only got part of the picture from my colleagues. It didn’t mean that my colleagues picture was wrong. What they were saying was probably absolutely true but this other past was true too. That’s a long time ago and I am still trying to remember to make space for both those pieces when I meet people. The piece that brings them to therapy and the piece that is their life outside of therapy“
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