Status Dynamic Psychotherapy - Status Dynamics: The Key Idea

Status Dynamics: The Key Idea

Proponents of status dynamics are centrally concerned with persons’ statuses—these positions that they occupy in relation to everything in their worlds—because they see them as crucial determinants of the range of behaviors in which these persons are able to participate. They maintain that the crucial point of focussing on persons' statuses is that the occupation of certain positions expands a person's eligibilities, opportunities, and reasons to act in valued ways (termed their "behavior potential"), while the occupation of others constricts such behavior potential. A favored analogy that they use to illustrate this point involves military hierarchies, in which an individual might occupy the position of "private" or of "general." The mere occupation of the latter position by an individual, they point out, carries with it a greatly expanded power and range of possible behaviors relative to the former. For example, a general, unlike a private, can give orders to virtually everyone else in the chain of command, can enjoy a host of officers’ privileges, and can have a far greater voice in important decisions. Critically, SDT proponents note, this greater behavior potential is completely independent of all the factors historically targeted for change by the major schools of psychotherapy such as the general’s beliefs, behavioral skills, motives, and biochemical states. Proceeding from this analogy, SDT adherents maintain, and seek to therapeutically exploit the fact that, all relational positions convey varying degrees of behavior potential.

The primary focus of SDT is to bring about positive change through "status enhancement" or "accreditation". That is, it is to assist clients by literally assigning them positions of enhanced power and/or eligibility. Should they accept these positions, SDT proponents maintain, they may then act from them to overcome their presenting problems and achieve desired life goals. At times, this strategy entails the therapist assigning clients new, more viable relational positions. More frequently, it entails helping them to realize relational positions that they have occupied all along but that, for whatever reason, they have failed to realize and exploit. In their terms, SDT therapists strive to position their clients "to fight downhill battles and not uphill ones," and "to be in the driver's seat and not the passenger one." To quote a prominent spokesman for this point of view, they seek to help clients

• to approach their problems from the vantage point of proactive, in-control actors and not helpless victims;
• to attack these problems from the position of acceptable, sense-making, care-meriting persons who bring ample strengths, resources, and past successes to the solution of their difficulties; and
• to proceed from reconstructed worlds, and from places within these worlds, in which they are eligible and able to participate in life in meaningful and fulfilling ways.