Method of Levels

I recently read about the Method of Levels psychotherapy technique and am very intrigued. It makes sense to me that it would work better than all the other techniques I’ve come across. And yet it’s also one of the simplest intuitive ones: mostly it just involves a willingness to talk on the part of the client/patient and ‘unusual curiosity’ on the part of the therapist.

The Method of Levels is a new psychotherapeutic technique based on Perceptual Control Theory. It is based on the concept that people are continually at work controlling themselves and what is around them in order to meet personal goals.

When a person has conflicting goals their attempts to meet all those goals result in psychological distress. The therapist using the Method of Levels helps guide the person into sufficient awareness of their conflicting goals that they can start their own process of achieving resolution. (Perhaps because once they are aware of all their goals they can start to make decisions about which one is more important to them, etc?)

Method of Levels is very intuitive in that the topic and the time of therapy are both chosen by the client/patient. They choose what problem they’d like to discuss and whether/when they want to discuss it. The therapist’s role is to encourage them to talk about their chosen problem, but to look out for disruptions i.e. the client may pause or smile or interject some remark. At the moment of the disruption the therapist is to draw attention to it to help the client gain awareness of what they were possibly not fully conscious of at the time of the disruption. Basically the therapist’s role having got the person to talk at all is then to continually interrupt with “I saw you just smiled – what was going through your head just then?”

To do this well all the therapist has to be is unusually curious and all they have to do is be willing to interrupt the client a lot. It is not about a list of questions the therapist cycles through although those probably are helpful to begin with; the more natural it is, the better. Even empathetic statements are unhelpful because they do not directly help the client into greater awareness. In any case but they are unnecessary since, if you are being unusually curious that implies strong empathy. Who would ask for more details unless they cared?

There are video intros to the Method of Levels on youtube. Here’s are a couple, one by Warren Mansell and one by Tim Carey, both main proponents of MOL:

Also here’s a 2 hour or so training session for therapists, led by Warren Mansell, on using the Method of Levels:

Based on what I’ve read and watched, it can be used with people with mental health disorders pretty much the same way it is used with anyone else, which intrigues me. In fact I just found this podcast with Sara Tai – another proponent of MOL who seems to have a focus on using it with mental health disorders – “A Survivor’s Guide to Bipolar DIsorder”

I’ll be listening to this podcast very carefully.

Here’s another good place to read about the Method of Levels.

Anyway I really like the Method of Levels approach. I hope that one day I’ll have a therapist willing to use it.