Pekka Lyytinen
Muutosloki Turku Ay, Finland
Pekka is a special psychologist in Developmental Psychology and psychotherapy trainer in Dialogical Family and Couples Therapy, but also a certified canoe instructor and instructor of rope activities. Since 2003, he worked as a therapist and family rehabilitation coordinator in the Foundation for the Rehabilitation of Children and Young People in the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare in Finland. In the Foundation he used and developed adventure and outdoor activities as therapeutic methods regularly with families or with parts of families. 1.1.2024 Pekka left his full-time job to concentrate on developmental work, training and supervision in family therapy, and outdoor and adventure therapy as a private practitioner. Pekka is one of the founders of the Finnish Adventure Therapy network and a member of Adventure Therapy International Committee.
Beyond the stories we tell ourselves:
Implicit theory and a proposed research agenda for outdoor therapies
We often rely on our personal experiences and the stories we tell ourselves about how outdoor therapy works. We also draw on research and evidence from related fields to make claims for our own work. Outdoor therapies research, much like psychotherapy research in general, lags behind in process and theory-generating research. Less articulated aspects of outdoor therapy is the tacit knowledge that is largely sensed, embodied, and intuitive, hence therefore also much harder to grasp and describe. This presentation draws our attention to the insights that could emerge through intentional explorations and attempted articulation of implicit theories in outdoor therapies. Moving forward as a field, we propose a research agenda into the more implicit landscapes of our practice via three possible pathways, including: (a) initial surveys to map practitioners’ guiding theories, (b) context-sensitive case studies that embrace the complexity of outdoor therapies, and (c) in-depth inquiries into microprocesses of change, perhaps not yet articulated in the outdoor therapy literature. In this presentation, we will share an example of the first proposed pathway, having recently carried out an international survey including 75 outdoor therapy practitioners from a total of x nations. We applied a grounded theory methodology in our exploration, mapping and analysis of the guiding theories represented across this diverse sample. Finally, we propose implications for future practice and research.
One Step Behind - On Dialog and Dialogical Adventure Therapy
The conflict between people and the environment, unsustainable use of natural resources together with political and ideological conflicts causes increasing friction and the need to create conditions for dialogue. On the other hand, when dialogue between people, groups or nations collapses, a humanitarian crisis arises, as is now seen worldwide. The same applies to damaging the dialogical relationship between man and the environment. Open Dialogue practice has been developed in Finland at the Keropudas Hospital in Tornio since the 1980s, with the aim of creating a new type of need-adapted treatment to help patients suffering from serious prolonged mental health crises (Seikkula, 2011). It has proven to be useful for clients and has also been accepted as a working method recommended by the WHO (World Health Organization, 2021).
This workshop focuses on the dialogic work as a method to prevent or resolve the conflicts on a small scale, in close contact with people and nature (Mattsson et al., 2022). The active use of the clients' own expertise is central to the dialogic way of working. In the workshop, the participants get first-hand experience of dialogic discussion in a way that follows the dialogic practice described by Olson et al. (2014). In addition, they get basic information about Open Dialogue and its application in crisis and conflict situations. The application of dialogic practice in adventure therapy is described with case examples. The participants have the opportunity to reflect on the application of dialogical practices to their own work.