Patterns in Interpersonal Interactions : Inviting Relational Understandings for Therapeutic Change

This book presents the historical and conceptual context of the IPscope, a unique relational assessment system developed by Karl Tomm that offers a means to assess and address the severity of families’ concerns in ways compatible with systemic and social constructionist approaches to practice. It is also a clinically and administratively viable way of making sense of family concerns while enabling ways to track therapeutic progress.

In this book we present a comprehensive view of a systemic approach to working with families, initiated by Karl Tomm more than two decades ago at the Calgary Family Therapy Centre in Canada. The contributors of this edited book articulate the IPscope framework as it was originally designed and its evolution over time. We invite you, experienced professionals and new family therapists, to join with us to explore some of the mysteries of human relationships. While the focus on our explorations revolves around clinical mental health problems and initiatives towards solutions, the concepts are applicable in many domains of daily life. They highlight the ways in which we, as persons, invite each other into recurrent patterns of interaction that generate and maintain some stability in our continuously changing relationships. The stabilities arise when our invitations become coupled and can be characterized as mutual; yet, they always remain transient. What is of major significance is that these transient relational stabilities can have major positive or negative effects in our lives. Consequently, we could all potentially benefit from greater awareness of the nature of these patterns, how particular patterns arise, and how we might be able to influence them.