ABSTRACT
As my colleagues and I have argued elsewhere (Levitt, Neimeyer, & Williams, 2005), clinicians and clients are best served when prescriptions for practice are nested within broader principles that facilitate intelligent judgments about their relevance in a speci®c setting. This point is less obvious than one might think, in a day characterized by enthusiasm for ``rulegoverned, reliable and replicable'' interventions (Held, 1995), conjuring the image of a therapy bleached of the idiosyncrasy of individual variation, capable of being delivered by essentially interchangeable ``providers'' of a standardized service. In contrast to cognitive-behavioral therapies advocating such manualguided approaches to practice with their penchant toward particular protocols, speci®c agendas, and approved lists of techniques, constructivists emphasize the inherent individuality of therapy and its necessary tailoring to the immediacy of the encounter between this therapist working with this client at this moment of emergent understanding of the problem before them. In such a subjective, shifting, and subtle setting, abstract principles provide better orientation than concrete prescriptions. For this reason I will focus on a trio of principlesÐthe ``3 Ps of practice''Ðthat frame my view of therapy, emphasizing those features under each that tend to distinguish the work of constructivist therapists from that of their cognitive-behavioral cousins. I will begin with some remarks about the therapist's presence and then move on to a consideration of therapeutic processes and clinical procedures, illustrating each with vignettes from my own practice.
