Status Dynamic Psychotherapy (SDT) is an approach to psychotherapy that focuses on changing a client's "statuses", whether they be career related, personal or social in nature. SDT is characterized by its lack of focus on factors traditionally targeted by psychotherapy such as the client's behaviors and cognitions, and how unconscious factors come into play. SDT was created by Peter G. Ossorio at the University of Colorado in the late 1960s as part of a larger system known as "descriptive psychology".
Proponents of SDT maintain:
That this emphasis does not conflict with the emphases of other schools, That status dynamic ideas can be used in conjunction with them in an integrated way, and That SDT thus represents a way for therapists to expand (vs. replace) their repertoire of explanations and clinical interventions.
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 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 be a private or general. The latter, they point out, carries with it a greatly expanded power and range of possible behaviors. 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.
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. 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.
Clinical applications
Three general applications of the basic status dynamic ideas just outlined may be distinguished. In SDT, the therapist
establishes a two-person community in which they function as an effective status assigner, Assigns statuses to the client on an a priori basis, and Assigns them on an empirical basis.
Therapist establishes self as effective status assigner
All psychotherapy begins with a meeting between the therapist and the client. From the status dynamic point of view, if all goes well, the result of this meeting will be the formation of a two-person community that is in a certain sense set apart from the larger community and world. Further, and perhaps unique to the SDT, a central purpose of this two-person community is to provide a place where the client's status can be enhanced in a way that better positions them to overcome presenting problems. In order to achieve this goal, according to SDT, it is important for the therapist to acquire the ability to function as a powerful status-assigner in the client's world—the power, if needed, even to preempt and/or to disqualify as valid status assigners other persons or groups who are degrading the client illegitimately such as the family of origin, the spouse, the peer group, or even the culture at large.