The Integrative Client-Centered Model

The ICCM is a client counseling and conflict management model for lawyers, professionals, and assistants involved in managing conflict.

It is an updated client-centered model built on foundations of neurobiological, relational, and attachment science which offer explanations and solutions regarding the cause of conflict. It incorporates time tested counseling techniques, and ICCM specific techniques. It has been tested and honed in the practice of relationally-focused family law, criminal law, and other interpersonal litigation and mediation.

Trauma and attachment-informed approaches bring a focus on the need for protection and safety as job #1. The ICCM provides practical tools to build rapport and a sense of a safe and trusted relationship with the client. These tools simultaneously improve the professional’s information gathering skills.

The attachment system is a survival system which affects how adults perceive and process information, and how they communicate under threat to safety. This affects how people bias the information they use to understand and solve their problems. Thus, the attachment perspective brings a focus for improving client information processing in the context of danger-processing.

The ICCM seeks to make advanced relationship science accessible with practical tools for legal practitioners.

Client-Centered

Client-centered refers to a counseling perspective where the client must make the choices which affect their lives. Clients are autonomous decision makers. The counselor’s role is to support the client so they can make the best decisions possible, and not make decisions based on a lack of information and fear.

A client-centered approach goes well beyond simply providing legal or other “information.” Clients usually know what is most important to them and what they can handle. Building a supportive relationship and promoting mastery and autonomy, with a variety of techniques and understanding of basic human functioning, is the best way to help the client optimize outcomes.

The Integrative Client-Centered Model (ICCM) provides a practical and robust model of human functioning, together with tools to maximize client support.

Some client needs

Research by law professor Clark Cunningham shows that the four most important things legal clients want is

• To be heard
• For their lawyer to care about them
• To understand the lawyer’s advice
• To have a voice in the process

The ICCM sees these not as wants but as needs, and is designed to meet all these needs while increasing the hope of an outcome the client is satisfied with.

The great majority, if not most people, seek legal help because they can’t solve their problem on their own and have experienced and/or are experiencing trauma which interferes with their ability to process their situation clearly. Often, clients can see only one way to solve a problem, and they think a professional can solve their problem that same way because they must have better skills. The ICCM is designed to help professionals understand how and why people perceive their problem as they do, how to help them gain a better understanding of the problem, and how to optimally address it.

Framework and component system

The ICCM is built on an open-source construct. It uses an identified general framework. Other frameworks from various disciplines and models are acknowledged so users can adjust the framework for their needs. Likewise, within each section of the framework it offers individual components.

For example, relationship building is a key framework section in most counseling models. The ICCM model includes listening skills in this framework section, and Integrative Listening (IL) is an ICCM-specific component identifying 10 essential elements of listening. If users want to replace or supplement IL they can easily do that, for example by adding a component such as Motivational Interviewing, or simplifying with an active listening model. Professionals can easily compress the 10 elements to a shorter list, add additional elements, or expand a particular element for age, gender, culture or other needs.

For the human element section, people who want to use the DSM/ICD or some other model of “conflict psychology” can do that. They can collapse or expand the section to accommodate perspectives they are already familiar with or discover to be useful, or which are helpful for their particular area of practice.

A robust model, capable of scaling

The ICCM is designed to be a robust model, both simple and complex, useful for practitioners at any level of experience. For people who have been in practice for a while, it adds to and greatly enhances their skill set. For young practitioners, it gives them the tools for what clients are most needing and gives them time to do their research, case prep, and outside consultations as needed.

The ICCM offers several core framework components and many techniques within each component to support client counseling, conflict management, and maximizing outcome potential.

The basic ICCM framework

1. The human element
2. Relationship building skills
3. Case and narrative building skills
4. Plan development and execution (with simultaneous case building in mind)
5. Regroup, reflect, rebuild, re-execute

Some ICCM components

1. The Human Element
   • Trauma and Attachment Informed Care
   • The science of rejection
   • Biopsychosocial models of danger-response systems
   • The Polyvagal Theory (Porges)
   • The Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (Crittenden)
     • Danger response and self-protective strategies
     • Information processing
     • Memory systems
     • Discourse analysis
   • ICCM’s Conflict Model, for understanding the human element in conflict
     • CSI-DMM Circumplex
     • DMM danger list
2. Relationship building skills
   • ICCM’s Integrative Listening, the 10 essential elements of listening
     • Other listening models
   • Transitional Attachment Figure
   • Emotion science
     • ICCM’s Affective Neuroscience Emotion-Feeling-Affect Chart (Jaak Panksepp)
     • Other emotion models
   • Grounding skills
     • A biopsychosocial approach (Kozlowska)
3. Case and narrative building skills
   • Zone of proximal development (ZPD, Vygotsky)
   • ICCM’s 6-Step Change Process, with attachment pattern consideration
   • Counseling tools
   • Investigation tools
   • Narrative building tools
   • Tools to support the client’s decision making
4. Plan execution (with simultaneous case building in mind)
   • Plan building – timing
   • ICCM’s client-centered business practices
   • ICCM’s Equipoise
   • A relational approach to the case and other party (a powerful approach)
   • Micro coaching
5. Regroup, reflect, rebuild, re-execute
   • Recursively building relationships, facts, client support, and decision making
   • Reflective integration techniques

The human element foundation

To effectively work with people, it’s important to look past the surface.

Many counseling models use a psychological foundation hoping to gain better insight into why people do what they do, especially when doing things and making choices which are hard to understand or are even counterproductive. However, models like the DSM/ICD can’t offer insight into the why, because they lack scientifically valid measurements or assessments, and they rely on surface level descriptions of behavior. Defense mechanisms are poorly defined, and patterns are unclear or non-existent. Concepts, such as narcissistic personality disorder, lack nuance and clear direction for effective solutions.

Attachment theory based on developmental science has excellent scientific assessments which provide a foundation for detailed descriptions and specific patterns of how people act, think, feel, and communicate. Defense mechanisms are highly organized and described as patterns of self-protective strategies. This gives practitioners a relatively easy ability to find solutions.

For example, some people communicate with narratives which are vague, wandering, use run-on sentences, avoid responsibility, are filled with blame, pull the listener in with emotional discourse, and may connect unrelated events into one super-event. These narratives are affectively organized, and the super-event is connected with a common feeling rather than common facts or a discrete sequence of events. Once the narrative style is recognized, the professional then has the hope of focusing their questions and investigation to parse out the individual events and find relevant and accurate facts, and get past defensive emotions and down to the core needs.

As an opposite example, some people communicate with narratives which seem well organized sequentially, focused on mostly positive facts and clear rule-sets, and may cause others to not feel a need to investigate further. However, the time-sequence and rule-set in the narrative may omit the relevant starting point, critical facts, more relevant rule-sets, negative feelings and experiences, and important needs of self or children. Once the narrative pattern is recognized, the professional can begin to identify additional facts, and bring in to the client’s narrative more relevant rule-sets and needs which can lead better case outcomes.

In both examples, the client’s processing of information involves a “defensive exclusion” of relevant information and an over-reliance on less than relevant information.

The central issue driving conflict and poor outcomes is unprotected exposure to danger and ineffectual defensive responses. The ICCM uses danger-response models such as social science rejection theory, the Polyvagal Theory (PVT) and the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM). PVT describes, in part, the fight-flight-freeze response system. The DMM describes, in part, information processing in the context of relational danger.

Virtually all clients walk into their lawyer’s office facing some sort of serious physical or relational danger.

These models are synthesized into the ICCM Conflict Model, a legal-specific model adapted for lawyers and legal practitioners.

Relationship building skills

The first skill is to help the client feel safe and protected. One of the best ways to do this is with enhanced listening skills.

Integrative Listening is the ICCM listening model. It identifies 10 essential elements of listening. These elements can be used individually or in various combinations to enhance listening and communication.

Helping the client to identify and manage, or leverage, their emotions is an essential part of relationship skill. The ICCM uses the Feelings Wheel for a basic model. It also uses two science based emotion models, Paul Eckman’s Atlas of Emotions, and Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience model of emotions, feelings, and affects. The ICCM includes an Affective Neuroscience Emotions-Feelings-Affect Chart (similar to the Feelings Wheel format).

Grounding skills involve a wide range of techniques essential to supporting the client as they expand their view of the problem and solutions.

Case and narrative building skills

Mastery and autonomy supporting skills help the lawyer build out effective case plans and narratives.

The ICCM’s 6-Step Change Process model, with a functional graphic model, describes the primary large steps and psychological obstacles people generally go through to reach optimal decision making. It shows how the change process works and where the difficult transitions are so professionals have the hope of using other ICCM and counseling tools to help clients reach an optimal decision.

Counseling skills involve a wide range techniques, including compassionate Socratic questions, pace and lead, body language and prosody management, the Rule Against Shoulds, and the Window of Tolerance.

Investigation tools help lawyers find the missing information. The DMM perspective helps to identify the types of information that might be excluded or over-relied on, and a wide range of other tools help to quickly organize the client and dig deeper.

Narrative building tools include traditional methods, and DMM attachment-informed approaches.

All U.S. states have a client-centered ethical model, where it is the client’s responsibility to choose the goals of the case. Thus, supporting clients to make informed and optimal decisions is what it’s all about. The ICCM includes specific tools for this.

The CSI and ICCI universe of support

The Integrative Client Counseling Institute (ICCI) is focused on developing and supporting the broader framework, model and components. The Conflict Science Institute (CSI) is focused on the human element model, for use by many professionals, including legal, medical, mental health, education, parenting, law enforcement and crisis negotiators.  They work together because the reasons for conflict inform effective responses.

ICCI and CSI offer several educational and supportive resources. We offer a variety of courses and training materials. These include online group courses, in-house courses, group mentoring, and one-on-one consultations. We provide training materials and online articles We offer free monthly group sessions covering various topics, and a no-cost legal listserv both available to anyone who has taken prerequisite CSI training programs. A no-cost medical-oriented DMM listserv, DMM Group Talk, and monthly discussion sessions, DMM Coffee House, is available for people who use the DMM in their daily work.

Based on the works of many thinkers

The ICCM is based on the works of many thinkers, such as Dan Siegel (IPNB founder); Patricia Crittenden and Andrea Landini (DMM); Allan Schore (psychotherapy); Stephen Porges (Polyvagal Theory); John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth , Jennifer McIntosh  (attachment); Murray Bowen (Systems Theory); Ben Grey (parenting, Meaning of the Child interview); Karen Quail (parenting, Peace Discipline); Haim Ginott (parenting); Ed Tronick (child development); Iain McGilchrist (hemisphere theory); Jaak Panksepp (emotion theory); Abraham Maslow (needs); Gabor Mate (attachment, addiction, ADHD); John Kabat-Zinn (mindfulness); Carl Rogers (client-centered theory); Jeffrey Young (psychotherapy, Schema Therapy); Bonnie Badenoch (IPNB and psychotherapy); Charles Darwin (evolutionary biology); Bessel van der Kolk (trauma); Jean Decety (empathy); Marsha Linehan (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy); Dan Pink (Motivation); Leonard Riskin, Robert Baruch Bush, Joseph Folger (mediation) Bill Ury, Harvard Project on Negotiation, (negotiation); and Bill Eddy (bridging mental health and legal concepts).