Once again, I had a hard time getting through the Savickas (1995) article. As Baker mentioned in class, one of the marks of a bad theory is one that overcomplicates our reality. This theory is paradoxically overly simple, however it is stated in a ridiculously overcomplicated way.
Basically, the gist of the article is when people are indecisive you should elicit stories to construct a narrative. That’s it. What was said in a number of pages in unnecessarily complex language can be stated simply in a sentence. I got the feeling while reading the article that this theory was created by someone that wasn’t too bright, and to seem more respectable he put it in a complex language to be taken seriously. It reminds me of a story, and I can’t remember exactly what it was about but I think it was positive psychology. The way I remember it, a Ph.D student wanted to do research on happiness and his advisor didn’t think that it would be taken seriously, so the student came up with the more “respectable” term positive psychology. (Again, this may be about something else, but the point is there all the same.)
Our lives, and especially our career choices, do not always form neat narratives. I do think we all need to find meaning in one way or another, whether through defining it ourselves (the existential philosophy of Sartre) or through God (the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard). Creating a narrative for our lives does nothing to help us realize our worth and personal meaning, and the whole exercise comes across as a pointless activity for children to keep them occupied. If a counselor tried to do this with me, I’d go through the motions half-heartedly to appease them.
The history of indecision also was completely unnecessary. So at one point people thought either you were undecided or decided. Then they thought there was a scale of indecision. Then they decided that it’s actually complex. Why does the article start this way? How does this help us become better clinicians in helping people deal with this indecision? According to the author, since indecision is a multidimensional concept, the natural application with our clients is to create a narrative of the person’s life? I don’t really see how the concept and the application connect.
The take away message from the article for me is that indecision is complex and you shouldn’t label clients as either being undecided or decided. Putting ideas as simply as possible facilitates the process of people actually understanding it.
References
Savickas, M. L. (1995). Constructivist Counseling for Career Indecision. The Career Development Quarterly, 43(4), 363-373.
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