Thanks Judy,

I do see these frames as context dependent, though not arbitrary. If you have a strong pathogenic belief that your strength is harmful, you would have a slew of life experiences that would either confirm or disconfirm this belief. You would enter therapy however to make your life work better. Some of these beliefs would interfere with this. Through your relationship with the therapist you gradually and intentionally work at isolating and disconfirming those beliefs that get in your way. I think it becomes clearer and clearer in therapy which beliefs they are. The reason things become clear in therapy is both the patient and the therapist have an unconscious or conscious intent to change things, and an allegiance to their ability to understand the world. I do think that the idea of the patient's plan and our assumption that we can comprehend it is central to the theory. Not that we need to come up with the kind of systematic plan formulations that are used in the research literature. I agree with Michael; I rarely bother with this formal structure. (But then again I rarely make lists or take notes.) I would find coming up with a formal plan algorithm a distraction from the more organic understanding of the patient's plan that informs my interactions in therapy.

My joke about sliding toward the post-modernist slippery solipsism slope alludes to my analogy of watching the sun set while understanding heliocentricism. They are contradictory views of the same event, but they have very different uses and meanings. There is a real world with various ways of framing it; not an infinite set of subjective worlds.

I'm still thinking this through.