“Hammel Digital” – AI assistant for utilization and supervision

I asked an AI developer to build me a chatbot with offers for therapeutic interventions based on my manual for therapeutic utilization, among other things.

The prototype has been refined and improved over the last few months.

You can find the AI assistant for Utilization and Supervision embedded in my

🔗 Blog.

If you feel like it, you can play around with it (e.g. ask: “my client suffers from moth phobia and tinnitus, how can I help her therapeutically / do you have a story I can tell her) and write me what positive / negative experiences you have had with it and what you think should be improved.

The AI also works if you speak to him in other languages.

I look forward to your feedback 📧.

Your Stefan

The Worry Catapult

One of the games we used to play at school was to stretch a rubber band between two fingers of one hand and then shoot folded bits of paper at the other pupils, or even at the teacher when his back was turned at the blackboard. It was against the school rules, of course, but it was still great fun and a good way of keeping boredom at bay. A sawn-off forked branch and a rubber ring from a preserving jar could be used in a similar way to make a stone catapult, and even now I still often think of these different kinds of catapults.

Sometimes wrinkles appear on my face because I am afraid, annoyed, sympathetic or troubled. I know that if they become a fixed part of my repertoire of facial expressions, in a few years’ time these expressions will turn into basic facial characteristics which determine my neutral appearance regardless of my mood – wrinkles and all. This is not what I want, and it is also not what I need.

My face muscles are like a worry catapult which is stretched between my ears. Whenever my skin tenses up in one spot and forms wrinkles in another, and whenever a particular level of tension has been exceeded, the catapult goes “pop” and the muscles relax. All the worries, all the annoyance, all the anger – catapulted away into time and space. Sometimes they are fired into nothingness, and sometimes they are sent to someone who – unlike me – will give them a good home. The only thing left on my face is a smile, as I know that the worry wrinkles have not made a home for themselves this time.

https://pixabay.com/de/photos/smiley-emoticon-der-zorn-ver%c3%a4rgert-2979107/ (28.3.2023)

“The Worry Catapult” is an intervention which can be used at a somatic level to avoid or reduce stress-related facial wrinkles, at an emotional level for relaxation and at a social level to practice new behavioural patterns for dealing with interpersonal stress. The procedure is similar to the “clenched fist” technique, a “method which can be used by a child to ‘throw away’ tension and problems by clenching [and then relaxing] his or her fist.” (Olness & Kohen, 2001.)

(From: Stefan Hammel: Handbook of Therapeutic Storytelling. Sories and Metaphors in Psychotherapy, Child and Family Therapy, Medical Treatment, Coaching and Supervision, Routledge 2019)

Everything Else

In a land in our time there lived a man, who read a book and found lots of wonderful stories therein. There were true and invented stories, experienced and pensive, enjoyable and painful stories. There were stories which contained stories, and such which were actually not stories. For every story he read, there occurred to him nearly five which he had either experienced or thought up himself. So the thought came to him, that a lot in the world was a story which could be healing for himself and others; he only needed to absorb the healing stories well and to forget the terrible ones immediately. Then he would learn which story he had used when and for what. So he organised his own stories which he knew, and which had become a help to himself and others, or could become so. Sometimes he noted it down when a new story came to his ears and sometimes when a helpful story occurred to him, he memorised it.

Then he saw before him in a picture the storystories of this life arranged in long shelves, as in a large pharmacy. And behind the counter there sat a man who had learnt to listen to himself and others. He was a master of his subjectspecialty. His talent was that he understood how to tell the right thing at the right time to himself and to those who visited him.

Anaesthesia

“I had to remove quite a bit of your tooth. I had to drill almost down to the nerve. You seem to be brave. How could you stand all this without an injection?” “I was sitting at a lake near my holiday resort. I listened to the wind in the leaves. A car or a motorbike went by. I felt the cool air on my skin. I was sitting in the sun on a big white stone – but no, if I looked closely at it, that really was my tooth!”