What do I work with and pay attention to as a therapist?
- I work with the whole person - with you as you are - the body-emotion-imagination-mind-intuition individual within their social context
- I work with your whole experience including your thinking and reflection - pre-verbal AND non-verbal AND verbal, rather than restricting our work to language and insight
- I work with feelings - whether they are overwhelming, raw, repressed or absent - as an important aspect of your reality
- I work with 'character' - those deep habits and patterns which over the course of your lifetime you have grown into, i.e. habitual ways of experiencing yourself and the world, habitual ways of perceiving, feeling, thinking, behaving which you take to be 'normal', but which tend to repeat past wounds and patterns
- I work with the 'therapeutic relationship' - with our interaction as a reflection or a microcosm of your life, based on the (partially true) notion that how you are in therapy is how you are in life - in a nutshell
- I work with the 'inner world' - with the various parts and aspects that populate your psyche and their multi-faceted interrelationships (as often revealed in dreams)
- I work with the 'unconscious' - with those powerful, underlying forces that shape you and organise you (often against your conscious intentions)
- I work with spontaneous processes - with how things are as well as how they 'should' be, and with the often strong conflict and opposition between your spontaneous and your reflective identity
- I work with the 'body-mind split' - with the dualism between body and mind embedded in Western culture and your particular share in this
- I work with 'identity' - those familial, cultural and sub-cultural webs and networks that you belong to and that shape who you are (whether you identify with them or battle against them)
- I work with you as the subject and potential 'author' of your life - i.e. with your inalienable and undeniable potential for a meaningful, wholesome and fulfilled life whatever your inner or outer reality
- I work with Jung's idea of the 'individuation process' - the idea that there is the possibility of finding an experience and a way of being that we might point to with the mysterious and elusive notion of 'Self'
- I work with processes that may be called 'transpersonal', that go beyond your individual identity and constitute a larger sense of belonging and interdependence with others and the world at large
- Integration: drawing on the best elements from across the multitude of approaches
- Recognising the common factors between approaches
- Appreciating and making use of the conflicts and differences between the approaches
- Integrating all the main branches of the therapeutic field
- Drawing on a rich diversity of specific approaches
- Re-visioning all theories and approaches through a bodymind perspective
- Balancing the mental-verbal bias of the ‘talking therapies’
- Emphasising non-verbal and otherwise subliminal communication
- Integrating both spontaneous and reflective processes and capacities
- Working with all the levels of bodymind experience (body - emotion - imagination - mind - intuition)
- Emphasising the relational aspects of the therapeutic relationship
- Recognising different forms of therapeutic relatedness / modalities of therapeutic relationship (Petruska Clarkson)
- Integrating the modalities into an holistic dynamic embodied whole (the ‘diamond model’ - Soth 2007)
- Taking into account many dimensions and layers of unconscious processes (including traditional transference and countertransference)
- Recognising the paradoxical nature of ‘enactment’ (counter-therapeutic versus transformative) as central to the therapeutic endeavour
- Inclusive stance towards one-person, one-and-a-half person, two-person and many-person psychologies (Martha Stark)