The main principles of our multi-dimensional integrative approach
- 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)
- Recent developments in
- Recognising the importance of right-brain to right-brain attunement
- Re-visioning the relationship between body and mind
- Application of systems theory and systemic understanding to psychology
- Multi-dimensional = integral (Wilber)
- Recognition of parallel processes on each level and between different levels of system
- Connection between inner world (whole bodymind) as a system and outer world systems (family, social, cultural, global)
- Recognition of inner and outer ecology of bodymind systems
- Our own woundedness as the foundation of our therapeutic presence
- Embracing our own wounded self as the instrument through which we work
- Transcending the doctor-patient dualism
- Therapy as an ‘impossible profession’
- Paradoxical notion of the working alliance and the therapeutic relationship
- The client’s conflict becomes the therapist’s conflict
- Enactment as the paradox at the heart of relational therapy
- Therapy as an ‘impossible profession’
- Paradoxical notion of the working alliance and the therapeutic relationship
- The client’s conflict becomes the therapist’s conflict
- Enactment as the paradox at the heart of relational therapy
- Self-organisation and the conflict between established structures and emergent processes
- Extending the traditional meaning of ‘parallel process’ into a new model and organising principle for therapy (fractal self - Soth 2006)