About my approach - detailed introduction
Key principles I pay attention to...
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- I work with the whole person - with you as you are - the body-emotion-imagination-mind 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
I will work in all of these areas and ways by paying attention to how they operate in me as well as you (i.e. with my 'self' as an 'instrument' of perception, attunement and resonance). I will be mindful of the patterns and interactions that are engendered between the two of us, and how these replicate or transform your past experience. As most people come to therapy when their conscious resources have already been accessed and explored (and often exhausted), we usually need to attend to all levels of your experience, including unconscious ones. In many ways these are often the levels that 'matter', i.e. before and beyond any conscious decisions made by your 'personality'.
In order to work in this multi-dimensional way, I have explored a wide variety of therapies. I have found that in most situations any one therapeutic approach on its own tends to be insufficient and lacking in depth and reach. Over the years, I have therefore felt drawn into a wide range of approaches, researching, learning and eventually practicing an integrative range of therapies, in order to do justice to the variety, richness and complexity of human experience. I am now familiar with a good many approaches, and have a working knowledge of most of what's out there. So in terms of my original training I am a Body Psychotherapist, and since then I have become what is these days recognised as an Integrative Psychotherapist. But what does that mean ? As it covers a wide range of approaches, this term does not convey much specific meaning.
Basic principles of my approach
Therefore, I call my approach Integral-Relational Body Psychotherapy, to emphasise what I now consider the main ingredients:
- integral - this implies bodymind, holistic, systemic, evolutionary perspectives, attending to evolving wholeness; it also implies an integrative rather than singular one-sided approach, attempting to draw on diverse, and often contradictory theories, finding validity in each
- relational - this implies (for me) both person-centred-humanistic-existential AND intersubjective-psychoanalytic perspectives (and the tension between them - I can explain this, but not in one line)
- Body Psychotherapy - this implies an appreciation of the tradition I trained in and its many powerful theories and techniques, although as an approach it has evolved beyond its origins (an evolution that I have contributed to - see some of my writing available on this website for the distinctions between traditional and modern forms of body-oriented therapy). In many respects, my own brand of Body Psychotherapy is beyond recognition in comparison with the 1970's cushion-bashing, catharsis-obsessed version of Body Psychotherapy which haunts the popular imagination and leads to misconceptions and prejudices.
What follows is an indication of my approach in jargon-terms, i.e. in the various languages and dialects of psychotherapy.
The development of my therapeutic approach
I have described the development of my approach in several articles and papers, notably in "What therapeutic hope for a subjective mind in an objectified body?" and especially in my chapter "From humanistic holism via the 'integrative project' towards integral-relational Body Psychotherapy".
There, I distinguish several phases of development, stretching from traditional Body Psychotherapy going back to Wilhelm Reich's character analysis and vegetotherapy through the various post-Reichian schools and Gerda Boyesen's biodynamic psychology to the origins of Chiron in the early 1980's. The development after that I divide into the initial years of Holistic Psychotherapy, which was then renamed to Chiron Body Psychotherapy - following the formation of the European Association of Body Psychotherapy in the early 1990's. The next phase can be called integrative Body Psychotherapy, followed in the late 1990's by integrative-relational. Since 2005 I prefer the term integral-relational to denote another shift, both theoretical and practical.
These phases do, of course, overlap and blend into one another and the sequential categorisation is an abstraction imposed on what was not a straightforward linear process.
For a detailed description of these phases and what ideas and principles characterised them and distinguished them from one another, please follow the above references.
Generally speaking, the development was from adherence to a more dogmatic, one-sided and partial perspective to a discovery of the shadow aspects and limitations of that original approach, and then beyond into an integration of other, previously excluded approaches. This led eventually to a re-integration of Body Psychotherapy with modern psychoanalytic principles and a formulation of the paradoxes inherent in the therapeutic endeavour.
From the beginning, my training included a variety of humanistic approaches and techniques (breathwork and rebirthing, Gestalt, psychodrama, Transactional Analysis as well as Neurolinguistic Programming), but I branched out into Jungian, post-Jungian and archetypal approaches, both in terms of my own therapy as well as in my work and my thinking. With the integrative project, more and more perspectives found their way into my practice, both from the humanistic spectrum and from the variety of psychoanalytic schools (including classical and Kleinian, object relations, self psychology, intersubjectivity, relational psychoanalysis).
What is 'integral-relational' ?
The term "integral-relational" incorporates to my mind all the preceding phases and principles, but also provides something new, specifically the notion of the 'fractal self' and an extended notion of parallel process (as described in my chapter on "embodied countertransference’`).
What does 'integral' mean in this context?
"Integral" is a term borrowed from philosopher Ken Wilber who has used it since the late 1990's (see his publications since then, especially relevant for my purposes here "Integral Psychology"). It refers to a systemic and holistic model of evolution. It implies a multi-dimensional notion of development, essentially of human consciousness, and how more complex systems and structures evolve from and through prior ones. It is holistic in bringing together both subjective and objective as well as individual and collective experience as well as body and mind. In simple terms, 'integral' denotes evolving wholeness, but without getting lost in focussing on the idealised outcome or the whole to the exclusion of the current state (even if fragmented and conflicted) or the relationship between the parts that constitute the whole. It therefore attempts to hold the tension between multiplicity/plurality/diversity on the one hand and unity, wholeness, oneness on the other.
Wilber has suggested (in his "Theory of Everything") that every event in the universe can be considered from four essential perspectives ("the four quadrants") which are not reducible to each other and therefore must equally be taken into account: subjective individual, objective individual, inter-subjective collective and objective collective. Typically, most disciplines of human knowledge will absolutise and elevate one particular one of these four perspective to the exclusion or neglect of the others, thus providing only a partial 'truth'. Wilber suggests that as long as we play off these perspectives against each other, polarise between them and insist on privileging one against the others, we can only perpetuate fragmented and self-serving knowledge and experience.
The resulting fragmentation can be seen clearly in the field of psychology and psychotherapy (which - in itself - needs to guard against privileging the perspective of subjective-interior reality). The field of psychotherapy has been fragmented for most of the last 100 years and only recently found a serious and substantial impulse towards integration. I have been interested and active within the 'integrative project' since its early days in this country in the late 1980's (although there were, of course, some earlier manifestations, it's only since the pre-cursors of UKCP in the Rugby Conference that this has had a significant impact on the field as a whole).
For further exploration of this theme, see my: The 'integrative project' within the development of Chiron Body Psychotherapy (2007).
What does 'relational' mean in this context ?
Over the last decades it has become clearer throughout the psychological professions that the quality of the 'therapeutic relationship' is crucial to the outcome of therapy. The title of the 2006 BACP conference, for example, was "It's the relationship that matters". Many therapists will now agree on this principle, but what precisely constitutes 'therapeutic relating' - what it is and what it isn't - has been much harder to agree upon. One main reason for this is that the various therapeutic approaches each emphasise certain aspects of relating to the exclusion or detriment of others.
Petruska Clarkson's integrative model (see "The therapeutic relationship") likened different modalities of client-therapist relationship to kinship bonds, thus opening out the idea that different relational stances might all be valid and have their uses in certain circumstances.
So most counsellors and therapists would claim that they pay special attention to the relational nature of the interaction with their clients and try to foster a good working relationship. However, in the tradition of relational psychoanalysis and in Body Psychotherapy the way it has expanded into the relational realm, the term 'relational' has deeper and wider meanings that go way beyond having a good relationship.
To me, the term 'relational' includes a recognition of the parallels between inner and outer relationships. It also implies a notion that patterns of relating are internalised and externalised - they originally evolve in relationship with significant others in early development, shaping our bodies, feelings and minds (or influencing what Reich called our 'character'). Once internalised and established, these patterns then repeat and replicate themselves, along with any painful and traumatic background to them, in all our relationships, including our therapeutic relationships.
What Freud labelled 'repetition compulsion' we can see as driven by the need to find resolution for self-sabotaging, painful and destructive patterns. Today, we see these repetitions as co-created (rather than simply transferred from the client onto the therapist) and therefore use the term 'enactment' or 're-enactment'. Through enactment, wounding interactions from the past can become replicated and lead to increasing hurt and dissociation or also possibly transformation and re-organisation of the pattern into more satisfying, functional and embracing configurations.
A crucial question for relational therapists is how to perceive, understand and interact with the inevitable and necessary enactments which are part of every deep and meaningful relationship.
So, in summary, 'relational' to me has some deep and specific meanings, implying both humanistic notions of authentic relating as well as psychoanalytic perspective of the transference - countertransference dynamic.
My integrative approach: Integral-Relational Body Psychotherapy
- unique integration of a wide variety of therapeutic approaches:
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- drawing on all the schools of the Body Psychotherapy tradition (Reichian, vegeto, bioenergetics, biosynthesis, biodynamic, etc)
- wide range of humanistic-integrative approaches, incl. Gestalt, Process-Oriented Psychology, breathwork & rebirthing, Transactional Analysis, Psychodrama, and others like NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) and existential approach
- psychoanalytic: object relations, self psychology, intersubjectivity & relational perspectives
- systemic: Bert Hellinger's family constellations
- transpersonal: Jungian and archetypal psychology, psychosynthesis
- diagram of the whole field incl cognitive-behavioural focus, constructivist, NLP
What is Body Psychotherapy ?
I was trained initially and have been working in the tradition of Body Psychotherapy - an approach developed originally by Wilhelm Reich, a student and later colleague of Freud. Since its inception in the 1930's, Body Psychotherapy has developed into a tradition which includes a variety of different schools (e.g. Bioenergetics, Biosynthesis, Biodynamic Psychology, Hakomi, Radix, etc). They all have in common the recogition that what goes on in the body reflects and influences what goes on in the mind and on an emotional level.
An accessible recent scientific investigation of the links between body and mind is presented in the very readable book: "Molecules of Emotion" by Candace Pert.
An introduction to Body Psychotherapy can be found by Nick Totton: Body Psychotherapy - an Introduction.
I will at some point write an accessible introduction, but for now leave you with a text which was written in the mid-1990's as an introduction to Chiron Body Psychotherapy - the centre where I trained initially and then became a trainer, supervisor and Training Director. I was instrumental in writing this text, so you may want to endulge me in presenting my personal view in this abstract fashion. Please also make some allowance for the fact that this text is more than 10 years old, and that my approach has evolved and changed quite drastically since then (on overview over the phases of this development can be found in my chapter "From humanistic holism via the 'integrative project' towards integral-relational Body Psychotherapy". There is also a text taken from a BACP presentation I gave on what a whole bodymind approach to psychotherapy might involve, called "Bodymind Process and Wholeness" - this may answer a few questions, too.