“I read you’re certified as an integrative psychotherapist. You shared this required a multi-year post-graduate training program that ended with a day long oral evaluation.
“I’m curious: What is this Integrative Psychotherapy stuff? Tell me more about this therapeutic modality you worked so hard in.”
I’m glad you asked.
What it Feels Like: A Way of Being with You, the Client
First and foremost, integrative psychotherapy is about a way of being with you, the client.
As an integrative psychotherapist, I’ll gently, kindly, patiently, engage with you. I’ll engage you in three ways.
Inquiry: With inquiry (part 1), I practice the art of gently following you, as you slowly take me into your world of thoughts, ideas, needs and feelings.
Attunement: Through attunement (part 2), I’ll engage in empathy, really being there with you as you feel and experience. I’ll also go “beyond empathy”, meeting your feelings and experiences with a caring, reciprocal response - for example, I might meet your sadness with my expression of compassion; I'll respond to your anxiety with a sense of security-making; and I’ll greet your anger with a serious-taking.
Involvement: Add involvement (part 3), and I’ll offer an ongoing sense of presence in the relationship in the form of reliability, dependability, and consistency.
Together, through inquiry, attunement, and involvement, you’ll find I’ll support and guide you in your healing journey. So, let’s talk about that healing journey in the language of integrative psychotherapy.
What Happens: Healing and Feeling Whole Again
Integrative psychotherapy is about, well, integration. Integration so that you can feel whole again.
Part 1
One core idea in integrative psychotherapy is that we all get hurt as we walk through life. Sometimes there’s acute trauma - those big, heart-achy events that break our hearts and sometimes even our spirit. Other times, there’s cumulative trauma - small hurts that happen again and again over time - perhaps the small ways our partners or our parents missed us. Either way, we all get hurt along this journey through life.
Sometimes there are relationships that help. Sometimes, someone loves us through the hard times. And that helps us heal. Other times, the people that love us are the people that hurt us. Or the people that love us aren’t there to help us. And we have to go through the hard times alone. When there’s no one there to support us, we can start to defend against the hurt - push it down inside, hide it from our own awareness - find ways to make it “go away”.
Integrative psychotherapy is about having a healing relationship with a therapist so that those hurt parts of ourselves can heal, and in that way we can feel whole again - we can integrate.
Part 2
A second core idea in integrative psychotherapy is that we experience life in 4 different ways: through our minds (cognitively), through our actions (behaviorally), through our bodies (physiologically), and through our hearts (emotionally). When we get hurt, we hold our pain in one, two, three, or even all four of these parts of ourselves.
Integrative psychotherapy is about having a healing relationship with a therapist who supports you in releasing the pain and the wounding that may be stored in up to four different ways. That way, you can feel whole - in body, mind, heart, and action.
The Underlying Theory
A key idea in integrative psychotherapy is that a therapist is better if he can integrate different theories together to help the client heal. Integrative psychotherapy combines collection of powerful approaches to therapy that are theoretically consistent. Integrative Psychotherapy involves Fritz Pearls’ Gestalt therapy and its contact oriented approach, Transactional Analysis as originally envisioned by its founder Eric Berne in his 1950s writings, Ronald Fairbairn’s object relations, Carl Roger’s humanistic or client-centered approach, and key ideas from cognative behavioral therapy. By interweaving all these theoretically consistent approaches, the therapist has more tools and better skills to help you, the client, heal.
Detail
If you’d like to learn even more about this mode of therapy, take a look at the articles section and click on the article “Integrative Pscyhotherapy: A Three course Meal.”
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