Integrative Body Psychotherapy and Gestalt Psychotherapy

Integrative Body Psychotherapy, Gestalt Psychotherapy, and other co-created experience-acknowledging approaches, are in receipt of increased neuro-psychological understanding and support for their methods and thinking; this support helps to keep my work informed, contemporary and in the realms of identifiable outcomes from the perspective of the client. Gestalt in particular, as part of its history, has cognitive and behavioral roots and thus also has an added orientation toward action and activation of experience, as well as a grounding in wider psychological and philosophical roots.

I am keen on us regularly reviewing your experience of engaging in our therapeutic relationship. As a practitioner I believe the main outcome measure is if and how you experience what we are doing (or have done) is having an overall positive and helpful impact on your sense of self and your ability to engage in a more authentic and meaningful way with yourself, with others and with the wider world. My approach pays attention to your various contexts of existence (systemic understandings) and your ability to integrate our work together into meaningful wholes (existential and construct psychologies).

The field of body psychotherapy emerged in part from Wilhelm Reich's work and it forms a distinct branch of both psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic thinking and approaches. Contemporary body psychotherapy, and the other integrative approaches I call upon, pay attention to the integration of physiological/somatic, emotional, mental, spiritual and social/relational aspects of the individual. It involves an extensive body of knowledge and specified theories of mind-body / body-mind functioning that take into account both the complexity of interactions and the reciprocal relationships between psyche and soma.

Therefore I have an underlying assumption that we are embodied beings carrying a potential for a functional unity between psychological, transpersonal and bodily aspects of being. I see dynamic correlations between the somatic manifestations, psychological, cognitive, behavioural and transpersonal processes that you and I observe and experience; I support us to engage with these in our relationship with compassion and awareness.