How is integral psychotherapy helping you and your clients

Hi all,
Durwin has asked me to take over admin of this pod for the time being as his time commitments are currently very demanding.  So I'm stepping in and I'll try to be here every few days or so.

It sounds like some of us are hoping to get discussions really moving on this pod. I think there is incredible potential here and we could all benefit from the experience and insight of this community (thanks Patrick for voicing this).

So a few questions to get things moving:

How is your practice integral as opposed to any other type of psychotherapy?

What are you finding are the specific benefits of using an integral approach?

What about frustrations? Blocks? Mysteries?

Do you find that you have clients who are second tier? If so, how is therapy different? Do you find second tier clients have fewer existential worries?

Any other questions, ideas, comments? Let's break it open…

Re: How is integral psychotherapy helping you and your clients

Hi Katherine,

I can tell you how my practice is integral and how it benefits me and my clients. First of all I should specify that I’m not a psychologist/therapist in the official sense of the word - all my work comes from word-of-mouth and I mostly deal with people who are looking for answers in their quest to further development and an increasing number of people who have issues relating to family/personal relationship and those who are dealing with death in some form. Durwin and I met on the II pod and he asked me to join this pod to get some of my ideas out.

I work with individuals and groups through their interaction with animals - dogs specifically. The biggest part of the work is done in wilderness or park settings, and nature and our relationship to nature is the background to all we do (obviously culture and society play a part here as well). I find that integral comes in most specifically in that I am at integral levels of development, and as such am able to interpret what is happenig in my clients’ world from an integral perspective. “Being present” is the most important condition I try to establish (hence the work with animals in nature) as I find that my clients are able to take a higher-level view of their reality and are much more open to gaining insights from an integral level. The main benefit to the integral approach seems to me that it makes sense to people, and it seems to generate insights that stick. I started my organization after I got to know integral and AQAL as a concept, and it has as such played quite an important part in setting up “On the Trail”. It’s been 4 years now, and my work has shifted mostly to working with people, but it’ll always be a work in progress, and I welcome this pod as a helpful tool in developing my own insights.

Frans

Re: How is integral psychotherapy helping you and your clients

Hi Frans,
thanks for replying about how integral helps you and your clients. It is a great relief for me as well to have a framework for understanding clients that is all quadrant, all level. Before I found integral, trying to settle on one (or a few) theories of psychotherapy always felt like sawing off my left arm. In other words, nothing felt whole and therefore I didn't feel I was true to my own wholeness in adhering to a partial theory.

I'd love to hear more about how you work with dogs in nature.

Re: How is integral psychotherapy helping you and your clients

Hello Katherine, allow me to introduce myself. My name is jon Pearson. I am a UKCP (United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy) registered psychotherapist of 11 years experience working from the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy. I have been reading Ken Wilbers corpus since 1983. Since that time I have practised Yoga across all  my disclosed and disclosing fulcrums and have taught Yoga as what I think of as an AQAL tango since 1990. I am partially osmosed into Vajrayana Buddhism. An actively-engaged parent to a wonderful 10 yr old boy, I subscribe to the notion of health, not as the World Health Organisation's definition of it as the “..absence of (pathology)” but, in the words of Katherine Mansfield, as “Being all that I can be”.

My original training modality has been in Transactional Analysis. However, as an integrally-informed student, I quickly became aware of the limitations of an approach targeted primarily at fulcrums 3 and 4. The current Relational approach in TA has sought to redress this imbalance by incorporating material garnered from Kohut's Ego Psychology,  contemporary psychoanalysis and object relations theory in order to account for the Fulcrum 2 or borderline/narcissistic entrapments we are all prone to manifest to some degree. I have taken this approach on board in order to evolve into a broad-spectrum psychotherapist and I am successful in my work.

This approach, wonderful as it is in that it accounts for the first six fulcrums and is osmosing into all four quadrants (accounting for cultural differences (LR), CNS physiology (UR), and tenuously, social policy (LR) latter of which needs more work tho Denis Postle's website is a joy in this respect)….does not as yet account for the transpersonal…which in this country certainly means you know something about that ole elevationist Jung…an issue I seek to resolve in that I am evolving an integral model of TA which seeks to rectify that balance about which more in due time….

So; how is knowing a bit about AQAL helping my clients. Myriad ways. Amongst them;

1) When sitting with, say, a young  working-class unmarried mother of 3 young kids who lives on the upper floor of a tenement receiving welfare support, it really is not possible to use a purely LR therapeutic relationship to empower her out of the merdes of her life; trying to  change the UL belief movie is like eating butter with a red hot needle. An integrally-informed therapist would seek to mobilise appropriate support agencies to oprimise her wellbeing whilst, and as a part of, engendering a therapeutic relationship to provide restitution in the L-quadrants. Much orthodox thinking in psychotherapeutic circles would eschew this course of action in that it a) flies in the face of therapist opacity and b) as a consequence  potentially sets up a relationship of co-dependence or symbiosis. My thinking is that these kinds of remedial steps are redolent of using my energies to get my clients energies going just like dealing with a schizoid processin a  high-functionning client but within the realms of all quadrants…if the unmarried mother is not noticing a difference inher internal or external life after a year of LR concerted efforts (bracketing here the disablements of a crumbling social service system) then the client's inertia increasingly becomes the focus of enquiry..

Gotta sign off here briefly and will continue shortly…

Re: How is integral psychotherapy helping you and your clients

Part two.

2) I subscribe to integrally-informed John Rowan's dictum that a therapist should be intimately acquainted with prepersonal, personal and transpersonal modes of relatedness. Ingress into the transpersonal is a confused issue largely dust-kicked by the current incongruence of definitions regarding what is religious,  what is spiritual and what is transpersonal and compounded by widely-differing notions of what is health - and the latter has been defined by Ken and Treya in Grace and Grit in lotsa different ways. Integralism hoovers up the dust-cloud very nicely ..in ways I will not elaborate upon here…but paves the way for understanding how best to differentially approach a client with a crisis of  religious faith, an individual crippled by impulsively acting at odds with her/his humanist “spiritual” beliefs, a person using “spiritual bypass” (Re;Grof) to block bereavement grief. Most orthodox pastoral counselling remains uninformed as to how best to tackle these issues and tends to collapse them into a single issue using the much misunderstood, watered-down Rogerian core conditions..which to my mind in hese cases  tend to be as effective as an anosmic tracker dog. By contrast, an effective integrally-informed approach can “diagnose” the issues according to fulcrum mistranslations and empathically respond to the various strands of “dysfunction” with what Chogyam Trungpa would refer to as “real-” as opposed to “idiot compassion”, thereby instituting insight on the part of the client, and a healing, reparative experience, to boot. I do my best in this domain; I am still learning. But I am taking on an increasing number of Buddhists through word-of-mouth referrals so I reckon being integrally-informed has gotten me doing something right.


3) How I am in the therapy room. Molto vipassana, yoga, ILP, over the last few years has rendered me alive to the subtleties of the transferential and countertransferential domain within my own inner event horizon with several notable benefits;

a) I am alive to the encounter, trained to dissociate less with clients, interested, prone to seeing the buddhata, the shakti, the sheer humanity in the Other in this miracle of we-ness…and the client picks up on this. Current research suggests that it is the quality of interactiveness in a therapy room which determines the success of quality therapy rather than a cognitive insight garnered by more instrumentally-biased interventions.

b) Spending a lot of time Witnessing in the therapy room (and I am not perfect; I can shrink-wrap my awareness into thinking about lunch with the best of 'em when hungry) tends to do something with resonance..the clients relatively-undisclosed dharma body resonates with mine facilitating personal understanding..many eureka moments..many morphogenetically-resonant “I was just gonna say that..” moments making us closer..I do feel that transference is as much a subtle body/causal body resonance..and after all, the Advaita Vedanta and Samkhya-Yoga systems delineate the vasanas and samskaras  as residing in the causal and  they transduce downwards..(I am thinking about doing an MSc Psychotherapy by writing a thesis on “Transference as a Subtle Body Process” but I dunno as yet whether they'd buy it in the current Establishment)

Anyway..there's a lot more to say. My blog may be worth perusing in the coming season if this all floats yr boat.

Re: How is integral psychotherapy helping you and your clients

Jon,
I am at long last coming round to replying to your very thought provoking and inspiring post. I mentioned to you privately, but will mention here again for other members of the pod, that I've been processing some procrastination that has its roots in fear. I love to write, but I find I get scared about being seen/heard. What if I say something stupid? What if I don't think of anything intelligent to say? What if I try too hard to sound intelligent and reveal my own insecurity and make an ass of myself while doing it. So this is my way of handling that. It's sort of a jump before you can be pushed approach. I'm not trying to solicit support just my way of facing my fear. It sort of works, usually.

I was very interested in your assertion that transference is as much a subtle body/causal body resonance.  I certainly agree that the affect we have on our clients and they on us at the subtle level is both helpful and rife with unspoken, unconscious transference and countertransference. My guess would be that possibly the majority of therapeutic change (and mistakes) are keenly felt at this level by therapist and client. I have also noticed at times,  that clients didn't seem to respond to dynamics that I thought they must feel at the subtle level. It seems as if there can be a sort of subtle numbness which can look like naivete and care-taking or bullishness.

I am also intrigued by the notion of transference as causal body resonance. I'd love it if you'd comment more on this.

There are so many other interesting pieces in your post, but for now I'd like to leave my comments to this discussion in the hopes that you and anyone else are interested in exploring this idea further?…