Attachment-Based Integrative Psychotherapy

Patterns. Unique, complex, only half-seen, guessed at and shared, we consider these things, explore your inner landscape that stretches back to childhood, (we have all been children). Then understanding that now is a different time we try and see how you can bring more of yourself to your life and to your decision making so that you can be free from old patterns, from ways of surviving and ways of feeling 'ok', that you no longer need because they no longer work. And this is a basis for finding new meaning and new ways of being for yourself and in the relationships that most affect your life.

Social norms, exclusion, oppression, isolation, neglect, politics, labels, diagnosis, discrimination, the exercise of power in society, and family and in cultures and in cultures within cultures. Sexual power, sexual abuse as children and as adults and how that affect us. Complex individuals struggling with multiple layers of meaning and unique intersections of experience. Vulnerability on the one hand, agency/power on the other. The threats we have faced, how we survived them, what that meant to us then, and what they mean to us now. And what now? Maybe reclaiming whatever you've had to put aside of yourself to survive or perhaps calming that part of yourself that can't stop shouting or hiding or hurting or insulting yourself. Finding new meaning and new action. Finding your way forward. 

Often the starting point is not what it seems. Ways of being shaped by our experiences can transform our perception of ourselves and of the outside on a gradient of conscious and pre-conscious deception and self-deception, hiding from us the things that are most difficult for us to face. A simple example of this is not being able to name our bad feelings, is this anger, or sadness, or fear or what? Or we may say to ourselves "I had a pretty good childhood", but when we think a little harder and try and think of actual tangible examples to back up our initial sense, hmm, maybe its surprisingly hard? The point is that if you’re suffering enough that you’ve come into counselling, but you see no patterns, that’s a pattern, and there will be more ‘under the hood’ as it were. Every starting point is a good starting point.

What this means for my therapy is that it is not so much the 'what' as the 'why', it’s not so much the 'behaviour' as the 'function' and it’s not so much the words as the reason for saying them. It is seeing all human behaviour, feeling, thoughts and ways of being as adaptive, protective, strategic, fully human. In line with this practical way of thinking my practice is empirically based and integrative, I use what works. 

As a theoretical basis for my integrative practice, I use the The Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment (DMM), this means that I choose interventions (i.e. what I do and say) at least in part based on understandings informed by the DMM. Also the way I express my understanding may often be in the terms of this theory, but these are always offered as hypotheses lightly held and always to be tested against your reality. The DMM is perhaps the best evidenced, and most comprehensive theory of human psychological development in relation to mental health yet proposed and is at the crest of a breaking wave with others such as the Power Threat Meaning Framework of a new nosological paradigm of mental health set to transform not just the narrow domain of psychotherapy but more generally our appreciation of what it is to be human, what the diversity of human experience really is phenomenologically, and how we can imagine being each other, in context, and therefore to live alongside each other with more understanding and with more care.

It is not necessary to know or understand anything about the theories that I use to get the full benefit of the therapy based upon them, in fact they can become a distraction, or even a hindrance, if discussed without discernment. The point of the therapy is in the relationship, the communication, the trust, the understanding, that is what makes it work, all the theory in the world is no good unless it’s implemented in and delivered through these things, these things that connect us. That’s the work I do.

Our Life, Our Being is an amazing thing. Truly amazing. Sometimes, in therapy together, we glimpse that. And it comes alive in us. And it ripples out into the rest of life.