CreaTherapy:

CreaTherapy is a modular approach to therapy that allows you to creatively build your theory/practice coherently and with solid foundations.

To do that, the model I have created separates the core components of psychotherapeutic practices to plug elements into the right places. My idea is to generate a core flexible approach with parts that can lead you to explore those topics deeply. This means you will still be studying the authors and traditions, and you may still belong to them.

The fact that the model is compatible makes it move in a plane that is different to other approaches, and therefore, I call it a (non)approach. This means that CreaTherapy is not competing with other approaches, but it appears here and there to help you create connective tissue between models, therefore giving you freedom of movement.

CreaTherapy is composed of three main parts:

• Philosophy: a description of notions about reality and knowledge creation
• Components: areas of knowledge inside psychotherapy that could belong to any tradition
• Personal/professional profile: concepts to describe a psychotherapist in their process. I aim to highlight your style and help you find your individuation path.
• Coherent discourse and values belong or are not to a tradition (you may create coherence on your own or based on a tradition).

There is a second layer that involves more of my research into psychotherapy, which includes:

• a broad and flexible developmental notion
• a notion about shadow and shadow work
• therapeutic principles to guide a process

Philosophy

The philosophical layer is the foundation of anyone's thinking, and we do not talk about this enough. We may times mask our ontology, the reality assumptions we are making all the time.

If, as a therapist, I believe in objective reality, that may clash with the idea of subjective reality of the model I may be using. For instance, I believe in science and a stable and measurable world, but then I am working in a person-centred approach that has evolved as deeply constructivist. This means that in session, I forget about any stable reality, and the only one that matters is my client's version of reality because everyone has their own reality.

Here, we start having a few problems. First, quite quickly, you will find yourself not being coherent with yourself or with your client. When we explore each other's realities more and more, we start seeing we differ in fundamental ways. How can I maintain my 'coherence' person-centred principle if I cannot express my different reality with my client? How can I be person-centred if I cannot talk about science with my colleagues?

My answer to that is quite simple: we move between subjective positions, and those have different reality perspectives. We do not need to keep a complete coherence of ontology, but we do need to understand those transitions to be coherent at a 'meta' level.

Even though each of these traditions has sub-groups (yes, all of this keeps opening up when you keep studying), I have narrowed the central ontological positions to seven options:

• Phenomenological: focus on personal experience, direct referents, and perception.
• Hermeneutic: focus on interpretation, symbols, and horizon of meaning.
• Cybernetic: focuses on processes and patterns, social systems, biological systems, and mind systems of information.
• Scientific: Focus on testing and trials (isolated experimentation) and statistical analysis, evidence-based, and cumulatively truth.
• Spiritual: trust in the goodness and natural unfolding of entities guided by natural, immanent or transcendental forces.
• Constructive: Focus on reality construction and unique realities.
• Participatory: focus on assemblage with the world, abstract/practical, unique/real experience.

You may feel more inclined to one of these, and your inclination may change over time. The ideas and practices you read and see if other people are grounded in one of these options. So, we need to understand the implicit assumptions of a practice and move some of those when we would like to use it on our own.

Coming back to our scientific and person-centred therapist, we can see that the same Rogers was quite scientific at the beginning. He used quantitative research to analyse effective therapists, being the first evidence-based therapist in history. The following evidence is compatible with being person-centred, but the movement has philosophically moved towards constructive philosophies because they help a lot to understand people.

So what do we do? Some scientists are more positivistic than others, but most these days are post-positivistic. This means that they do not believe in direct access to reality, and that is why they try to prove themselves wrong. Understanding science a bit deeper leads us to see that there is a relationship between the instruments and how they shape what we can perceive, and good science tries to triangulate with multiple instruments of measurement.

Quite easily now, we can have a post-positivistic view of therapy, where we understand that individuals have different measurements of reality, and that may explain our fundamental differences in understanding. Some scientists have moved to a participatory ontology, which moves this forward to say that we participate in the creation of reality with our engagement with it.

The constructivist lens is still helpful and does not need to be reduced to a postpositivistic or participatory lens. I can have meta-philosophical coherence and say that even though I am primarily postpositivistic, I think that only with a constructivist lens can I deeply understand others. Therefore, it is the 'best instrument' for that context.

This is an example of making 'coherence' at a philosophical level. These types of movements and reflections will allow us to then plug knowledge more freely when we read someone coming from a different 'place'.

components

Components aim to separate knowledge and techniques from the values, narratives, and philosophies a practitioner needs. This separation is not always easy because many techniques and practices are deeply embedded in the tradition's network.

I am proposing to create groups of core components, areas that group therapeutic knowledge. From those, I aim to point towards embedded knowledge that needs to be understood in their own network of coherent meaning.

For example, one component group is the subjective, and inside it, we find the component 'thought'. Inside, we can find multiple ways of working with thoughts, each from a different frame of reference. We can explore thoughts from Bion, a psychoanalyst in the object relations tradition, or from Lacan, the creator of his own school. We can explore thoughts taught by Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and inside CBT first, second, or third generation—the first saw behaviour as the centre and thoughts as one more behaviour. The second generation saw thoughts as a core scheme to change behaviour and emotion. The third incorporates mindfulness and does not try to change thoughts but to let them go.

Each of these views of thought belongs to slightly different modes of seeing the world, humanity, health, etc. Each belongs to a distinct tradition of knowledge. When we can see where they are coming from, we can understand those insights more deeply and asses when those techniques are more valuable. We can also build our understanding of 'working with thoughts' in session in a coherent way with us and our path. We can also understand deeply how our clients may see 'thoughts' as we learn about diverse perspectives and position ourselves as belonging to one:

our own perspective, positioned inside a network of perspectives.

Having a positioned perspective goes beyond perspectives. Knowing we are making a choice means we understand diversity.

Profile

I have developed a series of profiles for therapists that aim to help you see the diversity of approaches, not only from schools of thinking but also from natural dispositions towards caring for others.

I do not believe we are one of the positions, but we tend towards some, and we need to learn from their contrary positions.

For example, the 'Compassionate' is composed of being 'follower' over 'propositive', and being 'acceptant' over 'challenger'. This does not mean you have low levels on the others; sometimes, we have developed many configurations. Therefore, I did not make a continuum for the choices but two different scales, and you can easily have multiple tests for your record (there is no attempt to have hidden numbers; it is only a sum behind).

Sometimes, some of the positions are blocked for us; deep-rooted traumatic relationships have blocked an area of care for us. When that happens, it is easy to polarise into one position and then fall into its shadow aspects.

In this case, the Compassionate can polarise into not setting enough boundaries to protect their needs. The compassionate benefits from understanding the 'Changer', a position with the opposite configuration: high in propositive and challenger. This helps the Compassionate set boundaries when needed without losing its compassionate position as its centre.

Coherence

A big part of the creative part of CreaTherapy comes at this point: how do we make coherence from the parts?

We have seen research after research that therapy efficacy does not come from years of study, nor the tradition you study, not even from years of practice. It seems to come from the quality of the connection between therapist and client, the capacity to be convincing when practising by conveying the feeling of being coherent in thought and action.

This means that what makes a good therapist is not the learning itself but learning rooted in someone being authentic, someone who speaks from experience. A therapist speaking from their journey has a more significant impact than someone who speaks from the books.

Knowledge is essential because it helps us make sense of our chaotic experiences and remain coherent in a complex and painful world. But the most crucial part is that a therapist 'creates and discovers' its practice. The practice and the therapist are the same, and we can share the intimacy and fragility of being human and make sense of it together as two participants in the journey.

One of the ideas that I had when learning psychology was

What if what made the founders great was that they created a therapy? Should not we all create/discover our therapy?

This is the purpose of CreaTherapy as a (non)approach, not trying to give you the solution, but some foundations for you to make sense of therapy, your therapy, a therapy you create.

The process of coherence is personal and also collective. Developmentally, we tend to oscillate between being more collective and more individualistic, and I think those two poles are always in tension in our human lives. I think that our relationship with the traditions and collective moves through the path, and sometimes we need to belong, and sometimes we need to make our own choices. Keeping coherence with your path (and having ethical considerations to make your work safe and legal) gives ample space for play and discovery.