From Psychotherapy to CreaTherapy.

What is psychotherapy?

It is a hard question to ask, as there are thousands of approaches to helping others feel better. It is usually a relationship, short or long, where one person helps another face a problem.

Psycho-therapy is a therapy of the ‘psyche’, a name we gave to what before was called the soul, which then was referred to as the mind. In this case, the definition of psyche varies from school to school, with some referring to a more soul, dreamlike space, and some to a more rational one.

The second part of the name, therapy, is used for varied topics, such as chemical therapy (chemotherapy), physiotherapy, music therapy, and sound therapy.

Even inside the psychotherapy field, we find people who work with the body and even the body in different ways. Some will be targeting muscles and tendons, some sensations, some movements, some positions, etc.

We also find some traditions that work with groups, such as doing theatre, doing family dynamics work, and doing constellations. Some work with couples, and some work with a relational view of the dyad therapist-client.

Some authors have worked with philosophy, some with cybernetics. Some authors put a higher emphasis on biology, some on rationality, and some on human connection. As I name all these options, I hope you realise that the name psychotherapy seems insufficient to describe the field. The word ‘psycho’ does not grasp the field well, as we work with way more things than the mind.

In my PhD thesis, I proposed a new concept: “assemblage transformation practices.” I like the name in the context of exploring the idea of reality assemblages, but it is pretty clunky for everyday use.

My thesis had a central topic of creativity, and after playing with names for a while, I (even though talking with my partner, so it better said we) came up with the idea of chemotherapy. A concept that aims to open the field creatively from the start.

A common way of addressing this proliferation is integration, but…

Why is integration problematic?

A common way forward is to think about integration. So, I will address that idea from the beginning.

I think it is a great idea—so great that I studied Ken Wilber for years and trained in an integrative approach. The problem is that I found many ways of integrating.

I had my own way while in undergrad, something not too complex but that helped me organise what I was reading. I used Jung's idea of the personality and elements to organise approaches.

Then I learn Wilber, then Opazo. Then, I went to a conference on integrative therapies and listened to about five more options. I have found quite a few more.

But what is the point of integration if we end up with the same problem we started with: a proliferation of options?

But is that a problem?

That is the thing; it is only a problem from a point of view. But what if we can promote the creation of infinite models? A space where people can be helped to create their way of working, assuming that it is part of our human condition to be creative and to have a unique perspective? And at the same time, promote spaces of tradition that can help therapists feel part of a group with coherent language and values?

Here is where the project crea-therapy.com, as a web app, comes to life. Instead of trying to find the proper integration, we may better find ways of promoting safe and efficient model creation.

When I was learning multiple models of therapy, by reading some of the pioneers of each approach, I came up with the following question:

What if what made these therapists great was not the model they created but the fact that they created it?

There are many paths to arrive at the beach.

Once, I was walking with my partner to the beach, which is close to Dunbar, Scotland. This beach has a peculiar way of getting to the water. We park and then need to walk for 15 minutes. Sometimes, there are bog-like areas on the way, and there are some paths walked by other people. Some are more pronounced, and some are fainter.

As we were walking, I started to think in a way I immensely enjoyed, allowing the world to play as a metaphor and helping me reach some understanding.

In a chaotic system, there are infinite ways of walking to the beach. But some paths are safer. They are not necessary to follow, but they have already been tried.

I hope you can grasp what I will say with this bit of reflection: in therapy, we tend to have infinite paths to help a client, and some are more transited.

Does it make sense to let the paths reach infinity? Well, there are benefits to having some paths, for instance, in that way, you don’t step into more nature in a forest.

It was at that moment that writing CreaTherapy came to me as a possibility and a desire. Writing a path that I share, a path that does not aim to be the only one, not even in itself be one, but one that may trace a line in the infinite realm of possibilities. Maybe more than a line, a way of making lines still open but contained in safe spaces.

Intragration

I am proposing a different concept of integration as an alternative to integration. The main difference is that instead of using a model as an abstract configuration, the process of integration means personal assimilation and accommodation of new knowledge. It does not stop with cognitive coherence; it continues as personal creation/discovery and, therefore, a deep understanding of an idea.

We will keep exploring this notion through the text, but I feel it is essential to introduce this alternative from the beginning. I will expand and add granularity to these first conceptual notions.

The old traditions.

I find the idea of traditions quite fascinating. I can hate them when they become ‘cult-like’ and love them when they become a space for sharing where therapists feel free to express their thoughts and experiences.

I have the problem that when I read authors' inside traditions, I find that some of them are closer to other traditions. Sometimes, in the granularity of authors, we find that their values and approaches may have diverged quite a lot from the original.

I do not see that as a problem, as they maintain a coherent language and feel part of their tradition. But we usually do not map those epistemology divergencies or fields of application.

For instance Donald Winnicott can be read quite easily as an humanistic author, and even with mystical notes every so often. However, he was always a psychoanalytic therapist, even being the president of the professional body. Notions, like true self, are quite close to the authenticity of person-centred. The emphasis on spontaneity, playing, and instinctive attunement in Winnicott’s work sometimes seems quite close to Perl’s Gestalt.

It is that space, of authors finding new spaces inside the tradition, that made me develop a model composed of parts, able to be flexible enough to describe our own process of individuation as a psychotherapist.

With this image, I aim to separate things a bit at the moment of analysing a therapist or a model. Tradition stays important as a coherent community space; however, philosophy, practical theory, and practice are in a space between tradition and therapist.

We as therapists can individuate inside the tradition, creating/discovering new areas, incorporating new knowledge, and applying things in a slightly more coherent way. The area of the therapist's person becomes the second pilar on the model, which may be using an even bigger space. We therapists are always in process; we are changing and discovering things. Some ideas apply better for a while, and then others make more sense.

We struggle, we try, we have a crisis, we need to re-think our practice and sometimes our whole lives. What we learn is not dissociated from who we are, and that makes therapy a strange space. This profession works differently than any other profession because the personal and the professional are intimately interconnected.

I am not advocating for a full merge, and I think it is healthy to achieve a work/life balance. But after seeing hundreds of colleagues and myself learning therapeutic approaches and techniques, I can testify that we are always using and changing our lives as we learn. We suffer, we question, we have a crisis, and that’s how we learn.

Some may be able to hold things apart for a while, but when you start seeing clients, it is your own body, dreams or relational spaces that tell you at some point: This is not what I expected; this goes so far beyond what I was told.

Goals:

I want to make explicit the goals of the project I am going to unfold in this text: • to be more a template for therapeutic thinking than a new tradition, • to be compatible with therapeutic traditions of different origins, • promote personal creation by seeing theory as a creative/developmental process and • to create a language for mutual understanding in a space of diversity of thinking.

The model I am presenting to you may more or less cover these goals, but I think I have arrived at a satisfactory place (although there may still be many iterations to come to fully achieve these points).

I aim for it to not compete with the current approaches but to allow users, being therapists of clients, to understand the field, as if adding a layer of tissue between the current knowledge, so there are lines of communication and understanding.