Why I’m Eclectic

I’m often accused of sitting on the fence by colleagues and indeed that is a luxury that age and experience has permitted me. Apart from my Psychology degree I have post graduate training in CBT and Gestalt therapy, which for me, far from being in conflict with each other are complimentary and enable me to incorporate different focus at different moments of the therapeutic process.

 Eclectic is defined as selecting or employing individual elements from a variety of sources, systems or styles.

My experience has shown me that different levels of processing are important at all phases of any therapeutic process and different models of therapy can be useful depending on where the client is at any given moment. Of course I’m not suggesting that any process is linear, but am just using a construct to emphasize my argument.

I agree with Rollo May in that an important therapeutic aim is to “set people free”, which can be interpreted as the perceived capacity for choice within the natural and self-imposed limitations of living in “our” world.

We can understand human experience or consciousness in terms of 5 interwoven levels of freedom. The physiological, the environmental, the cognitive, the interpersonal and the experiential. Each incorporates growing levels of freedom at deeper levels of consciousness.

The physiological level relates to organic freedom and is activated and limited by, amongst other things, genes, physical disposition, diet, exercise and drug consumption. This relates directly to environmental freedom where choice and freedom to manipulate external stimuli can be explored using classical and operant conditioning of behaviourism. Here one may obtain observable and measurable results in losing weight, stopping smoking and getting healthy.

At a cognitive level long held beliefs about oneself or the world, that may no longer be adaptive, can be challenged through questioning these belief structures and through cognitive restructuring.

These levels of freedom and restriction relating to physiology, environmental manipulation and cognitive processes could be considered as conscious measurable levels of psychophysiological liberation, but the remaining two, interpersonal and experiential levels of experience often undermine and sabotage environmental and cognitive processes.

At an interpersonal level, we are in the realms of attachment and separation fears, where often our personal uniqueness and striving comes into conflict with our need for connectedness and dependence. Here we need to experience more and think less. Psychodrama and gestalt therapy have no equal as phenomenological experiential approaches.

The last and in my opinion most profound level of freedom is at an experiential level, this in itself transcends words and cannot be talked “about” but is experienced and lived. This kind of experiential freedom can be a hugely humbling experience which can leave people in awe, not of anything in particular, but of being in contact with the wonder that is existence itself, “being” in the world and participating fully in it.