Keith Witt Ph.D.

Psychotherapy involves a relationship between client(s) and therapist designed to help the client in multiple ways. I’ve been studying therapy, practicing therapy, teaching therapy, researching therapy, or in therapy since I was fifteen, and I continue to discover nuances in the therapeutic relationship, and to encounter exciting new approaches. I believe all systems have validity and utility and fit together in an integrated whole that encompasses the incredibly wide breadth of human functioning, relating, and healing. I’ve included an excerpt from my book Waking Up where I explore some of the complexity and depth of the therapy experience:

Psychotherapy—How is it Possible?

Psychotherapists want to interact with clients in ways that help them remeditate symptoms, enhance health, and support development. To do this we relate, teach, inspire, confront, interpret, and direct throughout the session in a variety of ways depending on what we and our clients bring into the room.

In many ways this is an impossible task. Imagine you are a therapist sitting down with a male or female client to help them in some fashion. You have an hour. What are the relevant dimensions that need attention?

Is your client physically comfortable, healthy, or in balance? How can you tell?

This client has consciousness, a sense of self. Are they comfortable or uncomfortable with their sense of self? How can you tell?

Your client is a social being, embedded in various social networks and relationships. Is there harmony or conflict in these social frameworks, and how can you tell?

Your client has both a masculine aspect of deep consciousness, hunger for purpose, and attraction to feminine radiance, and a feminine aspect of radiant love, yearning, and attraction to masculine presence. Your client almost certainly has predominantly a more masculine essence or a more feminine essence in their sexual relationships and in their social and professional networks, but can be open or blocked in either. Is your client open and true to his/her deepest sexual essences, or blocked and constricted? How can you tell?

Your client is developing simultaneously on a variety of developmental lines such as self, cognitive, moral, spiritual, and relational. What lines are most important to their current work? What levels of development are their centers of gravity (their current, most natural level of functioning) on those lines? What do they need to support development on those lines? How can you tell?

Your client remembers the past consciously, unconsciously, and in bodily tissues. Is the past a peaceful place? Do they feel liberated and strengthened by the past, or shackled, wounded, or disabled by the past? How can you tell?

Your client anticipates and conceptualizes a future. Do they anticipate with pleasure or anxiety? Is there peacefulness with their path to inevitable death, or terror, anger, numbness, or dissociation? How can you tell?

Your client has a felt spirituality, a constellation of physical sensations and cognitive constructs that they identify as a sense of the sacred. This sense of the sacred can be associated with any number of things such as prayer, meditation, nature, love, family, communion with others, work, play, life, death, places, ceremony, or ideas. It is not an intellectual construct as much as an interior, visceral experience that identifies a spiritually charged area. This felt spirituality, either consciously and/or unconsciously, yearns both away from the body for oneness with transcendence beyond physical reality, and also into the body for feeling oneness with all of nature, sensation, pleasure, pain, and communion with others. Are both these ascending and descending spiritual hungers being satisfactorily met? How can you tell?

Can your client effectively self-regulate and self-soothe in all environments and life circumstances, or does the environment intrude in the form of other peoples’ attempts to regulate and/or soothe them, or in the form other natural consequences such as illness, injury, or failure? How can you tell?

Your client has responsibilities to self, work, family, and relationships. Are these responsibilities powerfully and joyfully embraced, or are they experienced as burdens and constraints, perhaps even as miseries in response to perceived collapse and failure in felt duties (duties they have accepted on an emotional basis)? How can you tell?

Your client needs a sense of personal meaning and/or deepest purpose. Are these needs identified and satisfactorily met, or does your client suffer from not knowing or being true to his or her deepest meaning or purpose? How can you tell?

Your client has a constellation of defensive states that they can unconsciously inhabit under perceived threat. These states have characteristic amplified or numbed emotion, distorted perceptions and thoughts, destructive impulses, and decreased capacities for empathy and self-reflection. How do you help this person cultivate awareness and abilities to shift into healthier states of consciousness, and how can you tell when they do?

You, as therapist, experience a wide array of perceptions, sensations, thoughts, feelings, and impulses during the session. How do you process and act on these to best help your client?

Now, imagine that your client is joined in the session by their lover who also has all the above issues and concerns. At least in their sexual relationship, this lover is likely to have a more masculine orientation if your client is more feminine, or a more feminine orientation if your client is more masculine. This lover has all the issues we just explored, and shares with your client desires to love and be loved more, and to hurt and be hurt less. The complexity of the session has just increased by an order of magnitude. Their relationship is a living, intersubjective, energetic and behavioral system that has its own patterns and demands, relational defensive structures, strengths and weaknesses that need attention. Within this system there are two sets of individual characteristics, defensive structures, goals, and agendas, plus relationship issues. How do you prioritize and address all these new factors?

Good therapists cycle through multiple perspectives

It is, of course, patently impossible to simultaneously address this overwhelming wealth of material in general, much less in one hour. What good therapists do is cycle consciously and unconsciously through multiple perspectives during the session. These different perspectives enable therapists to identify issues, prioritize agendas, discern interventions, and maintain a healing culture in the session with their client.

Psychotherapy is an art.

I believe strongly that therapy is an art and that every therapist has a natural healing style that draws from many sources but is essentially a unique expression of that clinician. Because of this I focus much of my teaching on sharing exciting perspectives and techniques with students with goal of inspiring them to delve more deeply into their natural healing styles.

Just as we change and grow throughout our life cycle, our natural healing style changes and grows. I was just as dedicated and confident in 1980 as I am today, but I know a lot more and have deepened enormously in life experience and maturity. Meanwhile research has generated a wealth of new data, systems, and useful perspectives that enhance and complement the practice of psychotherapy. Am I a better therapist today than I was then? I probably am in most ways. On the other hand, I’m sure there are people in need who would benefit more from having sessions with the 1980 Keith than with the 2007 Keith. The psychotherapeutic relationship is idiosyncratic and dependent on so many variables that the chemistry of the moment often trumps the experience and qualifications of the practitioner. In five years I imagine I’ll have different perspectives and approaches in various areas. Does that make my current work inferior to the work to come? Probably in some ways it does and in some it doesn’t. For these reasons I believe a natural healing style is always a work in progress that extends throughout the life of the healer. I do my best to surrender to that process and I encourage my students to do the same.

Filed under: Uncategorized on August 21st, 2007 | Comments Off