Schools of therapy and life-healing – a consumer guide

I started to write a description of the methods which I use or have been influenced by, and from there it grew to be an overview of a good many of the commonly known types of therapy.

This page isn’t complete. I’ll be adding more sections later.

Good therapists, not good therapies

When it comes to life-wide change and life healing, my sense of what’s real and what works is based on my own journey of 35 years wide-ranging experience of the world of meditation and personal development. (I’ve experienced a hundred different approaches, the bad as well as the good.) So I’ve reviewed these various schools of psychotherapy from that perspective. I’ve aimed to be fair, but I’ve not tried to be neutral, and this is meant to illustrate my personal viewpoint.  I hold very clear values about psychotherapy: that it should be not technical or clinical, but loving, safe and respectful and if needs be, challenging; connect with both practical everyday life and if needed with inner core emotions; meet and see the strength and the beauty of the whole shining person, not just “someone with a problem”. Other people  have completely different opinions.

In my view, all schools have something good to offer, but most are on their own only part of the story. I use six or eight different methods at different times, and I wouldn’t be without any of them. There are endless dozens more therapies, some excellent; but in the end I don’t think there are good therapies: rather, there are good psychotherapists. And each good therapist uses one or many of this enormous range of methods  which suits that particular therapist.

Many schools, but few principles

Also, there there aren’t so many dozens of essentially different therapies. Rather, there is a much smaller number of underlying healing methods which the many dozens of  therapies draw on in different combination. Indeed nowadays there are therapies which are brought into existence rather artificially in order to have a specific delimited protocol of methods suitable for academic research.

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