In our courses / workshops we draw on a number of therapeutic resources, primarily gestalt therapy, systemic family constellations and internal family systems therapy (IFS).
Gestalt therapy provides the tools that enable us to gain greater self-awareness, embrace reality more fully and to become more grounded in the present. Above all it allows us to gain contact with unresolved issues from the past that still affect us in the present, manifesting in our everyday lives as negatively charged emotions and uncomfortable physical sensations. It helps us to learn how to face and welcome our experiences, accept and integrate what we feel, and discover the resources we have to satisfy our needs and so take care of, and responsibility for, ourselves, and become more authentic.
Systemic family constellations provides us with a deeper understanding of our family system, enabling us to see the hidden dynamics that underlie the family system so as to heal the family relationships and re-establish order and harmony in the family system. Out of this reconciliation with our roots flows the strength that enables us to face what life has in store for us. We discover that our life is a homage to all those that have come before us, to all our ancestors that suffered and experienced joy before us so that we could be here today. Our well-being and inner peace are their triumph and the guarantee that their tribulations were not in vain.
Internal Family Systems Therapy provides further tools, this time to enable us to recognise and work with the many sub-personalities or parts that make up the internal system of the mind. We learn how these parts interact with each other, how some act as ‘protectors’ to ensure the well-being of the system and how other parts have been ‘exiled’. These ‘exiles’ are normally vulnerable child parts that were wounded and suffered some form of trauma in the past. We also learn that beyond these parts we all possess a Self that is unaffected, untouched by past hurts and traumas and that this Self is our true, essential nature. By facilitating the presence of the client’s Self, IFS enables it to contact the protectors and exiles with curiosity and compassion and so enable any extreme parts to take on more balanced and fulfilling roles within the system. Exiles are able to tell their story and be received with compassion, leading to their healing and reintegration within the internal family system.
As well as these systemic therapeutic and humanistic approaches, the Foundational Programme also draws on positive psychology, the enneagram and autobiographic work. Positive psychology aims to optimise psychological well-being by, among other means, cultivating virtues like gratitude, forgiveness and love and positive character traits. The enneagram is a powerful ‘horizontal’ personality typology that we combine with a ‘vertical’ developmental approach adapted from integrative philosophy. And autobiographic work enables us to revisit, remain in peace with, and love, our past.