About Dr. Keith Witt
My Mission
My mission…my passion…is to help everyone be healthier, happier, and love better.
Relationships determine our quality of life — relationships with people, the world, our physical bodies, and all the different aspects of ourselves in the past/present/future. Healthy relationships generate harmony - harmony that most of us feel as love and health.
What creates satisfying love and health?
For thousands of years people in all cultures have explored every aspect of romance, passion, family dynamics, healing, purpose, spirituality, parenting, and intimacy. I want to share how this vast body of knowledge fits together into a beautiful, graceful whole that can be practically applied to every aspect of your life.
I’m a licensed clinical psychologist, lecturer and author dedicated to studying, teaching, and creating transformative healing systems. I’ve been teaching, writing, and practicing psychotherapy in Santa Barbara, California since 1973.
I decided to become a psychotherapist at 15 when I entered therapy myself and realized it was a natural language - a native tongue - to me. I wanted to participate and contribute, not just as a client but also as therapist and teacher.
I was born in Hawaii, raised in suburban Los Angeles and have lived and worked in Santa Barbara since 1967. With that background, it’s only natural that I embraced the Southern California lifestyle. I’ve been an enthusiastic surfer, a tennis player, and from 2000 to 2006 fronted the rock band, Blown Head Gasket. Along the way, I was also trained as a tap dancer. I have a black belt in Shotokan Karate and continue to study martial arts. These days I enjoy daily tai chi practice.
I met my wife Becky in 1973, and we’ve been together ever since. We have two grown children, Ethan and Zoe. We’re living proof that with insight and understanding--and a lot of work--you can achieve enduring harmony in all aspects of your life.
In the end… it’s all about love.
What I Am About
The combined work on this site is a cosmology, heavily informed by Ken Wilber’s Integral meta-theory - a theory that organizes, enhances, and connects all systems. New forms arise from systems connecting, and the interconnected systems on this site all fit together into a cosmology of love and transcendence that I want to share with you.
As I and this world have evolved in the last five decades, this material has evolved, integrating one beautiful set of perspectives after another, generating one cool new understanding and practice after another. If you learn these perspectives/practices and live them, you and your life will change for the better and you will discover and enhance your unique blend of superpowers. All of us humans have superpowers, whether we know it or not, and my mission has always been to help as many people as possible to develop their superpowers to support love, health, success, and the evolution of consciousness.
Background and Experience
Education
- Bachelor of Arts in psychology with honors - University of California Santa Barbara, 1973
- Masters of Arts Degree in Counseling Psychology - UCSB Department of Education, 1975
- Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology - The Fielding Institute, 1982.
My dissertation, An Investigation of the Effectiveness of Talking Plus Touching in Enhancing Health, explored the relative health benefits of combining therapeutic touch with talking in psychotherapy sessions.
Teaching Experience
Research, Writings and Lectures
Books:
- Integral Mindfulness: from Clueless to Dialed-in
- Waking Up: Psychotherapy as Art, Spirituality and Science
- Sessions: All Therapy Involves Relationships Integrating toward Unity
- The Attuned Family: How to Be a Great Parent to Your Children and a Great Lover to Your Spouse
- The Gift of Shame: Why We Need Shame and How to Use It to Love and Grow
- 100 Reasons to Not have a Secret affair
- Trauma into Transcendence: the four stages of trauma work
- Loving completely—a Five Star practice for creating great relationships
- Shadow Light: Illuminations at the edge of darkness
- Shadow Light Workbook
- Integral Mindfulness—from clueless to dialed-in
Other topics I’ve written and lectured on include:
- Integral Sex Therapy
- Integral Erotic Polarity
- Integrally Informed Psychotherapy and Interpersonal Neurobiology: A Match Made in Heaven
- Why Integrally Informed Psychotherapy Is So Cool
- Using the Integral Operating System in Coaching
- Shame: The Misunderstood Emotion
- The Gift of Shame: How to Use Shame as a Resource and Guide in Psychotherapy
- Counseling Skills and Theories
- Up-level Your Natural Healing Style Study Group
- Enhance Your Natural Healing Style Using Perspectives, Techniques, and Art You Enjoy
- Couples Counseling
- Intimacy, Freedom, and Fear
- Attunement as an Organizing Principle in Health, Relationships, and Therapy
- American Tantra
- The upcoming Integral Age
- Dialed-in Marriage
- Dialed-in Parenting
- The Hero and Heroine’s Journey
- Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders
- Evolutionary Relationships
- Love and Conscious Evolution
- Masculine and Feminine
- We all go crazy sometimes
- Habits
- How Spirituality permeates our lives
- Your Child’s Spiritual Growth
- Clueless to Dialed-in
- Humanists, Pragmatists, and Traditionalists
- Secrets of Happy Families
- The Warrior and the Man of Wisdom