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Personalities are the base notes of change work

In Integral Master Therapist Blog, Integral Perspectives, Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

Whatever mode of therapy you’re using, it’s beneficial to keep influencing clients to install missing capacities in their personalities and take responsibility for problems stemming from maladaptive personality traits. It’s always a good idea to help people be more flexible, adaptive, and appropriate. This is both especially difficult and crucially important with personality disorders.

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An Integral Understanding of Narcissism and Gaslighting, Part 3

In Integral Master Therapist Blog, Integral Perspectives, Psychotherapy by Chris Foley

Narcissism is characterized by self-absorption, self-centeredness, the objectification of others, and a constant hunger for attention and praise—narcissistic supply. People with pathological narcissism—seeing others as merely objects for gratification—can also hunger to enjoy the suffering of others. This is where narcissism sinks into psychopathy.

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An Integral Understanding of Narcissism and Gaslighting, Part 2

In Integral Master Therapist Blog, Integral Perspectives, Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

Narcissism is characterized by self-absorption, self-centeredness, the objectification of others, and a constant hunger for attention and praise—narcissistic supply. People with pathological narcissism—seeing others as merely objects for gratification—can also hunger to enjoy the suffering of others. This is where narcissism sinks into psychopathy.

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Shame into regret

In Integral Perspectives, Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

The challenge of therapy (and development) is to turn shame which trashes our worth and moral fiber, into regret which has more of “I wish I knew then what I know now, so I could have behaved better and caused less damage.”

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Post-Issue Relationships

In Love, Sex, and Relationships, Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

Post-issue relationships are the goal of all psychotherapiesIn a post-issue relationship, each problem is an opportunity to grow and love. A post-issue relationship still has problems, resentments, doubts, and selfish …
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Loving Completely – Integrating Science, Heart, and Spirit – a conversation with Neil Sattin

In Love, Sex, and Relationships, Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

Do you ever feel like there’s a barrier between what you know about how to have a good relationship, and what you actually do? How do you take what we know about the science of relationships, combine it with the wisdom of our hearts and our quest for deeper meaning, and integrate it into something practical?
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Depression is the great deceiver

In General, Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

There is four times the rate of depression now than in 1987. We’ve essentially been doubling the amount of depression in this country for each of the last three generations. Even considering an increased tendency to diagnose depression now than in previous years, this emerging 21st century culture is clearly not particularly conducive to happy care-free lives.
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Deeper Consciousness Means More Responsibility

In General, Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

In my book, Waking Up, I maintain that Integral psychotherapists cultivate compassion and depth of consciousness to co-create healing cultures with their clients. Depth of consciousness means understanding people within the many contexts of their lives, including the altitudes they typically inhabit on a variety of developmental lines like the self, interpersonal, parenting, morals, psychosexual, and integration-of-defenses lines. With deeper consciousness in my clients and myself comes felt responsibilities to help all those contexts, but with varying degrees of urgency.
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Coaching and Psychotherapy

In Integral Master Therapist Blog, Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

I’ve looked with interest at the rise of coaching as a discipline over the last twenty-five years. I love the movement and admire all the men and women who are called to help others in their lives. People are by nature social, and everything we do, any developmental progress we make, involves intimate connections with other people, and we all do better with wise guidance.
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Integral psychotherapy is redefining psycho/spiritual/physical healing in the 21st century

In Love, Sex, and Relationships, Psychotherapy, Spirituality & Personal Growth by Dr. Keith Witt

Integral theory is a meta-theory that creates a scaffolding within which all other theories are organized. Integral psychotherapy is any therapy that takes into account a global understanding of the Kosmos. Objective/subjective, individual/collective, states of consciousness, lines of development, stages of development, spiritual/temporal, and types of individuals are core dimensions of Integral understanding. Any healing approach that practically utilizes these perspectives as cross-validating, mutually influencing forces is by definition Integral psychotherapy.
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The (Positive) Power of Shadow

In Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.” – Carl Jung In a U.N. study, people rated happiness as more important to …
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Intimacy and Evolution Are Relational

In Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

I believe that humans—using conscious focus and intent—extend energetically even farther into direct communion with fields of subtle energies that comprise all knowledge and form in multiple dimensions. It’s all relational, it’s all evolution constantly progressing, and it all leads to human self-aware consciousness joyfully expanding.
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The Physics of Mood

In Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

We all want to feel better. Sometimes, this can happen instantly with insight, attention, loving acceptance, or shared understanding. But more often than not, feeling better takes time. I call this the “physics of mood,” because our feeling states are based, to a significant degree, on our hormonal systems. Rage, shame, terror, and high anxiety create endocrine baths in our bloodstreams that often don’t instantly disappear when we address them.
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Dealing With Panic Attacks

In Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

Panic attacks are not much fun. Hearts race, hands sweat, you feel like everything is going to hell, and you believe you are powerless, worthless and alone. Many people mistake panic attacks for heart attacks and end up in emergency rooms being prescribed anxiety reducers like xanex and valium.
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Mid-life Crises: Disaster or Turning Point?

In General, Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

The concept of a midlife crisis first appeared in a 1965 article by Elliot Jaques, entitled Death and the Midlife Crisis. He, like the psychoanalytic community, felt that approaching death was more fully realized by adults, potentially provoking depression, panic, and strong impulses to flee, change, or recapture a vision of youth and hope.

Approval and Disapproval Influence Us All the Time [64]

In Cultural Commentary, Psychotherapy by Dr. Keith Witt

Whether we know it or not, our social existence is dominated by feeling accepted or unaccepted, OK with the world, or ashamed of some mistake, flaw, or failing. How we …