Common features of Integrally informed meta-psychotherapies

The Integral epistemology is a meta-theory that generates coherence and organizing principles for multiple theories. An Integrally informed psychotherapy is a meta-psychotherapy that provides coherence and organizing principles for multiple psychotherapies. It often involves a therapist embodying the AQAL system, but I’ve encountered numerous therapists who don’t know Integral and still operate at Integral altitudes in their work.

I find Integral altitude psychotherapies to be luminous, blending pure empiricism and pure spirit. I’ve always been fascinated with the common features of such psychotherapies. Here are some of the most central principles I’ve observed:

• Life is a continuous set of processes which we can consciously influence.
• Health is optimally influencing the processes of our lives.
• To grow, we need productive self-awareness observing our strengths, weaknesses, mistakes, and triumphs, having insights about better ways to be, and embodying those insights.
• “Self” arises from the orientation reflex we share with all life. Self-aware consciousness in communion with others is the most complex form of orientation reflex in the known universe.
• All selves and processes are experienced uniquely with different types of people in shifting worldviews and changing states.
• Everything is relationships and we can direct love into all of them.
• Integral altitude psychotherapies involve appreciation for multiple systems and a felt sense of how they all fit together.
  Integral altitude therapists have confidence in the power of psychotherapy. You can’t tickle yourself, intersubjectively is uniquely different from being alone, and especially so in the intimate crucible of the therapy session. Therapists accompany and guide clients to places they often can’t get to alone.
• It really benefits therapists to have a stable connection with the other world while doing the work. I recently found this helpful in an intervention session with a practicing alcoholic—he desperately wanted a better connection with his higher power, and my confident channel into the Other World reassured and guided him.
• All psychotherapies have blindspots, and Integral altitude therapists are aware that these will show up regularly in their careers. The most common one I’ve observed in Integral altitude therapies and therapists is not being fully aware of the differences in diagnosing and treating normal crazy and extra crazy (especially personality disorders, the most common forms of extra crazy).

How to embody this knowledge in psychotherapy?

In Waking Up: Psychotherapy as art, spirituality, and science, I suggest that effective therapists and change workers relate, teach, inspire, confront, interpret, and direct.

• Relate—We love our clients.
• Teach—We share as much useful knowledge as our clients can absorb.
• Inspire—we cocreate states reaching for the beautiful, good, and true that inspire awe, joy, love, astonishment, and other transformance emotions.
• Confront—we reflect reality.
• Interpret—We uncover the patterns of our clients’ lives.
• Direct—We express ongoing preferences for more healthy and loving decisions. We openly prefer effort and progress growth mindsets over rigid fixed mindsets.

Observing and embodying these activities yields more consistent Integral altitude psychotherapy.

How do people know when to ask for help?

I think therapy benefits everyone but if you’re not a therapy enthusiast, when should you seek it out? I think orienting around whether or not you and the people around you are happy with you is a fantastic guide.

Happy or unhappy?

Are you happy with yourself and are the people around you happy with you? If so, you’re probably in a good evolutionary groove.

If you aren’t happy with yourself or the people around you aren’t happy with you, you probably need to address some distresses and blind spots.

If you are happy…
You are probably in a good groove. What are ideas and practices that will help you stay in that groove?

• Since life is constant change and multiple relationships, I guarantee that sometimes your continuing development will require effort, sacrifice, and support from caring others.
• Always be alert to experiences or inputs that are more beautiful, good, and true than your current understanding. Let these superior perspectives and practices influence you.

You or others not happy with you is a wakeup call from your adaptive unconscious—your Shadow self—demanding healing attention to distress.
When something isn’t working, it’s a good idea to try something else. It’s especially useful to find wise others to help. These wise others are often therapists, coaches, teachers, or other change workers.

Challenges to continuing development

In The Teachings of Don Juan, the Sorcerer Don Juan tells Carlos Castaneda the there are four traps to threaten a person of knowledge—fear, power, clarity, and old age. Each one has embedded in it an injunction for growth.

• Fear causes us to contract and resist change. So never let fear decide, and always let wisdom decide.
• Power can cause us to not consider our mistakes and blindspots. So always be aware of the possibility of being wrong or making mistakes.
• Clarity can make us overconfident of our beliefs in the face of contradictory data. So always look with curiosity at alternative understandings.
• Old age and infirmity can contract us away from love and wisdom. So anchor in consciousness, values, principles, and wise others while cultivating radical acceptance of all reality including old age and infirmity.

Integral altitude therapies naturally include such thinking. Everything can be experienced from multiple perspectives, and all perspectives have wisdom to offer if we look deeply enough.

What is therapy anyway?

I often hear coaches, consultants, and spiritual teachers say what they do is “Not therapy.” I mostly see these declarations as necessary risk management, but also honorable statements of personal limitations in training, experience, and responsibilities. I understand that in a heavily regulated and highly litigious society, you want to steer clear of the law and regulatory bodies. I also know first-hand how much education, expense, and certification you have to go through to become an officially licensed therapist in this country—I had to jump through many hoops to get my Marriage Family Therapy license in 1975 and many more later for my Psychologist license in 1987. People holding these licenses can resent coaches, pastors, spiritual teachers, or other lay counselors essentially doing the same work with vastly less training, expense, and certification.

The upside of this risk management consciousness is cultivating ongoing awareness of what your limits are in your work, and valuing consultation, supervision, and other inputs to improve as a change agent. The downside is that it focuses us on the disconnections of systems rather than on common elements and commitments of healing relationships.

All this being said, when two or more people enter into an agreement where one is helping the other to grow, therapy is taking place. If the practitioner embodies the common features of Integrally informed psychotherapies, Integral altitude psychotherapy is taking place.