Therapy
What We Do & How We Do It
By Dr. Johnathon Neda, Costa Mesa-Newport Beach Psychologist and Therapist in Orange County.
What is Psychotherapy about?
What do we do in therapy and how do we do it? The following conceptual framework and focus of psychotherapy is a composite informed by the convergence of theoretical knowledge, research, and clinical experience.
To the extent that the client is ready and able to delve into a deeper level of therapeutic interaction, the central functions of the approach I offer is hinged on the following two aims:
Therapeutic Collaboration
Taken together, this therapeutic mode of collaborative inquiry illuminates how another person experiences being. These two aims help clients learn how to stay with and really feel into the depth of their lived-experience—a level of our existence that we typically don’t pay attention to, are out of touch with, or don’t quite know how to tune into.
Slowing down and adopting an unknowing attitude of curiosity facilitates clients in exploring and giving expression to the seemingly dormant associations underlying their predicament. This associative-descriptive process serves a dual function as it’s part of both the discovery and the healing process.
Reaching Beyond Cognition
The overarching goal here is to develop the capacity to operate out of a wider and deeper system of knowing that includes but reaches beyond thought. To function out of this perspective is to engage in direct experiential knowing through awareness, which is the ongoing knowingness of the mind. This sophisticated form of awareness is based upon the point of view of the whole person rather than of any single part of the human organism (e.g., such as the faculty of reason).
Using the clinical relationship to cultivate [the client’s] awareness through self-exploration avails the client-therapist team of the opportunity to gather more data in trying to effect a change. Gaining access to further resources of the mind expands our problem-solving strategy, which we can draw upon to find new possibilities in addressing the [client’s] given issue of importance. This has profound implications for mental health.
Outcome of Therapy
Good therapy doesn’t just focus on the removal of deficits or symptoms. To be transformative, it has to be geared towards actively cultivating positive emotional states of mind. For instance, depth-oriented psychotherapy can help transform negative feelings or at least lessen the sense of being embedded in one’s pain and suffering. It can alchemize trauma into triumph.
In the course of therapy, those who learn to operate out of their fuller being become more deliberate in their daily lives. In being more intentional, new behavioral expressions begin to manifest as choices are more carefully weighed or considered. Ultimately, this caliber of therapeutic work culminates in a level of experiential freedom characterized by an individual who inhabits a larger sense of themselves and therefore, opens up to a richer experience of life as a whole.
