Core Process Psychotherapy is humanistic, integrative, transpersonal and psychospiritual.
People often come to therapy when they feel quite stuck in patterns where not enough of their needs are being met. Another reason for coming to therapy tends to be where someone is denying aspects of self in one way or another.
Rarher than look at change in a reactive way, a Core Process approach asks a client to bring awareness to the way the mind creates such stuck patterns or creates ways that we split from our whole self.
It is an integrative modality that combines Buddhist approaches on wisdom and mindfulness with Western psychodynamic approaches on the conditioned mind.
Staying With Our Inner Experience
Through this approach we are invited to be in relationship with our internal world and stay with our inner experience even though this includes pain, fear, sadness, and anger as well as joy, relief and inner stillness. By staying in relationship with our felt sense or inner life, we process our feelings in ways which may not have been possible for us in the past.
When we can stay with our inner processes in this way, we can connect or reconnect to our whole self. This can be seen as a healing journey as we integrate our split parts. We can naturally retrieve our disowned or unowned or unpotentialised aspects of self when we sit with our distress, difficulty and pain and allow it to be processed - met, acknowledged, owned and felt.
A Therapeutic Relationship
The therapeutic relationship is seen as central in a therapeutic enquiry, and this modality believes that everything is relationship. It asks us to bring attention to where we are in and out of relationship within our selves and also with others and within the relational field between us. This can also extend to our inter-connectedness and how we relate to the wider environment, through its various intersectionalities.
The therapeutic relationship is seen as central as relationships have inevitably wounded, and they can also heal and to be healed they need to be met in relationship that can acknowledge the hurt, pain and loss of what came before.
Suffering, Impermanence and Acceptance
You may be wondering how this modality works. Essential to this is acknowledging that life isn't always sweet and it's important to become disenchanted with a yearning for it to be sweet. It can be sweet and sometimes is. It can be and is many things at different times or moments of our life: devastating, unfair, boring, frustrating, disappointing, distressing, disempowering are just a few examples of what we tend to want to fix, correct or therapise away.
Instead of trying to manage feelings that are often judged as ‘bad’ a Buddhist psychology asks us instead to become disenchanted with a mind that clings to needing things a certain way. It also asks us to recognise the impermanent nature of all things, including our inner states of mind as well as external conditions. It also asks us to accept things the way they are. In practising these qualities of mind, we can naturally feel into a more spacious, responsive and creative way of living.
In simple terms we are no longer subject to the worldly winds of gains and losses, praise and blame, success and failure. Although we may want to have nice things, enjoy our work and relationships, they won't bring a lasting sense of security as they are externalised desires. Many people come to this form of therapy when they've had all that they can take of the worldly winds and are ready to integrate shadow as an aspect of the psyche.
We can stay connected nstead to our deep knowing nature which is already free from personality-based-living. Our inherent nature is our health and our ground of Being. It has become obscured by the inevitable conditioning we all go through including the emotional cost of that conditioning. The wave can forget that it is also the ocean.
Obscurations to Inherent Health
In therapy we can acknowledge our pain, grief, distress or even joy and this can be witnessed by an attuned resonator or therapist. This in itself can be a powerful way of feeling real, heard and met. We can then naturally deepen into contact with ourselves and our deep pool of awareness and continue our organic process of individuation.
We look at all of the ways we keep ourselves from our natural state of awareness. We develop personalities in the world which is a necessary way of living, surviving and coming into relationship with others. Core Process Psychotherapy helps us to discover how our ‘self’ is only a continuous movement of mental, emotional and physical processes.
Core Process Psychotherapy helps us to notice how we have split from our wholeness, our 'Self' which is free of formed ideas of personality-based-structures. With awareness, we can integrate our internal splitting of self, so that we rediscover and live out our true potential for more fulfilment, compassion, wisdom and joy. Developing awareness itself is seen as healing, emancipating and a way of bringing greater reflectivity to our way of participating in the external 'worldly winds' of life. Our personality is seen as the most formed aspect of self, and the invitation is to return to the deep pool of consciousness in order to rediscover ourselves as a Process: our true dynamic 'Self' is a dynamic, creative state of Being.
"Core Process Psychotherapy is an exploration of how we are in our present experience, and how this expresses the past conditioning and conditions of our lives. A depth awareness of what is happening in the present moment is used to explore our inner processes. This awareness encompasses our energies, sensations, feelings, mental processes and their expression in the body. The aim is not to alter our experience but to sense how we relate to it, so that it becomes possible to move with greater creativity and flexibility in our lives." - Laura Donnington
"Nature has many ways of refilling us. When we awake to the glory of a beautiful sunrise she fills us with hope. When we play like children in the waterfall she fills us with joy. When we answer her thunder with our own she fills us with power. When we kneel by the river and surrender an image of our lost one to its currents, she fills us with grief. When we sit with the wisdom that comes from seeing and understanding our journey, watching swans gliding in silence on the dark lake, she fills us with reverence. And when the work is done and we stand alone on the hillside beneath the stars she fills us with grace." - Ian Siddons Heginworth (Environmental Arts Therapy)
The aim is to be in our human experience, and not to try to rise above it or change it. Presence to all of our inner experiences means that we don't aim to just feel good. We can learn to accept and be with all of our inner weather. As we feel our human experience to be both personal and universal, we connect deeply to our interconnectivity, our relationships with our inner parts and others and our living environment, and sense into the inherent health and freedom at our core.
As held patterns are released, so my experience of myself can become more integrated, freely moving and whole.
“Awareness is our true self, it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness, we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments.”
— Charlotte Joko Beck
"We hoard and hold tight to our own awareness - like a frightened whirlwind spinning ever faster, trying to convince itself of its own autonomy, struggling to hold itself aloof from the ocean of air that surrounds it." - David Abrams, eco-psychologist
