Though I am trained as a trauma therapist in techniques designed to relieve distress, I experience my clinical work as human development support. I work to support the development of every aspect of my clients’ lives that they deem personally significant, a process that at the outset typically begins with addressing specific patterns of symptoms or difficulties. For many persons engaged in therapy, symptom relief is part of a greater desire for the freedom to be more fully themselves within every domain of life. These domains include the physiological, emotional, cultural, relational, familial, vocational and spiritual. The process of healing and recovery typically involves the growth of every part of us, a truth exhibited in the increasingly researched phenomenon, post traumatic growth.
Often, and especially in cases of long-term therapy, more and more of the client’s life comes into focus within the course of our work together. This expansion of the scope of therapy can include both a broadening and a deepening of the client’s experience of themselves and their lives. Within this expansion, the therapeutic goals of healing, recovery, and symptom relief reveal themselves to be elements of a much larger process within the trajectory of a human life. Here, I will call that greater process human development. Human beings appear hard-wired not only to survive, but also to grow, develop and evolve. Our psycho-biology is endowed with an innate intelligence, a developmental propensity, that permeates every dimension of who we are. Our interest in healing and well-being are themselves expressions of this developmental impetus within us. I understand therapy as the practice of providing optimal conditions for our psycho-biology’s innate intelligence to function as freely as possible.