Systemic Consultancy – to be clearly differentiated from systems theory (!) – has been an extremely successful counselling approach for some time. This success became possible through prominent demarcations from previously established procedures. The inclusion of the environment (family, team), the rejection of guilt questions, and of making judgment, a new understanding of illness and …
The dispute over whether the body is relevant, or perhaps even indispensable for psychological change, was already taking place in Freud’s times. Wilhelm Reich and Otto Rank were the first dissidents to fall out of favour with Freud on the basis of this opinion. To this day, depth psychology has not really recovered from this …
Metatheory means occupying oneself with other theories, utilising the help of theoretical principles and propositions. We have tried to investigate as many relevant and established counselling disciplines as possible. The questions have always been: Why do these methods succeed, how do they explain these effects and how, from our viewpoint, can theory and practice be …
The psychological system continuously chooses one side of the respective psychological guiding processes and, thus, it ensures its continuance. Without decisions there can be no continuance. As people, we stand under the compulsion to select, which enables our freedom and makes personal responsibility necessary. This has the consequence, that the ‘continued existence’ is not a …
What does perception competence consist of? It does not consist of information processing or data gathering, but it consists of an interaction of many different senses: The things that belong to perception competence are emotional concern as well as body awareness, a sense for nuance and colour, listening to what reverberates and precedes the sound, …
The psychological system must continuously decide. Deciding means choosing between alternatives (guiding processes!). This continual need for self-preservation, through choosing a new event – perceiving, thinking, feeling, acting, evaluating, wanting, resonating and understanding – makes the psychological system unstable. There is no time-sustaining security for stability. Nobody can know if he will find the answers …
The ways and means by which psychological guiding processes give structure can also be described by the every-day word ‘expectations’. Expectations mean that one reckons with certain events or possibilities, but not with others! These expectation structures (if one asks the researchers about infant research) already occur in the first weeks of life, because of …
Psychotherapy, as well as coaching, promises changes in behaviour, experience and communication in their clients. The principles, by which this change occurs, or should be affected, cannot differ. How can this be possible? The principles of change, the active factor for enabling psychological wellbeing, work motivation, successful communication and good performance, apply to all consultancy …
Here is a small consideration for readers interested in system theory: How should the entirety of the psychological system be thought of, when eight different guiding processes are to be identified? The idea of a central entity (such as thought, reason, the self, identity) cannot be maintained and justified from a system theory viewpoint. If …
Deciding means (not) wanting something. Deciding means that one relinquishes calculation. Calculation here means, that one lists the pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages of the alternatives and that one adds them together in the hope that it will become clear what should be done. If this functions, one no longer has to decide. Then …