What is Process-Oriented Psychology?
Processwork (or Process-oriented Psychology) is a practice that uses the client’s own sensory-grounded experience as the source of a change process unique to them.
It is an awareness based practice that believes in what is happening in the moment and supports the client to trust their own inner sensory-grounded experience as as the source of a wise and ever unfolding change process unique to them.
A practitioner who uses a Process-oriented approach is trained to notice their client’s signals; without assumptions - to amplify them, and then work with the Edge of the client’s identified reality as it arises.
This awareness work helps them to uncover those experiences and aspects of their whole self that lay just beyond the boundary of their normal way of identifying. The emergence of these previously unowned experiences deliver the natural and wise next steps in their life journey.
Process-Oriented Psychology is a very effective approach to individual and collective change, which essentially provides the paradigm, and trains the facilitator in attention and awareness skills and feeling attitudes that allow them to trust what is already happening, notice the way in which the clients perceives their reality, connect with the way that the present moment is trying to express itself, and follow where the underlying wisdom of every situation, and the client, is leading. You will experience the power of this approach repeatedly by the personal and collective “Yes” that you feel when a process is unfolding.
Process Work, as it is also known, began in the early 1970’s when Jungian analyst, Dr Arnold Mindell, the founder, formulated the idea of the 'dreaming process;' as a coherent and meaningful flow of experiences that underlies problematic or painful events. He discovered that our natural next step in personal growth manifests not only in nighttime dreams, but also in physical symptoms, relationship difficulties, addictions, and social tensions, and that by attending well to these disturbances exactly in the way that they are reported by the client, we can assist in unfolding new wisdom, insights and connections, for the clients which reveal their own solutions. It is not up to us as facilitators of any kind to give people answers, it is up to us to use our awareness, our own sense of centre, our capacity to really listen with an empty, curious mind, and our faith in momentary experience as it unfolds, to reveal the true solution, or change, that is inherent in the “problems” themselves.
Process-Oriented Psychology theory and methods encompass a broad range of applications and have been applied in many disciplines: as a form of inner work or self-therapy, as a facilitation method for groups and organisations, as a conflict resolution technique, in therapeutic settings with individuals, couples, and families, as a method for working with physical illness, comatose and remote states of conscious-ness, death and dying, and behavioral health issues such as addiction, depression, anxiety and panic disorders.