What is Holistic Psychotherapy?

The word holistic has been used to describe health care practices that include acupuncture, massage therapy, Reiki, naturopathy, and homeopathy. These practices attempt to bring harmony to the physical, energetic, and/or nutritional states of individuals.

Holistic Psychotherapy also seeks to bring balance between these systems. However, as with all psychotherapy, its primary focus is the treatment of psychological and emotional pain that manifests in depression, anxiety, trauma and related disorders. It is the way in which holistic psychotherapy treats these disorders that marks its departure from conventional psychotherapy and denotes its singular effectiveness.

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Psychologist Or Psychiatrist? 3 Questions to Ask Before Making an Appointment

Patients are always surprised to learn that there are very few laws governing the practice of medicine. In fact, a physician who is licensed to practice medicine by his state medical board – whatever his specialty – can legally provide counseling for anyone, even if he or she has absolutely no training in psychology at all!

For instance, just because a doctor calls himself a psychiatrist is no guarantee that he is actually competent to practice psychiatry. For example, legally, a proctologist, a medical doctor certified as a specialist only in disorders of the rectum, can label himself as a non-board certified psychiatrist and do adolescent counseling for drug problems or psychotherapy for suicidal patients-all, with no training in psychology.

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Integrating Psychotherapy and Spirituality

Why “integrating” psychotherapy and spirituality?  This question seems silly to many people for one of two reasons.  Some would say it is silly because the two must necessarily be kept separate, like church and state.  Others would say it is silly because they are inherently intertwined and don’t require any effort on our part to be integrated.

I am inclined toward the view that the two are inherently intertwined, but believe that they have been artificially separated by psychology, the discipline that most clearly undergirds most of what we practice in psychotherapy, in its zeal to be scientific.  Freud’s disdain for religion didn’t help either.  Of course there have always been those, like Carl Jung, who have kept alive the perspective that psychology and psychotherapy have an intrinsic relationship to spirituality.  However, this perspective has only moved toward widespread acceptance among psychotherapists in the last few decades, thanks in part to the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.  Such acceptance in mainstream psychology, as reflected in the American Psychological Association, has only been noticeable in the last few years.

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