Adlerian Psychotherapy & ‘Lifestyle’

Adler, Freud and Jung are seen as the fathers of psychology. Adler saw psychology as indivisible from a person’s physical, emotional, and social experience of life. He recognised the central influence of early childhood and all surrounding layers of social and collective conditioning as the key factors to an individual’s ‘lifestyle’. This blueprint contains thoughts and beliefs, with associated emotions and behaviours, that determine the pattern of relationships with others, with self and with the world.

A person’s blueprint projects into all their interactions and so the accumulation of all lifestyles on earth effectively determines society and all human experience, including our relationship with our planet. I offer an opportunity to examine these blueprints, enabling freedom of choice through insight, acceptance, and expansion of what is perceived as possible.

In this phase of humanity’s awakening, it is only as we individually embrace the inner workings of our mind and emotions with compassion that we will bring the light of consciousness to enable our world to transform. Most spiritual traditions have recognised that each human is a universe, and that ‘heaven’ is within. It is the balancing of our inner experience of life in the present moment that brings peace to our outer reality and then to humanity’s global experience. It is in the embracing of what we have resisted (the shadow) and the uniting of what can be seen as darkness with light that we enable wholeness to be found.

I have been practising Adlerian Psychotherapy and Counselling for six years, and I’m now focusing my energies mainly on supporting those who are awakening to an understanding of their greater self, although any personal development journey involves this even if it is not a conscious aim.

The holistic Adlerian approach remains central but much of the work follows transpersonal psychology - using visualisation that activates and integrates the right side of the brain through images, archetypes and metaphors. Transpersonal psychology focuses on spiritual and transcendental human experience, seeking to inegrate the individual’s connection between ‘self’ and higher consciousness It offers profound and rapid balancing of the psyche and mental/emotional ego personality and I draw on my shamanic training here.