What is holistic psychotherapy?

What is holistic psychotherapy?

I believe there is a paradigm shift in the way we view modern medicine, and that divide is growing greater.

A traditional, medical approach to psychotherapy has two main structures that are absent from the holistic model. These are diagnoses and medication. In a traditional western medical model of mental health, the client is viewed as mentally ill and is given a medication to combat their illness.

The holistic model acknowledges the need for diagnoses only to help a patient describe their cluster of symptoms, to initiate and facilitate conversation around strategy for how to return to balance. In this model, a diagnosis pathologizes an individual, shaming them, or perhaps further perpetuating the idea that something is wrong with them. Carrying around a diagnosis may be counterproductive in that it can increase feelings of shame and create its own version of a placebo effect or self-fulfilling prophecy. This goes beyond any new age law of attraction ideas or that our thoughts create our reality. (I also believe this to be a piece of it, but that’s not the point here). Let’s say for example you have been diagnosed with depression, and part of your belief system is that you are broken and will never heal. When a doctor says to you, “you have this mental illness called depression, you have to be on pills to fix it”, the subliminal messaging is clear that there in fact IS something wrong with your brain. It’s not making enough serotonin, dopamine, etc.

The holistic model looks at factors in your life that may be root causes for feelings of hopelessness, loss of joy or creativity, persistent feelings of sadness, to find out what needs to shift to help your worldview, sense of self and self-efficacy shift.

In this model the causes for depression could be childhood trauma that shaped a negative sense of self, loss of job or relationships that affected one’s self-esteem, high consumption of recreational drugs that cause a spike and a crash in dopamine, nervous system dysregulation, and several other factors. In this model, medication is no use because it doesn’t get to the root of the problem, the actual cause of the feelings. Therapy combined with coping skills can teach you how to overcome depression and help increase your feelings of positivity and see new possibilities.