New Paradigm Process Therapy & Consulting offers a variety of support services to individuals, couples, families and groups. These include therapeutic support unavailable in the mainstream psycho-medical treatment model, as well as consulting services for organizations seeking conflict transformation and healthy workplace cultures. NPPTC uses the facilitation techniques of Process Oriented Psychology and Leadership, within a social equity and anti-racist framework.
The Process Work Approach
Individual Sessions
As a paradigm, Process Work grants freedom to be creative in the exploration of our lives and ourselves. Alchemy is an apt metaphor: we often seek therapy when we are faced with something icky, that we cannot find value in. Process Work applies heat through growing awareness, which supports the transformation of a disturbance into something precious. Individual sessions offer time and space to plunge into the lesser known parts of our personality and consciousness, and to bring new wisdom into our everyday identities.
relational Therapy
Relationships are our greatest teachers, and often our greatest challengers. Because unintended communication is typically what disturbs relationship, together we develop awareness of communication signals, value the meaning of mixed signals, and practice the skills of inner awareness that support honest expression in relationship. Over time, we learn to welcome conflict as an opportunity to grow, to know ourselves better, and to deepen relationship.
Extreme and Altered States of Consciousness
Of all the wild experiences human beings have, extreme states of consciousness are possibly the most marginalized, and often feared, in mainstream U.S. culture. Extreme states can express deep agony, and profound personal insight. Process Work takes a teleological approach to altered state experiences. That is, everything that arises is meaningful, not simply the causes and treatments. In contrast to psychiatry, we view altered and extreme states as temporary experiences, rather than chronic conditions. Interventions are geared toward the individual, in the present moment, with the intent of growing awareness about the experience itself, as well as the meaning it may hold.
Grief & Loss
The author of The Long Goodbye, Meghan O’Rourke, in sharing the process of caring for her mother at the end of her life, offers us this precise observation, “If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.” The death of a loved one is devastating; so too are the deaths we do not name - of significant relationships, of dreams of the future lost to illness or injury, the loss of a home to disaster or foreclosure, and countless other ways we encounter heartbreak in this life. We experience many deaths in our lives, though we do not always acknowledge the grief that accompanies our losses. Grief work gives us new language to understand our experiences, and ways of evolving in relationship to our losses and our loved ones who have died.
Coaching
Many of us fear our personal power, because it is unknown in its fullness, and because we fear the ways that power is misused. But standing in our personal power also allows us to share our gifts with the world, and to be fierce protectors of what we care about. Coaching sessions are an opportunity to cultivate awareness beyond a known set of behaviors, so we can choose how to exist, and how to react. Coaching is designed to follow the individual goals of each client, to create frameworks for skill development, and to own and embrace the self-growth of persisting through challenges.
Dream Work
Who we are really, is who we are at night, when we can dream anything. Sadly, education in the Western world often discourages dreaming, so we have trouble accessing the dreaming parts of ourselves. Process Work regards dreaming as a lesser known part of our consciousness that is asking for more awareness; it is an opportunity to think symbolically, be childlike and imaginative, and to unfold mythic patterning that is present throughout a lifetime.
Addiction
The field of addictions treatment is rife with judgments and critics. Process work is different. It allows creativity and curiosity to find meaning in the altered states that are accessed through drug use. We take a direct and warm-hearted approach to sustainable change, considering the context & situation present when the addiction started (personal history), the current situation that supports the addiction (personal psychology), and the world issues in the background that make addiction appealing (cultural context). We work with substances as forces of nature, or disturbers, that are symbolic of a larger process trying to emerge and be integrated into awareness. We recognize behavior change as a byproduct of a deeper emotional change and expanded awareness.
symptom work
While it can seem absurd, or even cruel to suggest that there is meaning in our suffering, Process Work methods remind us to pay attention to our body’s underlying experiences, and the information that arises through our sensory channels of sight, sound, deep proprioceptive feeling, movement, and relationship. Our dreaming bodies remind us to keep awareness of the possibilities available to us, when we are so embedded in the everyday world of consensus reality beliefs, facts, and social norms. The body often comes into consciousness through disturbances, ie. pain, injury, impact, and illness. Symptom work is deeply grounded in the experience and sensations perceived through the body - not simply analyzing information with the mind. Symptoms are ours to cope with, but they are often connected to a larger experience of relational, environmental, and world issues.
