The Art of Collaboration in Psychotherapy

We find our health in our collaborations.

In integrative relational care and practice, health refers to the whole person, not merely to reducing the symptoms of discomfort, distress, and suffering. The whole person is our concern. Our immediate and ultimate concern. In the context of integrative psychotherapy, the whole person refers to all the aspects of the client’s life that contribute to, form, and inform their experience. It does not only include suffering. It also includes the very real and embodied core sources, qualities, and resources that engender resilience, connection, and vitality.  The whole person is just that. The felt sense of what we intuit it to be.

Collaboration, by its nature and necessity, like the client, is integrative and relational. Integrative refers to how we internally and externally bring the part aspects of our life process together. Collaboration and multi-modal practices of psychotherapy reflect not merely the physical bringing together of distinct therapeutic perspectives, but most importantly reflects how we think about and understand interconnectedness and interdependence; that is, that all parts of experience connect, and that all parts of experience depend on and affect every other part. In collaboration, practioners working together provide different perspectives of expertise and life experiences that might be critical in understanding a client’s symptoms. Psychotic-like symptoms, for example, can mean very different things.

The relational not only recognizes that parts are interconnected and interdependent, it recognizes that how we engage and function in relationships determine the health of all systems of consciousness, including self-experience, relationships, organizations, collectives, and environmental ecologies. Thus, how we work together, or co-labor, determines the health of each individual in the system.