SOME USEFUL DEFINITIONS

1_What is Integrative Psychotherapy?
2_What is EMDR?

1_What is Integrative Psychotherapy?

Integrative Psychotherapy (IP) is a quick and efficient form of psychotherapy. With its roots in Humanistic Psychology, IP attempts to transcend the more traditional approach that one school of therapy or one therapeutic tradition should fit all people.
As you can imagine, every person is multi-faceted, as is the picture a person forms of him or herself. Each one of these facets can be utilized within the realm of psychotherapy. Think of features such as physical and personality traits, social environment, ethnicity, personal history, feelings aspirations, values and many, many more! It is easy to see how through our innate differences and experiences every individual is indeed a world apart. To effectively address this diversity, Integrative Psychotherapy strives to offer a tailored form of therapy. To do so, it rests on a few fundamental pillars:

- Individuals are as they are: Unique
- Individuals have an inborn need for balance in their lives.
- Individuals have an inborn wish to grow and develop themselves according to their aspirations.
- Deep down inside, individuals know how to and can solve their problems themselves.
- In general, people do not seek the help of a therapist because they have a problem, but rather because they have lost contact with their own resources that will help them solve it.

Utilizing therapeutic techniques supported by scientific research (*) such as EMDR, NLP (See below), Transactional Analysis and Gestalt therapy, the integrative therapist meets the client in his or her world. Together with the therapist, the client searches for the root causes of difficulties in order to find the necessary tools to solve them.
As C. G. Jung put it: For every client, a therapist must reinvent a new therapy, every single time.

2_What is EMDR ?

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapeutic tool used in certain forms of psychotherapy in order to relieve the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) and other mental health problems. EMDR initially used eye movements in a bilateral manner similar to those that occur naturally in REM sleep. Later developments in EMDR extended the use to include other bilateral stimuli, such as sound and touch or dual attention stimuli, to bring about similar effects. The use of EMDR has also been broadened to treat a wide range of conditions.

SOME USEFUL BOOKS

Francine Shapiro and Margot Silk Forrest: "EMDR: The Breakthrough Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress and Trauma". The edition of this book about EMDR is meant for the general public and contains a lot of examples of EMDR treatments and the results obtained.

Martin Seligman: "What You Can Change and What You Can't", Knopf/Random House, 1994. Martin Seligman is considered one of the founders of the positive psychology movement where the emphasis is given to the scientific research on what enables people to perform at their best. The positive psychology breaks with the "traditional" psychology that focuses primarily on the discovery and treatment of psychological problems such as depression, burn-out, etc.