Psychotherapie und Coaching

HAKOMI - Mindfulness-centered body psychotherapy

Over the last 50 years, classical psychotherapy has changed in various ways. For example, the shift from talking about an experience to experiencing an experience in the present therapeutic situation is important. Then it’s on to examining how we ourselves shape and organize that experience.

The HAKOMI® method, in its body-related approach, takes into account not only the depth psychological and systemic perspective, but also transpersonal aspects in psychotherapeutic work. This results in a unique opportunity to combine conflict- and solution-centered, process-oriented and consciousness-oriented approaches.

Hakomi is body-oriented

The body is one of the best means of examining and understanding a person’s self-organization in the present experience. How we organize ourselves as a whole in our behavior, in feelings, memories and views, including everything that we are not aware of - the body reflects it. That is why it is valuable to be able to perceive its language through mindfulness and to understand it. In this way, many important core beliefs can be called up and experienced immediately when we work with the physical, visible level of our being.

We use body awareness to be able to easily examine a person’s self-organization in the present experience. With physical interventions that are carried out precisely and mindfully, we direct attention and open up new ways of experiencing.

Non-violence is an attitude of mind

One of the essential contributions of the HAKOMI® method lies in dealing with defense. Precisely described therapeutic attitudes and newly developed techniques shape this work. People have a series of mechanisms to ward off external influences and to preserve their own integrity.

It is exhausting and difficult to engage in a struggle with these mechanisms. Many things are easier and faster if, for example, we support the defense and thus make it accessible to observation.

With a non-violent attitude, we invite the unconscious to cooperate, because the unconscious determines what is possible in a session and what is not. Only when it does not feel threatened in the therapeutic relationship will it release the most sensitive information.

With words

From our point of view, the quality of a person’s self-organization is determined by the flow of information. How different parts of a person work together depends on what they know about each other and about the outside world.

Internal models of reality open up and limit the possibilities for behavior and experience. Words characterize and move the symbolic levels on which this type of information can be stored and changed. Words are also an important way for a therapist to constantly stay in touch with the inner experience of their client and thus ensure that they are not in different worlds, but are really working together.

Depth psychology

The focus of our work is the individual structure of a person’s personality. That is, the way in which inner unresolved conflicts and the associated unconscious views are expressed, for example, on the body level and in relationship design, and limit the development of individual potential.

In accordance with the theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis and depth psychology-based therapy, I am convinced that these unconscious views are essentially formed in the context of early relationship experiences. Real change is the process of experience-oriented awareness and the enabling of a new, alternative experience of what has been experienced (missing experience). This happens within the framework of the therapeutic relationship.

These convictions are currently being impressively confirmed by new findings in neurobiology and infant and attachment research, whose findings repeatedly refer to how early significant experiences shape human self-organization. The mindful examination of this self-organization with the client, the awareness and emotional processing as well as the anchoring of new experiences on the experience level are core elements of the HAKOMI® method. They are characterized as a depth psychology-based body-oriented method that, precisely through its experience-centered work, also coincides with the latest findings in therapy research.

Inner mindfulness

Our everyday consciousness is not an effective means of experiencing and changing deeper levels of our self, because our everyday consciousness uses precisely these deep layers for its habitual self-organization. That is why we often find ourselves at the point in the struggle for change that we recognize the problem quite well with our minds, but the attempts at a solution do not work.

At this point, inner mindfulness helps us, a form of attention that has proven itself in the meditative disciplines for thousands of years. The slow training of inner mindfulness builds an increasingly stable position of consciousness that allows us more and more to explore the components and the design of the inner experience.

First we get a better sense and feeling for the questions of our lives, and finally we can find access to the foundations of our self-organization. This “common thread” often runs like a woven pattern through many areas of our lives. The non-conscious automatic control factors are gradually brought into consciousness and organized by an increasingly comprehensive “self-guidance”. Ultimately, the path of mindfulness leads to the forces of self-healing and inner wisdom.