Book Description

Integrative psychotherapy: using the principles of dynamic complex systems toguide everyday clinical work. This book introduces a new, integrative, systemic approach to psychotherapy andcounseling and shows how the principles of dynamic complex systems can guideeveryday clinical work.Our mental, interpersonal, and biological (e.g., neuronal) systems are complex andnonlinear, and allow spontaneous pattern formation and chaotic dynamics. Theirself-organizing nature sometimes maneuvers the systems into pathological states.However, the very same principles can be utilized therapeutically to encouragechange for the better. The feedback-driven nonlinear dynamic systems approachdescribed here basically attempts to facilitate positive self-organizing processes,such as order transitions, healthy patterns of behavior, and learning processes.In addition to describing the theory and evidence supporting the feedback-drivennonlinear dynamic systems approach, the authors use an extensive case study toillustrate how the principles of dynamic complex systems can guide everyday clinicalwork. They show how modeling and monitoring of the client's systems and anempirical description of its patterns allows the therapist to individually fine-tunetherapeutic techniques to support the client's progress. Fine-meshed feedbackbased on real-time data and time-series analysis is at the core of the approach, andso an internet-based monitoring system - the Synergetic Navigation System (SNS)- that helps capture dynamic processes and guide practitioners' therapeutic decisionsis also described.