Integrative Psychotherapy: A Feedback-Driven Dynamic Systems Approach

This book introduces a new, integrative, systemic approach to psychotherapy and counseling and shows how the principles of dynamic complex systems can guide everyday clinical work. Our mental, interpersonal, and biological (e.g., neuronal) systems are complex and nonlinear, and allow spontaneous pattern formation and chaotic dynamics. Their self-organizing nature sometimes maneuvers the systems into pathological states. However, the very same principles can be utilized therapeutically to encourage change for the better. The feedback-driven nonlinear dynamic systems approach described 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-driven nonlinear dynamic systems approach, the authors use an extensive case study to illustrate how the principles of dynamic complex systems can guide everyday clinical work. They show how modeling and monitoring of the client‘s systems and an empirical description of its patterns allows the therapist to individually fine-tune therapeutic techniques to support the client’s progress. Fine-meshed feedback based on real-time data and time-series analysis is at the core of the approach, and so an internet-based monitoring system – the Synergetic Navigation System (SNS) – that helps capture dynamic processes and guide practitioners’ therapeutic decisions is also described.