As therapists, we know how important it is to care deeply for both our clients and ourselves in order to work effectively, healthfully, and meaningfully. I invite you to experience a definitively integrated, experiential, and robust clinical consultation process that supports both you and the clients you serve within the frame of one unified Bigger Picture.

An Integrated Concept of Self-Care

The quality of care we offer others and the quality of self-care we offer ourselves are mutually dependent. Taking a break from our work to focus on our personal well-being and needs is essential. Self-care for therapist and client alike involves the act of separation, but it need not involve a feeling of disconnection. When the work day is over our deeply consequential relationships with our clients are still alive within us.

Can you imagine a space for care and self-care that has room for both you and your clients? Can you envision a bigger frame of care that nurtures our connection to ourselves, our connection to each client, and our collective connection to the fundamental aspects of life that nourish us all and move us forward?

The Bigger Picture clinical consultation model embraces the critical questions, “What do my clients need?” and “What do I need?” It also invites us to explore the richness and value of the questions, “What do we need?” and “As we, how are our needs and our nature greater than the sum of our parts?”

An Experiential Approach to the Process

To care for our clients, ourselves, and the “we” of each therapeutic relationship, the Bigger Picture consult model utilizes an experiential approach. Its foundations and methods are rooted in two primary sources: Eugene Gendlin’s “Focusing” process, and Bigger Picture’s “Essential Elements” process.

The Focusing Process

Focusing is a research-based process developed by Eugene T. Gendlin Ph.D. which was first applied in the field of psychotherapy. Focusing invites us to tap into our “implicit knowing” — a place where we palpably sense a something, but it is difficult to express it in a usual way, with usual words. This “felt sense,” as Gendlin calls it, somehow feels both more vague and more intricately accurate than what any reasoning could explain. For additional details about Gendlin, Focusing, and the Felt Sense, read more here.

Describing the application of Focusing to psychotherapy, Marion N. Hendricks, Ph.D. explains, “We want to interact with our client in such a way that the client can contact a bodily felt sense of life situations…If we pre-define or rely on a technique or model to form our responses, we will not be able to hear what is sensed by the client but not yet articulated…We listen to the person’s experience, rather than to our ideas about the person…We try to protect the emergent process, knowing it is more likely than anything we might come up with to carry experience forward.”

Applying Focusing to clinical consultation, the Bigger Picture model provides therapists guidance in accessing a felt sense of their own internal well-being and needs, as well as a felt sense of their unique experiences and relationships with each client. Together we will seek what you know that is prior to words, beyond words, or both. We will listen to your felt experiences that precede interpretation, exceed interpretation, or both. We too will honor the emergent process as a most trustworthy guide in carrying forward your understanding of each therapeutic relationship, and what it needs.

The Essential Elements Process

Gendlin suggests that as human beings we do not consist of content, but of interaction. In fact, he proposes that we are not in interaction, but that we are interaction: with ourselves, each other, and the living world of which we are a part. The Essential Elements process, unique to the Bigger Picture model, invites us to explore our inherent nature as interaction, and through doing so, feel supported and enlivened by a deeper connection to our interconnectedness. Simply said, the awareness of our interconnection is the key to our integration.

Integration is defined as a combining into a functioning, unified whole, and as a restoration to friendship or harmony. The Essential Elements process draws upon a diverse array of guided experiential exercises designed to counteract the dis-integration we may feel as individuals, and restore connections to our relational essence. Utilizing a flexible variety of mindful, creative, and/or body-centered practices, we will collaborate to increase your access to a sense of groundedness, flow, expansion, and revitalization for the benefit of yourself, your clients, and each therapeutic relationship you share.

A Robust Structure of Support

In addition to providing depth of care for both you and your clients through its integrated, experiential approach, the Bigger Picture consultation model is built to provide you with a robust and sustained schedule of support. Whether you are accustomed to participating in occasional consultation with subject matter experts, regular group consultation with a rotating schedule of presenters, or peer consultation with one or more of your trusted colleagues, you may still feel as if there’s never enough time to fully unpack the unique therapeutic relationships you share with each and every one of your clients.

The structure of the Bigger Picture consultation process provides the opportunity for consistent, thorough attention to all of your clients’ stories. It also provides informed, supportive attention to your own. One-on-one weekly sessions allow us to devote the amount of time and energy required to discover not just what is necessary, but what is nuanced. Your gift of trusted relationship with your clients is a steady, precious creation, and a valuable investment for you both. It would be my privilege to make an equally valuable investment with you in the steady creation of a trusted and supportive consultation relationship.

Intrigued by the idea of this Bigger Picture? Let’s connect!