FAQ: The Wholeness solution (WS)

1/ Are you suggesting we do away with secondary positioned approaches like cultural competence, the study of identity or normativity, difference and diversity?

A: No. We will always have multitude of disciplines, specialisms and additional topics. The WS is asking for a essential inclusion across mainstream ground knowledge ( self dev, theory, relationship, skills, practice) of mainstream helping, including access/ibility as self context and lived context is part understand and exploring experiences for all clients.

2/ is there a risk that therapists will have an agenda if embedding contextual awareness?

I often hear people say that by accounting for clients’ context or having a socio-political viewpoint (e.g., environment, social position, normativity/difference, material conditions, discrimination, culture, beliefs, political policies), therapists might have an agenda and/or take away clients’ autonomy.

Yes, it is true that overidentification with any matter, whether one’s own trauma, lived experience, particular expertise, social issues, or personal (e.g., political) beliefs, can take away from autonomy. But this is baked into ethical practices.

We always stay client-directed, but empathically attuning to context is (mostly) a missing part of conceptualisation, relationality, and support.

3/ Surely the individual person-to-person matters the most?

Yes, and client-directed. But we also recognise inner experience, interpersonal AND contextual interplay in forming experience. Context gives a more complete scope of understanding and exporation. For example, material and environmental conditions are important lenses of understanding.

4/ I work more humanistically and phenomenologically but your asking me to work out of that?

I don’t believe any theory disallows shifts and flow of experience outside of the here-and-now frame including prompts and questions. If it did, then how would that help with blinkered areas impacting client experiences and ultimately reducing client harm (for both normative and different parts).