Train at GETME in the Humanistic / Experiential therapy traditions! (Also: Ethics training from a humanistic lens.)
Ethics in Action is an ethics training grounded in embodied approach to working through ethical dilemmas.
Next: Saturday, September 26th, 2026, from 8am to noon.
Experiential Therapy Study Groups
Thursday Group or Friday Group
This combination of training & consultation is ideal for those who want to be part of a learning cohort to deepen and expand your experiential therapy practice.
Experiential Couples Therapy Seminar
Similar to the Experiential Therapy Study group, but for clinicians who want to work with couples.
At this time, I am not taking on new, conditionally licensed therapists for individual supervision. If you’d like to work with me, I encourage you to consider one of my groups. I do offer one-off consultation for clinicians who can use this support.
About Clinical Training,
Supervision & Consultation at GETME:
At GETME, I train and supervise from humanistic and experiential perspectives, drawing primarily from Client-Centered Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Focusing, Emotion-Focused Therapy, and Psychodrama. These approaches share humanistic philosophical assumptions about personhood, the causes of suffering, and what processes might be helpful.
Some Basic Humanistic Principles:
- All people have dignity and worth, and are to be treated with egalitarian respect.
- All people have needs. Needs are normal and understandable, and not seen as evidence of pathology.
- People have the capacity to grow and change, and will tend to do so under favorable conditions.
- A person is best understood as a whole, rather than a collection of parts. In the traditional humanistic understanding, it is only the organism as a whole that acts.
- Only the person has direct access to their own experiencing. This means that in an enormous number of ways, both immediate and potential, the person has a more intimate and detailed knowledge of themselves than what anybody else — including a therapist — ever could.
A View of Needs / Pain
Derived from the work of early humanist Abraham Maslow, this tradition recognizes three primary, distinct areas of need. The other side of a need is the hurt or pain we feel when the need isn’t met.
- Safety Needs. This includes the needs for food, clothing, shelter, and whatever protections are required for physical bodily integrity. In the absence of these things, we may be subject to deprivation, exposure or even death, and may feel things like anxiety, fear or terror.
- Attachment Needs. Humans have an innate need for connection, belonging, and support. In the absence of these, we may feel lonely, isolated, abandoned, sad and uncared for. When an important attachment is severed, we can feel devastated, inconsolable, and broken.
- Identity Needs. Humans yearn to grow. We wish to gain competence, mastery, and independence. We like to test our abilities against the world, and to differentiate and distinguish ourselves in some fashion. We like to be seen and recognized for who we are, including our likes and dislikes, and what we’re able to accomplish. In the absence of these experiences, we can feel misunderstood, unheard/unseen, unimportant, ashamed, invisible, and “like a failure.”
In this tradition, we take it that most people come to therapy because they have needs from one or more of the above categories that are completely or intermittently unmet — and perhaps even unexplored.
The Person-Centered Hypothesis
Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Therapy was the first humanistic psychotherapy. Central to his theory was what he called the Person-Centered Hypothesis. It could be expressed this way:
Given the proper conditions, all people have the tendency to grow in competence, confidence, maturity, acceptance, understanding, support of self, and connection with others.
Rogers called this innate capacity for growth the “Actualizing Tendency.” He proposed six “necessary and sufficient conditions” for a therapeutic process to take place. Later humanists singled out three of his conditions as the therapist-offered “core conditions”: Authenticity, Unconditional Positive Regard, and Accurate Empathy.
Process Diagnosis / The Here & Now Focus
In this tradition, therapists view the situations of a person’s life and experience in terms of process. Instead of categorizing and labeling what you are, what you “have,” and/or what is wrong with you, the question is what is happening here and now? As the person and the environment mutually interact and respond to one another, what are helpful ways to see and understand how things are currently organized and/or changing?
Problems are not seen as originating or manifesting exclusively within the individual, but rather as processes that emerge naturally (and traceably) out of person-environment encounters. (Note that “environment” here explicitly includes other people.)
Ultimately, the role of the therapist is assist the client to track and understand the client’s moment-by-moment experiencing.
Experiencing
But what is “experiencing”? It isn’t merely thinking, though thought is a part of it. It isn’t just sensory perception, though that’s included, too. It isn’t just emotions, or behavior, or memory, or narrative, etc, though all these things, and more, make up our moment-by-moment experiencing. The sum total of all of these experiential elements, in this moment, make up our experiencing. And each of these elements bear on, and influence, one another.
A Special Place for Feelings and Meanings
Though there are many discrete elements to experiencing, the various schools of therapy emphasize different aspect with an aim to reconfigure the system. Cognitive therapists emphasize thoughts. Behaviorists track behavior, etc.
In humanism, there is a long tradition of emphasizing feelings and meanings. The idea here is not to exclude the other elements — as I said, all the elements are part of experiencing, and they all influence each other. But humanists find that, most of the time, the most potent sources of experiential shifts are found in feelings and meanings.
The Paradox of Change
Further, both Person-Centered & Gestalt Therapies emphasize the paradox of change: This is the recognition that change in the person tends to come about not through direct, teeth-gritting, strenuous, nose-to-the-grindstone efforts to change but, rather through paying ever more careful and closer to attention to what already is.
New options become visible and possible when we see better, understand better, and accept ourselves more — rather than fighting ourselves.
The Experiment
At all times, certain elements of our experiencing are outside of our awareness. Sometimes these are the very elements we need to grasp in order to better understand ourselves and our situation. In many cases, a warm, accepting, ongoing dialogue with the therapist is enough to surface them. In other cases, the therapist may propose an experiment.
An experiment is a prompt of attention and/or behavior that may help establish awareness of one or more “absent” experiential elements.