Meta Therapy

Meta-Therapy

It’s been a long time since I have directly and exclusive written about psychotherapy. The last book was The Structure of Personality (2001). Then after spending two decades on the subject of coaching (Meta-Coaching) and writing 16 books on that subject, I have now returned to the subject of therapy. Thank Dr. Carl Lloyd for that, he kept urging me to do that! You can see his Foreword below.

But I did not just want to write anything about therapy and much less a something that would merely repeat what’s been written. I wanted to write something that would add to the field, something that would be significantly different as to invite a new way of perceiving it. So I wrote Meta-Therapy: Psychotherapy in the Meta Place.i

Psychotherapy occurs in a very special place inside of people—in the meta place. Here you find the dynamic meta-structures which comprise a person’s background knowledge, beliefs, values, understandings, reference points, meanings, assumptions, prohibitions, memories, imaginations, etc. Meanings which define a person’s sense of reality and well-being.

Here meta structures function inside us as if they were instincts— automatic, unconscious programs for thinking, feeling, acting, and relating. Yet they differ from instincts in that you have access to them so you can manage and control them. You can do your own ‘programming’ for healing, well-being, health, effectiveness, productivity, resilience and much more.

Meta-Therapy will take you on a journey to the inside meta place giving you an understanding of how human life is inevitably lived inside–out. You will learn how to access the meta place, how to use observation, questions, metaphors, etc. to introduce transformative change. You will learn how to negotiate ‘problem definitions’ and solutions in the meta place. How to use presuppositional questions and comments to implicitly set new frames of meaning to enrich and empower a person.

Without a rich understanding of the dynamic meta system within a client, a therapist’s interventions will be superficial and deal mostly with symptoms, rather than the overarching causes. Discover how the meta place is organized in yourself and your clients. As Meta-Therapy repeatedly emphasizes “the person is never the problem, if there’s a problem, the frame is the problem,” it frees you to look for and transform those frames.