The Reach Approach is a psychoeducational model. This means in addition to counselling and psychotherapy we offer a plethora of resources for the individual to be able to sustain their own wellbeing and mental health beyond any therapeutic work.
Our model has four distinct phases: Life Map Work, Shame Work, Darkroom Work and Lifestyle. Although these provide a clear framework, the model is fundamentally ‘person specific’. Which means we adapt the work to the individual rather than expecting the individual to adapt to the model. Consequently, no two people will have exactly the same experience, even when they move through all four phases. Where a person does not wish, or does not need, to follow the complete approach, we draw on selected aspects of the model and its resources to meet their particular needs.
We seek to understand the individual before deciding what work is appropriate, because meaningful and lasting change requires us to understand not simply what is happening in someone’s life, but why.
- Life Map Work – Making Sense of the Story
Life Map Work is the usual starting point. It provides a window into the person’s history and helps us look beneath presenting symptoms to the underlying issues, experiences and patterns that have shaped their life.
We see a life as being rather like a map. It contains busy motorways and congested streets, quiet country lanes and neglected pathways, beautiful parks and landscapes, as well as damaged or deprived areas. It also contains important landmarks representing qualities such as creativity, depth, patience, beauty and resilience. Some routes are travelled repeatedly; others have barely been visited. Together all these aspects form the unique landscape of the individual.
Our past contributes significantly to who we are today. Our attitudes, values, emotional responses, relationships and habitual ways of behaving have been influenced by parents and carers, education, peers, significant relationships and countless experiences, some important, some seemingly insignificant. Over time these experiences become woven together, mostly outside conscious awareness, to form patterns that can either support or restrict us.
Life Map Work involves creating a detailed account of one’s life. This can be written chronologically, perhaps in five or ten-year sections, or expressed creatively through images, timelines, symbols and other formats, that best suit the individual. The objective is to capture as much of the person’s remembered experience as possible.
For most people, the process itself is therapeutic. It allows thoughts, feelings and memories that may have remained unexplored, inaccessible or denied, to be brought into awareness. The life map is then shared with the therapist in a safe, sensitive and supportive environment.
This activity is not about becoming trapped in the past. It is about understanding the past sufficiently to reduce its unhelpful influence on the present. By understanding the journey that has brought us here, we can begin to choose where we go next.
- Shame Work – Understanding What Binds Us
The second phase, Shame Work or the Hall of Shame, takes the exploration further. Here we undertake a more forensic examination of the experiences, beliefs and behaviours that sit behind our fears, pain and unwanted patterns.
We regard shame as the most powerful underlying force in human dysfunction. It can create the deeply embedded belief that something is wrong with us. Often this begins early in life, when children are not yet able to distinguish between what they have done and who they are. When love, attention, approval or security appear conditional upon behaving in particular ways, a child can come to believe that their value depends upon performance, compliance, or pleasing others.
These messages then become internalised and continue to influence adult life long after the original circumstances and events have disappeared. Shame fuels fear, anxiety, self-doubt, people-pleasing, avoidance, denial and the construction of a public persona designed to conceal what we fear others might discover about us and find distasteful.
The Hall of Shame is not about adding more shame. It is about exposing and dismantling the beliefs and misconceptions that shame has created.
This means looking honestly at both sides of the story: how we have been devalued, wounded and shamed, and how our own shame may have led us to undermine or shame others. The focus is on those experiences that have had the greatest power and influence over us; it is by resolving those key events that the entire landscape changes.
When deeply held experiences can be spoken about with someone who is genuinely non-shaming, offering only kind judgement, their power begins to diminish. What has existed in secrecy and darkness can be brought into a safe environment, understood differently, and be transformed.
The purpose of shame work is ultimately liberation: to recognise that we are not the mistakes, experiences or judgements that have shaped us.
- Darkroom Work – Diving into the Deep
The third phase, Darkroom Work, is a creative, experiential process designed to explore the emotional drivers beneath our conscious understanding.
We all carry emotional experiences that cannot necessarily be resolved through intellectual understanding or conversation alone. We may understand perfectly well why we behave in a certain way and yet still find ourselves repeating the same pattern(s). However, understanding this does not mean we have the power to change it. Darkroom Work seeks to engage with the emotional and unconscious mechanisms and different dimensions that continue to drive those patterns.
Our use of the dark as a therapeutic medium is deliberate. With the eyes closed and the external visual world removed, attention is redirected inwards. Instead of looking outwards, analysing, decoding and responding to the environment, the individual is invited to experience what is happening internally. This is where the energy of sight can become ‘in-sight’.
The emotional world can initially seem chaotic or irrational. Experiences from different periods of life may have become interconnected in ways that make little conscious sense. Yet beneath this apparent absurd logic there are patterns, meanings and associations that become accessible through experiential, rather than purely intellectual, exploration.
Darkroom Work involves meeting emotions head-on. Sometimes these are calm, sometimes turbulent, but whatever their form we need to pause and learn to listen to what they are communicating because there is always a message, an insight or an instruction on offer. Darkroom Work is a process of discovery, rather than imposing answers.
Because this work is so powerful, it is only undertaken when an appropriate relationship of trust, honesty and safety has been established with the therapist, and it should not be undertaken without skilled support.
Darkroom Work is not about indulging in pain or repeatedly revisiting suffering for its own sake. It is about resolution, emotional freedom, healing and reclaiming personal power. Where Darkroom Work is not appropriate or does not suit the individual, other experiential approaches will be used, including emotional freedom work, deep relaxation, trance, emotional breath work and other introspective activities.
- Lifestyle – Being a Co-Creator
The fourth and final phase of our approach is Lifestyle. Unlike the earlier phases, this has a more educational and practical emphasis, building on the therapeutic foundation that has been laid. As previously explained, our approach is both therapeutic and psychoeducational, which means both understanding how we got here, and learning how to live differently.
The Lifestyle phase brings together the insights, resources and skills developed throughout the journey and turns them into an integrated way of living. The objective is not simply to experience change during therapy, but to make that change sustainable in everyday life.
Consistency is fundamental. Practices such as mirror work, positive affirmations, guided sleep, inner-child work, reframing and creative visualisation, and other personal development activities only produce lasting benefit when they become part of everyday life. Occasional bursts of enthusiasm followed by long periods of inactivity can create a cycle of progress and regression that is exhausting and discouraging. A cycle of boom and bust.
We therefore emphasise ‘knowing’ and then ‘doing’. Healthy habits begin as small, manageable activities. Through repetition they become established patterns, and those patterns gradually become part of the way we live.
This is particularly important because human beings are creatures of habit. Repeated behaviours gain strength and eventually become incorporated into our sense of self. If those habits are limiting or damaging, they can keep us trapped in old patterns. Conversely, consistently practising healthier ways of thinking, feeling and behaving creates the conditions for stability, wellbeing and continued growth.
An important concept within this final phase is re-parenting: creating the structure, care, guidance and emotional support that may have been missing earlier in life, so the authentic self can emerge. Those who successfully complete this phase will have created a holistic, synergistic blueprint, using The Story of Health, that that they can draw upon for the rest of their lives.
Further Reading
The phases of The Reach Approach are distinct, but they are not rigid compartments. They overlap, inform one another and are always adapting according to the needs and readiness of each individual.
Ultimately, the purpose of the Reach Approach is not simply to understand ourselves more deeply. It is to use that understanding to become awake, less governed by the past, more conscious in the present and more capable of choosing the future we want.
For those of you who want to explore our ways of working further, we would recommend the following articles: