by Lawrence Rook
Non-Dual Therapy, Whatever the Client Believes
People come to psychotherapy because they are suffering. They may be anxious, depressed, struggling in relationships, or dissatisfied with their lives. Something is troubling them, and they want things to be different. But from a non-dual perspective, suffering does not come from what is happening in people’s lives. All suffering arises from ignorance and the sense of self: identification with the person they take themselves to be, the identity they have constructed from their thoughts, beliefs, memories and interpretations of experience. Advaita Vedanta points beyond this conceptual sense of self, raising a question that has implications for psychotherapy: what happens when, rather than improving the self we take ourselves to be, we begin to see through it?
This is where my approach to non-dual psychotherapy begins. Rather than primarily helping people construct a better version of themselves or make sense and give meaning to past experiences, I am interested in helping them see through the identities with which they have become entangled. The client does not need to share that understanding, have any interest in spirituality, or know anything about non-duality. The work begins with their actual experience and the difficulties they bring. But the understanding informing the work changes its direction.
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