The 'How' of Therapy Matters Too

For me, the how of therapy matters just as much as the what and the why. The interventions we use matter. The theories that shape how we understand suffering matter. But so does the way we encounter the person sitting across from us. The therapeutic process itself can either make room for the whole person or inadvertently reduce the person to the part of them that needs healing.

I want to create space for a person to encounter themselves more fully—to notice what is happening in their body, emotions, thoughts, relationships, choices, sense of meaning, vocation, and relationship with God. These dimensions of personhood do not exist independently of one another, and I do not want to approach them as though they do.

This is also where moral imagination becomes an interior posture for me as a clinician. It means remaining open to the possibility that I have not yet seen the whole person. It asks me to look again, especially when suffering, diagnosis, history, or behavior makes the person seem easier and less complex to understand than they really are. It is a willingness to remain curious about what is present as well as what is not present, what has been obscured, and what may still be possible.

In this way, the how of therapy is not simply about delivering an intervention well. It is about the kind of space we create for encounter. How I listen, what I attend to, what I make room for, and how I respond all communicate something about the person in front of me. Attunement and co-regulation are part of this. So is the possibility of experiencing relationship differently than one may have experienced it before.

For me, this is where the different pieces of Mirari come together. The CCMMP gives me a way to see the person in their fullness. Somatic and relational work gives me a way to attend to the embodied person. Moral imagination asks me—and the person I am accompanying—to remain open to what we may not yet see. And the therapeutic relationship becomes a place where those possibilities can be encountered rather than simply talked about.

The goal is not simply to know more about ourselves, feel differently, or learn another way of coping. It is to create enough space for something more to be seen, encountered, and reimagined.