About
Martin Linton Therapy
My mission is to alleviate suffering by finding ways to be okay with the scope of personal human experiences.
My research and practice has shown me that if people lose felt-sight of their innate nature to a bind of logic it gives rise to suffering and frustrations. Contrastingly, becoming intimate with this nature dissolves suffering and generates understanding, compassion, calm and creativity.
My journey in to professional counselling started during the 1980’s wave of psychotherapeutic literatures, Ideas, including creative visualization (active imagination) along with meditations and practicing what was , then, called "Consciousness" (i.e. Mindfulness), with Social Psychology and Cultural Studies at university in the early millennium. I had experienced an emotional upsurge of anxiety related to my own traumatic experiences. This led me to read a particular book that got me hooked on therapeutic ideas and practices. To date, I still attach these powerful learnings as part and parcel of the approaches, practices, thinking and understandings that inform my views as a person qualified to deliver: Systemic Counselling, IFS Therapy, and psychotherapeutic practices.
I have formulated my epistemology and call these Mindful Dialogism and Solution Focused Depth Therapy. Also, I am founder of Parts Rewind Therapy (PRT). These are experientially developed systemic practices.
I can help by being with you and what is difficult. I promote and encourage the well-being, possibilities, value-based growth with the best interests of the system you carry with you. I do this by co-selecting a recipe of many ingredients that can be tailored with and for clients. This process is useful to generate reflectivity towards identifying, clarifying what is happening, and what informs this. In most cases, I can confidently use my experience to assist towards co-identifying what is possible or useful, and offer ways towards co-constructing / co-creating a more manageable emotional experience, by accessing beneficial reflexive difference. Additionally, I may suggest or offer to coach experiential practices to generate inner freedom and innate qualities to ease the creative process.
This works with focusing in key areas of experienceing:
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Contexts / Associations
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Logics / Cognitions
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Emotions / Embodiments
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Body senses / Feeling
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and what I've come to call "Sightfulness."
There are many options that can, if appropriate, be co-negotiated to engage, join and compliment the personal therapeutic process' as the counselling process unfolds.
As an individual or couple you may benefit from the most up to date and cutting edge approaches that I have both trained-in and continue to practice.
This may be by 'talking through', or 'working with' [counselling] or maybe "experiential" methods / strategies [guided] to ease and free-up the system.
If either client/s or I feel something is not working in the best interest of the clients I invite discussion about this, ask for feedback, offer alternatives, or may suggest an appropriate referral.
My overall practice offers a blend of both traditional and the most current approaches of therapy to enable the un-blending of what is not useful from what is. This means I use cutting-edge practices that are deeply effective and solution focused. I focus my attending towards the possibilities of relational enhancements, co-creation. This all, in the main, helps clients to explore and make sense of the wider existential contexts that inform, impact upon, and pass through human existence as thoughts, emotions and body feelings rather than limiting the approaches and potentiality under pre-set or manualized approaches. As, what I call, a systems-centred-relational counsellor I recognise that your thinking may be completely accurate and a reflection of cultural narratives that are relationally fluctuating and felt. I believe this all can be both entrapping / limiting or become usefully reflexive and deeply empowering.
My preference is to employ ideas with-in a contextual approach, this is part of my overall psychotherapeutic system that utilizes the body along with the mind - I call this "Bodyfulness" or body context. I recognise no-matter how hard we try to overcome, adjust, correct or improve thinking, the systemic problem exists within collective cultural forces that are often more powerful than individuals. These forces (burdens / narratives / influence) can become entwined with innate parts about the human. These counter forces are argued to reposition felt-experiences as they were pre-therapy, alike a thermostat regulates central heating. Depending on the contexts of embodiment it may take a gradual process to readdress this via the exploration of the systemic resources, qualities and potentials. I therefore, invite participants to give the process a fair chance to grow new neurobiological mind matter (fitness), I use the metaphor of getting into and out of hot or cold water, climbing a hill, or attending exercise for strength.
Systemic ideas can help ease and detach from and re-author the effects of being immersed within sociocultural forces and pathological blame / social narratives. Here, I use the metaphor of a distanced view that looks back closely from a safe place, enabled with the magnification of binoculars. Social aspects may, or may not have been placed onto the individuals world generating neurotic affects. It is highly valued that an individual who accesses healthy changes, at the emotional, level can in-turn influence the surrounding system towards a context of improved health. This occurs by attuning parts of what I term the "OVERSelf" (a cloak), by freeing inwards, towards innate and healthy personal experience it allows life to be fully felt and appreciated. I understand a deeply felt healing is possible by connecting with the innate qualities that resides in all human beings. My experience informs me that I have the skills and tools to achieve this (Solution Focused Depth Therapy / Dialogical Mindfulness).
I have as saying I've used since the early 1990's: "You cannot take the fire out of some ones head without something as simple as water".
Conflict Resolution Practice and Coaching (CRPC), is other approaches I am keenly interested in, via systemic mediation - via compassionate and resourceful ideas confliction can be resolved within a process of collaboration. This seeks to be inclusive of the wider interests, importance, values and positions of the persons involved. In particular Facilitative, Narrative, and Transformative mediation are methods that assist towards embracing conflict in a constructive and creative way; by generating communications that are considered healthy and wholesome, to co-construct solutions with both their own terms/and others. These contrast, for example, Evaluative mediation that is better suited to legal experts, to reach deals of compromise often decided by powerful others taking over personal control.
Generally, then, I practice from a Person-Centred grounding amalgamating ideas that compliment each other, along with the ideas clients bring to the sessions. My aim is to offer an Unparalleled Personal Relationship (UPR) that provides empathic compassion in a way that is relationally connective, naturally honest and wholesome - where clients can witness and speak their inner truths and be heard in a way that may be new to their selves. This often enlivens clients personal resources and possibilities that can also develop useful / helpful 'relational-collaborations'. The client/s and counsellors relations generate a co-authoring towards enriching personal intuitive wisdoms, new hopefulness and achieving preferred future outcomes.
This all means I am a counsellor who generally works person – person but not limited by dialogical therapeutic consultations because I offer a treasure chest of experiential methods to accompany / support my clients. My work as a counsellor aims to be collaborative, useful / helpful, by unfolding relational contexts that, in-turn, usually bring about felt-differences that generates movement/s towards, or affirms, whatever it is that is required / needed from the counselling relationship for healthy living.