The world isn’t making sense.

You feel locked into a trajectory not of your choosing.

You worry about the future.

You feel there is a disconnect between what you value and how you act.

You are unsure what it is you truly value.

You don’t know which beliefs are yours or simply the beliefs you have inherited.

You feel overwhelmed, dysregulated or always on edge.

You feel emotionally distant, numb or disconnected.

You experience anxiety, chronic pain, fatigue or other mindbody (psychophysiological) symptoms.

You have low self-esteem.

Your internal dialogue is filled with pressure, criticism and negativity.

You obsess about your looks, always trying to present yourself perfectly.

Your self-worth depends on external validation or status recognition.

Philosophical counselling is special kind of conversation where two (or more) parties engage in a healthy, respectful and deliberately challenging back and forth.

The counsellor invites you to explore the biggest and perhaps most powerful ideas in your life; what is reality? How does the world really work? What is knowledge? What do I value? How should I act? What really makes me me?

Through this process, a more critical, reflective and coherent picture can emerge that supports your everyday; is this the right job for me? Should I really move countries? How do I actually want to spend my free time? Should I go back and study? How can I best support my kids in navigating the unique difficulties of modern life?

The main difference between the various forms of psychotherapy and somatic therapy is that psychotherapy is a top down approach, whereas somatic therapy is a bottom up approach. This means that psychotherapy works predominantly with the mind; verbally expressing and processing to better understand and evolve past, present and future psychological dynamics. Somatic therapy works predominately with the body; creating safe conditions for a person to go towards difficult sensations, emotions, or memories. Through effective, evidence-based techniques, professional guidance and co-regulation, the necessary conditions for the body are created. Through this, suppressed emotions can be released, traumatic events can be processed, and fragmented or abandoned ‘parts’ of the psyche can be integrated. 

This is a theoretical paradigm that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that is, it understands the basic constituents of the world to be events of encounter, acts or moments of experience that are woven together to constitute the processes by which all things occur, unfold, and evolve. Understanding ourselves and our relations with the world around us in this way, it is argued, can help us unwind ourselves from out of a set of dualisms that have ensnared modern thought over the last few centuries. In contrast to materialist, idealist, dualist, and other perspectives that have dominated modern western philosophy, a process-relational perspective more explicitly recognises the dynamic, complex, systemic, and evolving nature of reality.

We decided to established ioēs because we saw, so clearly, the impact the two disciplines we practiced were having on our lives and on the lives of the people we were supporting through our individual practice. However, neither approach individually seemed capable of engaging with the whole-of-organism, process-relational philosophy that grounds our practice.

For example, somatic therapy helps people heal emotional wounds, build the capacity to meet life’s difficulties, and exercise greater freedom. Whereas philosophical counselling helps clarify values, clearly articulate a life purpose, and develop coherent strategies for living a truly meaningful existence. Philosophical counselling cannot support the re-organisation of the nervous system. Somatic therapy can. Somatic therapy doesn’t clarify meaning, purpose and values that can be acted up. Philosophical counselling does. Together, we believe these approaches can help people navigate life’s beauty and difficulty with patience, kindness, courage, resilience and coherence.

That’s exactly what this has done for us.