Individual Therapeutic modalities: Existential, Energetic, Pragmatic, and Cognitive

This is a quick note on how I think about therapeutic modalities which started out as a response to a friend, and I thought I would share.

These modalities could be thought of, symbolically, as obscurations of the four faculties of body, mind, emotions, and breath.

Pragmatic modalities give you the capability to deal with practical problems (“What do I do about that?”)

Cognitive modalities relax distortions in patterns of thinking (catastrophizing, blaming, etc.)

Energetic modalities relax limitations on feeling (in both the receptive and palpatory “reaching out with the heart” sense).

Existential modalities take existential issues as a concern (“Existence feels off in some ineffable way.”). This matter is at the heart of much religious and spiritual practices.

To look for a singular approach that works with all dimensions, while theoretically possible, is to some degree a search for a unicorn. While these concerns are always a big, tangled mess in practice, when working with therapeutic traditions, a good rule of thumb is that it is better to have an extraordinary practitioner in one dimension than trying to address all of these in one place.

When I was young, I did experience all of these in one place: a remote spiritual community where we lived in a physical community, somewhat separately from society. That is the sort of circumstance that can address all four concerns at once.

In this day and age, such an opportunity is vanishingly rare, so understand that while addressing any single dimension will bleed into all others, most approaches that aim to address all the dimensions will either be mediocrity with insufficient focus on one dramatically effecting one aspect to make large changes, or a cult in the dangerous-and-doesn’t-work sense.