The Tao of Deep Intimacy is a coaching method, not a style of psychotherapy. This is an important distinction.
Think about going to the gym. If your body is functioning relatively normally — maybe just a little overweight and out of shape — a trainer can be of great help: push you to be at the club at 6am, maybe even train you for the Olympics. There are no limits to what you could achieve together. If you have a torn ligament, however, or some damage to your body, it would be unwise to go to the gym and work with a trainer. You could cause yourself more injury. A good trainer will tell you, “You’re not ready to work with a trainer right now. You’ve got a torn ligament; you should go to a physiotherapist, who will help you to heal the injury. When you’re ready, you can come back and work with me.”
That is very similar to the distinction between coaching and therapy. Many of us carry unresolved pain and trauma from childhood, or even from previous relationships. When that is strong enough, it can cause involuntary responses in us, like freezing or aggression, in which we may feel stuck. There are many different natural responses we can have when there is unresolved emotional pain blocked in the body. If that is happening in a way over which you have no control, there’s nothing wrong. It simply means there are wounds that still need to heal. That is the work of a psychotherapist: to help you overcome stuck patterns, like blurting out, withdrawal, tightening, and freezing. These are all trauma responses which are best addressed by a psychotherapist.
On the other hand, working with a coach doesn’t mean that everything is perfect and dandy, but it means you have some capacity to be able to observe your responses, some ability to interrupt patterns, and to introduce something new. This doesn’t mean that you are always in mastery of your emotions, or always in a good mood, but it means that when an energy arises, you have enough space around it to be able to catch it, maybe not immediately, and to try something different.
I am not licensed as a psychotherapist. I’ve been working with people since the early 1980s, but I never chose to become a psychotherapist. I’m a coach. I help people who are in a relatively “normal” state to be able to push the edge towards their intuition of their potential. In relationships, this could mean ecstatic feelings of love, connection, devotion, and trust… to be able to explore relationships beyond what we collectively see as “normal.”
This is not a method of psychotherapy. It’s not suitable for somebody who is struggling with unresolved wounding and pain. It’s an approach suitable for people who might have gotten bored with “normal” and want to learn tools to step into the extraordinary.
