Delve practitioners are encouraged to build and implement their own style practice consistent with their understanding of their clients, themselves, and broader social contexts. As an organization, we encourage clinicians to attend to several specific domains of psychological functioning in one’s work with clients
Relationships. Delve believes strongly that much of one’s emotional and personal struggle is manifested or exacerbated by their relationships and relational processes. We view relationships as significant, grounding, fundamentally important, and almost always relevant in the context of therapy.
Emotions. Many modern approaches to psychotherapy suggest ways of eliminated, reducing or controlling emotion. We believe that while these strategies have merit, emotions are a rich tapestry of human experience that provide clear value to us as we live our lives. We take emotional experiences seriously and strive to help clients understand, manage, and act in relation to their emotion while still pursuing their goals, needs and values.
Sociocultural Forces. Few modern therapeutic approaches fully embrace the importance of one’s relationship to their culture, their culture’s relationship to them, and the broader socio-systemic and socioeconomic forces at play. When they do, it is often tacked on as an additional element of competency rather than a fundamental pillar of psychological functioning and a central pillar of psychotherapeutic practice. We move this consideration further to the top of mind with respect to an understanding of psychological distress and dysfunction, asking our clients and our clinicians to truly contextualize their experiences with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, national origins, time, political systems, familial systems (as they interrelate with all of the previously enumerated).
Relationship with Self. We consider deeply various theories on the development of one’s self-identity and hold firm to the idea that selves are contextually linked and fluid. Further, we hold firm that there are many selves, such as the idealized-self or feared-self, which overlap and remain omnipresent in our lives.
Psychodynamics. Psychodynamic approaches to psychotherapy trace their origins back to the beginning of the discipline. An understanding of the origins of one’s internal working models can be fundamental to understanding the models themselves. And, these internal working models clearly and stubbornly continue to affect all aspects of psychological functioning including the ways in which one sees the world, what they expect from the world, what they believe are options for interacting with the world, and how they interpret the responses then received. By wading into the history of psychological experience, both insight and a shifting of these working models can both, independently and powerfully, shift one’s psychological functioning.
Cognitions. Cognitive approaches to therapy are a lynchpin of psychotherapy and have been for decades. We draw from the wisdoms of cognitive psychotherapy approaches in our everyday work. Further, we enhance these by exploring broader understandings of logic and thought structures that can be askew and interwoven into one’s psychological pain.
Behavior. Our approach holds as primary the role of one’s actions in their broader psychological functioning. We view behavior as both a target for assessment and a means of growth. Changing one’s actions, even when one may not be automatically motivated to do so, can create psychological change and relief. As such, we strive to help clients tightly align their actions with their goals, needs, and values.
Physiology. Lastly, while our practitioners are not medical providers and cannot prescribe medications or perform any other medical procedure or assessment, we nevertheless, ask our clinicians to keep at top of mind the complex fundamentally interwoven experience between one’s body and their psychology.
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