About the Collective

Origin Story

Sometimes the best learning comes from figuring out what not to do.

Our founding collective members came from a variety of practice settings and backgrounds, including other group practices, individual practices, and agencies, and overwhelmingly felt that a better model was possible.

Frankly, we were particularly dissatisfied with…

  • The scarcity of community and support

  • The lack of direction on improving our individual services and professional development

  • Minimal accountability and safe spaces to be constructively challenged

  • Short-sighted practice approaches and philosophies

  • Ineffectual bureaucracies

  • Resistance to change and innovation

  • Implicit biases

  • The implementation of pseudoscience and unreflective assumptions about mental health care

…and felt that our clients were disadvantaged as a result.

One way to think of this is that they functioned poorly as “communities of practice.”

The big picture is that there are many reasons why more effective communities of practice have been hindered in the professional field of mental health care.

For instance:

  • Traditional siloed approaches to psychotherapy and the role of singular, charismatic authority figures within them. 

  • The disorienting proliferation of hundreds (if not thousands) of distinct approaches and lineages of psychotherapy.

  • Sociology and philosophy of science factors impacting the progress and effectiveness of the empirical research on mental health care and its translation to practice.

  • The inherent, isolated, behind closed doors nature of psychotherapy.

  • The complexity, ambiguity, and particularity of psychotherapeutic processes.

  • The early proliferation of ineffective gatekeeping and professional development methods not shown to actually improve treatment and outcomes.

  • An over-medicalization inappropriate to mental health care becoming institutionalized and hegemonic.

  • Unproductive assumptions about mental healthcare and psychology proliferating throughout societal discourse, including misinformation about diagnostic categories of mental health disorders, as well as their etiology and treatment.

  • The insularity and shortcomings of the general academic fields and graduate programs supporting the mental health professions.

Based on our less-than-stellar experiences, we set out to design our own preferred community of practice.

Mission

We focus on harnessing our cumulative expertise to help each other support our individual clients, continuously improve our therapy, and innovate our services in response to the needs of those we serve. We routinely consult, review suggestions and feedback, and work on professional development projects together. We are always looking for new ways to collaborate more effectively, and to improve the quality of care we provide.

We believe in offering mental health care that is:

  • innovative, expansive, pragmatic, holistic, and anti-reductionistic

  • inclusive, transparent, judgement free, and well-suited for folks and populations that tend to be misunderstood and/or fall between the cracks.

  • personalized and effective, and privileges the unique “therapeutic fit” or match between client/s and provider.

Our larger missions are to:

  • Modernize mental health care and re-imagine how the mental health of clients can be better served by therapists working more effectively as a community of practice—and curate a team of practitioners to optimize how the team functions as a whole.

  • Support, pave the way for, and collaborate with like-minded providers, teams, and initiatives.

  • Foster a holistic, expansive, interdisciplinary, and novel approach to mental health support that focuses on what works and is not limited to what has traditionally been practiced.

  • Offer a variety of services and levels of care in order to make mental health support accessible and customized to each individual and situation.

Three ways we accomplish this include:

  • Cultivating first principles thinking–focusing on the foremost empirically and theoretically supported principles and factors most correlated with therapeutic benefits across modalities. We use this as a rich bedrock with which to collaborate, innovate, and further specialize from, so that we can support the development of each individual clinician’s singular strengths and professional artistry.

  • Focus on practices and professional development methods most shown to lead to desired client outcomes and the increased effectiveness of clinicians.

  • Moving beyond psychotherapy and clinical counseling in our interdisciplinary model of mental health support. In order to expand the expertise, life experience, and healing relationships that our clients may benefit from, we are developing a community of therapists that works with and supervises alternative mental health professions; for example, therapeutic coaches, peer counselors, and lived experience educators.

Our Methodological Principles

Our approach is governed by a system of interconnected principles.  

Therapeutic Fit

Therapy involves an intimate emotional relationship with someone you can count on, relate to, and trust. The fit between you and your therapist is pivotal, and the factors most important to therapeutic fit can vary from situation to situation. We prioritize assessing the therapeutic fit and helping you find an ideal match.

Collaborative expertise

Working with life’s trials and tribulations can benefit from a wide range of knowledge and experience. We are focused on leveraging the knowledge and experience distributed throughout our community of therapists, and collaborating with you to foster and empower your own wisdom, expertise, and sovereignty.

Holistic well-being

Many ways of understanding problems of living can be reductive, postponing deeper solutions or even creating whole new problems of their own. We are focused on treating you as a whole person and grounding challenges you’re facing within the rich context of your life, mind, history, desires, beliefs, and values. We strive to understand things from multiple, generative perspectives, and move beyond conceptions of pathology and problems so that we can make more room to improve your life as a whole. We believe therapy’s emphasis should be on producing new and positive experiences, not just remedying negative ones.

Personalized

In order to be most effective, evidence-based principles and interventions need to be tailored to the nuances of your personality, life, and relationships. More than that, sometimes therapists need to craft new, unique principles and interventions tailored to your personal situation and life history in order to find what will work for you. While in part, we personalize our approaches because we understand the intricacies of the human condition and what works in therapy, the ultimate reason is because we’re committed to finding out what works best for you!

Practical

We are practically minded and focused on the goals and progress you want to achieve in your life–and therefore the outcomes you want from therapy. We are here to help you prioritize the sequence of steps that would have the greatest impact and help you stay organized and on track. We routinely monitor your progress and collect feedback, so that we can optimize the course of therapy and ensure we’re heading in your preferred direction.

Socially Constructed

Your struggles are intimately tied to the sociocultural systems you’re immersed in. They are not merely psychological or neurobiological; they are social and socially constructed. It can pay off to explore how language and culture—and the assumptions embedded within them—factor into your distress.

  • Forms of power intrinsic to institutions and organizations, media, education, and social and family relations, set you up to experience adversities like distress, threat, and insecurity. In turn, these can have cumulative adverse impacts on your mental health—or simply fail to provide you with the supports needed to adapt and thrive. This perspective also includes how you may habitually perpetuate ideas and perspectives that obstruct your life and journey. Many of your struggles may result from ways you internalize things that have been made up in one way or another.This can be a form of self-sabotage that keeps you stuck in negative feedback loops. Our collective strives to foster an irreverent and inquisitive spirit, as well as the lateral and divergent thinking that can:

    • Help us, as clinicians, see through the socially constructed elements of the mental health field and our practices that hold us back from better helping people. 

    • Help you see through and liberate yourself from the socially constructed elements of your struggles, so you can be freer to create new experiences with less to hold you back.

Integrative

Integrative psychotherapy focuses on the common, transtheoretical factors and principles associated with increased beneficial mental health outcomes across therapeutic approaches. It sees you as an evolving whole and avoids defining you and the issues you’d like to address through a single, limited point-of-view. Then, it adapts to you and matches particular strategies to each stage of your journey. This way, you experience progress rather than feeling like you’re going in circles, hitting dead ends, or practicing something you’ve tried before. If something is not working or feeling quite right at any given time, you and you provider will re-route and find a better path.

Much of psychotherapy and mental health support consists of having the right conversations at the right times with the right people with the right knowledge and mindsets. We’re committed to making that happen more often, more effectively, for more individuals.