Sociotherapy: A Relational Approach to Social, Mental, and Physical Wellbeing

This session is organized in a circle format in which participants engage the practice together rather than through didactic instruction. A brief presentation will introduce Sociotherapy, followed by discussion and shared exploration.

The growing prevalence of challenges to social, mental, and physical wellbeing exposes the inadequacy of the dominant individualist, psychology-based paradigm, which locates distress primarily within individuals while treating the wider relational conditions through which lives and experiences take form as background. Sociotherapy is positioned as an alternative to existing therapeutic approaches. Emerging from decades of clinical outcome research and clinical sociology practice, it understands human experience, suffering, wellbeing, and change as relationally constituted. The Relational Ground is the dynamic field of self, others, social structures, and the physical world through which human experience, understanding, meaning, and action emerge. Rather than reducing experience to the isolated intrapsychic individual, Sociotherapy understands change as relationally constituted within the Relational Ground, where person and ground are distinguishable but inseparable.

From this relational foundation follows the practice of Sociotherapy. Particular attention is given to the Partnership Approach, within which the facilitator stands as ally, advocate, companion, confidant, and trusted support. Sociotherapy brings relational understanding directly into therapeutic work with individuals, couples, families, groups, and organizations.

The session also addresses the Sociotherapy Association’s inaugural Foundations Certification Programme and the developing process of professional formation and certification, furthering sociology’s capacity for direct therapeutic practice and bridging the longstanding divide between sociological theory and intervention-based practice.

No prior knowledge of Sociotherapy is required. Participation is voluntary.