Douglas-Tataryn

A Personal Perspective
The Bio-Emotive Framework has been a life long work for me.

At one level it is an attempt to bridge the practical, experiential world of the clinician with the rigorous data driven, theoretical world of science and psychology.

While my clinical practice and Ph.D. training gave me the background abilities and insights with which to work, it was my wife’s and my relationship and life interests which was the ground from which the Bio-Emotive Therapy system emerged.

On another level the Bio-Emotive Framework is the result of a very personal quest for understanding myself and my relationships: striving to love fully in a marriage with four children, and sometimes finding myself acting in ways that were hurtful to the people I loved. Trying to cope with the chaos of married life and be better people, my wife and I did what we had been doing for years; we talked extensively, we studied, and we participated in weekend personal growth workshops, we did meditation retreats, etc.

In terms of the meditation and spirituality, we had studied intensively in the Fourth Way, Sahaj Marg, Buddhism, Yoga, Integral Philosophy, and other teachings. This helped immensely on some levels, but still something was missing. It was while working personally with spiritual teachers and leaders – people we admired and aspired to be like – that we realized they were struggling with the same inter-personal issues with which we, and everyone else, were struggling.

This was the missing piece; Spiritual development and growth, and the best of intentions, do not ensure healthy inter-personal relationships. (In some of my more informal talks in the early 2000’s I referred to this as “Why spiritually advanced people still do and say dumb things”.)

It was after this realization, and in becoming more familiar with Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, that I slowly began to see the Bio-Emotive Therapy I was developing with my clients in a larger, evolutionary context.

Using insights from Spiral Dynamics and Integral theory, the Bio-Emotive Framework revealed a new perspective on it all. We, as a culture, suffer from cultural alexithymia. My clients, while suffering personally and idiosyncratically from depression, anxiety, marital discord, etc, were all suffering from this cultural affliction.

The Bio-Emotive Therapy system moved from just helping people with mental health problems to become the Bio-Emotive Framework; a method for dealing with our cultural alexithymia before it becomes a mental health problem.

It allows individuals to fully integrate their feelings and emotions into their functional lives, to live fully at a post-modern stage of development and beyond.

Recent Developments in Psychology that Support the Bio-Emotive Framework
The Bio-Emotive Framework is also supported by more than my anecdotal evidence, in that it is similar to many other recently developed therapies that emphasize emotional processing and that do have strong research supporting them, including Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), Internal Family System (IFS) and Coherence therapy.