Grounded Investigative Psychotherapy® (GIP)
Gaining Access to Psychological Reality and Working with It Therapeutically
As indicated on the homepage, understanding often holds a central place in therapy’s rich and complex process of personal development and healing. Recognising the persistent theoretical and conceptual disorder within psychotherapy and the human sciences, and having identified cultural bias and over-intellectualisation among the principal sources of this problem, I developed Grounded Psychology (GP) to reconstruct the epistemological and methodological foundations required for a more reliable understanding of human psychology. Readers wishing to examine these foundations in greater depth can do so on the GP page.
GP establishes a continuity between scientific and therapeutic inquiry by bringing both under the same epistemological and methodological requirements. This continuity has allowed Grounded Investigative Psychotherapy (GIP) to emerge as the therapeutic application of GP, carrying these requirements directly into psychotherapy while drawing on GP’s theoretical framework where it becomes relevant to the therapeutic process.
GIP supports the development of a reliable, in-depth and increasingly faithful understanding of your psychological reality while seeking to minimise bias and distortion. Within the therapeutic relationship, the development of this quality of understanding is often one of the principal conditions for healing and personal development.
Accordingly, GIP is not another therapeutic technique but the methodological framework that guides the therapeutic work. Within that framework, therapeutic methods and interventions are selected and used according to how well they serve your needs and contribute to the work taking place.
This page explains the principles, aims, and therapeutic process of GIP. It also shows how GIP arises from the broader scientific framework of Grounded Psychology and how its principles are realised in therapeutic practice.
From GP to GIP
Gaining access both to human psychological reality and to the particular realities of your experience is not straightforward. Nor is the development of a discourse capable of describing these realities faithfully and making them available to reliable understanding. Far from constituting ordinary capacities that specialists can simply take for granted, these are demanding scientific and methodological achievements. Psychotherapy and the human sciences have devoted considerable effort to them, but have not succeeded in establishing sufficiently reliable and consensual foundations.
The evidence is difficult to ignore. The theoretical and methodological landscape of psychotherapy, like that of the human sciences more broadly, remains profoundly chaotic. The problem is not merely that the field contains a diversity of perspectives. It contains contradictory and mutually exclusive accounts of what human beings are, how psychological life is constituted, how it develops, what causes psychological difficulties, and what therapeutic change requires. These disagreements concern the foundations of psychological knowledge itself.
Greater empiricism has produced genuine advances in some areas. Yet no existing theoretical or methodological position has established itself as a satisfactory solution to the underlying problem. The central epistemological questions have neither been adequately formulated nor systematically addressed. The conditions required to gain reliable access to human psychological realities, to describe them faithfully, and to develop forms of understanding and language sufficiently congruent with them have never been fully and satisfactorily worked out.
For you as a client, this is not an abstract academic difficulty. My understanding does not encompass the whole therapeutic process, but it profoundly affects how your experience is perceived, heard, described, interpreted, and worked with. It therefore influences the kind and quality of therapy the therapist is able to offer. For this reason, I have devoted my efforts to the preliminary epistemological work of clarifying the conditions under which human psychological realities can be approached, described, and understood more reliably, and of developing a methodology through which these conditions can be realised both scientifically and within the psychotherapeutic process.
I have concentrated this work on two major epistemic obstacles. The first is sociocentrism: the tendency to apprehend human reality through the categories, values, concerns, and forms of perception generated by one’s own society and collective psychology. The second is over-intellectualisation: the tendency, especially pronounced in the Western tradition, for abstract, conceptual, and theoretical constructions to become detached from lived experience and to acquire greater authority than the realities they are intended to describe.
Both obstacles interfere with access to psychological reality and with its faithful expression. Experience is no longer approached, described, and understood sufficiently on its own terms. It becomes filtered, reorganised, fragmented, or replaced by inherited cultural categories, collective forms of perception, and intellectual constructions.
Overcoming sociocentrism has entailed exploring the cultural and ideological configuration that constrains Western thinking and, on this basis, opening up the possibility of theorising beyond the confines of that configuration. This has made possible a freer mode of thought: one less bound by the inherited assumptions of Western collective psychology.
Overcoming over-intellectualisation has required a radical empirical orientation: a disciplined methodology based on rich description, careful attention to language, and inclusive inquiry into all relevant dimensions of human experience — an inquiry in which concepts are continually tested, refined, or corrected in relation to the phenomena they are meant to describe, and in which relevance is determined by the phenomena themselves rather than by traditional disciplinary boundaries.
This work gave rise to Grounded Psychology: an epistemological, methodological and theoretical framework developed to provide a more solid and authentic foundation for understanding human experience. Its importance lies in the epistemological conditions it establishes for inquiry, the methodology through which those conditions are put into practice, and the theoretical framework that has emerged from that work. That methodology has proved fruitful at the theoretical, practical, and therapeutic levels.
This is where GP gives birth to GIP. GIP brings the epistemological and methodological principles of GP into psychotherapy, the aim being to help you understand your psychological reality more reliably and effectively in the course of your therapy.
GIP addresses two key epistemological and methodological difficulties:
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how can therapy sufficiently and faithfully capture what makes up your psychological reality?
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how can this work remain as free as possible from the distorting influences identified by GP, particularly sociocentrism and over-intellectualisation, and from the categories and forms of understanding through which they operate and which can move away from the reality of your experience?
This clinical application is necessary because the epistemological problem concerns both sides of the therapeutic encounter: my access to your psychological reality, and your own access to what you are living. Therapists ordinarily listen, perceive, question, interpret and respond from within a background of assumptions, concepts, language, training and wider cultural forms of understanding. These can shape the therapeutic process in ways that move away from a client’s actual experience when they remain insufficiently examined. GP is designed precisely to work against this problem and to keep my understanding as closely answerable as possible to the reality of what you are experiencing.
You, too, approach your experience through inherited forms of language, interpretation, self-understanding and collective psychology. These inevitably contribute to the ways in which you make sense of yourself and what you are living.
Most people have had little opportunity to examine these inherited forms critically and to develop a sufficiently grounded understanding of human psychology and of the structures, processes and forces that shape their lives, personalities, relationships and existential difficulties.
Your self-understanding may therefore incorporate some of the same distorting influences identified by GP: it may be sociocentric, over-intellectualised or fragmented, or organised through familiar explanations that correspond only partly to the reality of what you are experiencing.
As GP’s clinical application, GIP is designed to support the development of reliable understanding on both sides of the therapeutic encounter while working against the distortions that can affect both my understanding and your self-understanding.
To achieve this, GIP performs a dual function. It brings GP’s framework and methodology into my therapeutic work, supporting a more reliable understanding of your reality. It also provides the therapeutic process itself with a grounded, investigative and collaborative method of exploration and discovery, through which you can develop a clearer, more accurate and more personally relevant understanding of the psychological realities with which you are living, together with a therapeutic narrative that carries and supports this understanding.
Within my therapeutic work, GIP is not the whole of the therapy I practise, but one of its central dimensions. It is the grounded, investigative and collaborative process through which I work with you to move from the stories and scripts through which you currently understand yourself towards what I call a therapeutic narrative.
By this, I mean a richer, more accurate, and more therapeutically useful understanding of your life, your difficulties, your experiences, and your possibilities for change. This narrative also provides a framework for understanding and engaging with the psychological or existential processes through which growth, healing, and transformation can occur.
Where aspects of GP’s theoretical framework become relevant, they are used in the service of clarifying what is emerging from your experience, rather than as a ready-made interpretation applied to it.
This understanding is not pursued for its own sake. It supports your engagement in the wider therapeutic process, including the emotional, psychological, relational, and existential work it involves. In this sense, GIP is guided by a simple practical requirement: to help you understand your psychological life as it is, through language and concepts that remain as closely grounded as possible in your actual experience, away from inherited explanations, familiar stories, diagnostic labels, or concepts that only partly fit it.
GIP does not replace therapeutic experience with analysis or explanation. Its purpose is to support the emotional, psychological, relational, and existential work of therapy. By helping you come into closer and more accurate contact with what you live, feel, repeat, avoid, seek, or suffer, GIP creates conditions in which deeper therapeutic processes can unfold with greater relevance and precision.
As experience is described through more accurate and faithful language, you come into clearer contact with its different components, which consequently often become more accessible. What was vague, confused, misidentified, hidden beneath inadequate explanations, or not yet consciously understood, can begin to take clearer form. Feelings, thoughts, perceptions, bodily states, memories, impulses, conflicts, and meanings may become easier to recognise, name, approach, express, understand, and process. In this sense, understanding does not stand apart from experience. It helps you come into fuller contact with what you live.
The same applies to psychological change more broadly. A more accurate therapeutic narrative can support renewed self-understanding, changes in self-perception, and the gradual emergence of a voice from which you can speak more truthfully about yourself and your life. As this understanding becomes increasingly integrated into the way you experience and live your psychological life, it can also support shifts in relational patterns, the growth of self-worth and confidence, the reconfiguration of aspects of your life or personality, and the emergence of new possibilities for growth, healing, and development.
GIP is therefore not an intellectual substitute for therapeutic experience. It is one of the central dimensions through which therapy becomes more grounded, more accurate, and more capable of supporting the psychological and existential processes through which change occurs.
The principles described here do not reveal everything that may take place in therapy. GIP is one central dimension of the work and provides an important part of the context within which deeper therapeutic and developmental processes may unfold.
If you would like to situate GIP in relation to more familiar therapeutic approaches — such as person-centred therapy, psychodynamic therapy, CBT or integrative therapy — I address this question in the FAQ.
How the Process Works in Therapy
In therapy, you bring narratives that give access, directly and indirectly, to your existential and psychological configuration, as well as to the way you currently understand it. However, this understanding is rarely complete and may not adequately grasp the psychological realities involved. Sometimes, it is itself part of the problem, or creates problems of its own.
One of the aims of therapy, at least as I practise it, is therefore to revise and renew your narratives, so that a therapeutic narrative can gradually emerge. By this, I mean a narrative that allows you to see and make sense of your existential and psychological configuration more completely and accurately, and on this basis to engage in, or unblock, the psychological and existential processes required for your growth, development or healing.
A therapeutic narrative is not therapeutic because it is comforting, persuasive or simply coherent. It is therapeutic because it is more faithful to the reality of your experience and more closely aligned with what is actually happening in your psychological life. As such, it forms part of the therapeutic process itself, while also facilitating other therapeutic factors: emotional processing, renewed self-understanding, changes in self-perception, relational shifts, the emergence of a more truthful voice, and new possibilities for growth, development and healing.
To help explain the aim of GIP and the psychotherapeutic process that follows, I will use the metaphor of a puzzle. You can think of your attempt to understand your psychological life as something like assembling a puzzle.
The different elements of your life story, personality and experience provide the pieces from which you try to form a picture of how your psychological life is organised.
The puzzle, therefore, is not your psychological reality itself, but the picture you have formed, and continue to form, of it. More often than not, that picture will be incomplete, partly inaccurate, or organised in ways that do not adequately reflect what is actually happening in your psychological life.
As you begin telling me your personal story, the present state of this puzzle gradually comes into view. It differs considerably from one person to another, but two broad situations are especially common.
In the first case, you may feel that you have already uncovered many of the pieces of your psychological puzzle. You may have formed several clusters and even guessed the beginning of an overall picture. You may even believe that you have the full picture. However, to your great dismay, this completed or almost completed puzzle, although it may seem to work as a logical structure, has proved unhelpful at a practical level.
It has not translated into psychological or existential change. It has not helped you resolve your personal issues. Your hope is that therapy will unblock this situation and possibly explain why this has happened.
In the second case, you may recognise that only some of the pieces of your psychological puzzle are visible to you. You are aware that many pieces are missing. Some of the pieces may also be blurred, only vaguely visible or difficult to recognise. To make things worse, the connection between the pieces already present is not fully obvious to you.
You have only been able to form a few clusters, or perhaps none at all. Your psychological puzzle remains so unclear and insufficiently organised that you feel lost and confused. As a result, the overall picture remains vague and elusive. Your hope is that therapy will bring some order and reveal the missing picture.
If you recognise yourself in either of these scenarios, one of the core aims of your therapy with me will be to help you work further on your existential and psychological puzzle: bringing more of its pieces into view, clarifying how they fit together, and where necessary revising, repositioning or discarding pieces that do not adequately reflect the reality of your psychological life.
The aim is to bring it towards greater completion and coherence with the reality of your psychological life, so that the picture that emerges can support deeper therapeutic and developmental change.
In other words, the aim is to develop a fuller and more faithful understanding of your circumstances and psychological life, while using that understanding to support the psychological, existential and practical changes that become possible through the wider therapeutic process.
As a principle, sessions begin with what you bring. You decide what to bring, what to express, what to share, and when. This may concern how you feel on a given day, emotions linked to recent or more distant experiences, thoughts that arise in the moment, or matters that have been occupying your mind for some time.
Throughout the therapy, your lived experience remains the primary point of reference and the focus of the work. My response to what you bring depends on what I perceive to be most needed from a therapeutic point of view at that time.
Sometimes, I may leave you a great deal of space, allowing you to remain with what you are experiencing and to let it unfold in the session. In such moments, I am fully present and attentive, but not necessarily very active verbally. My way of engaging with what you bring is immediate and perceptual. I attend closely to what is expressed through your words, tone, behaviour, bodily presence, and through the overall atmosphere of what is taking place.
During the first few meetings, I am likely to listen more than I intervene. My aim is to get to know you and to gather the material needed to begin developing an understanding of you and your psychological life. Depending on how much information you share spontaneously, I may simply follow what you bring, or I may invite further exploration of aspects of yourself and your experiences.
Early in the work, we are likely to explore what brought you to see me, what you would like help with, what you have already tried in order to help yourself, what worked and what did not work, and why. I am also likely to ask what you expect from me and how you understand the therapeutic process, if you already have a view of it.
As our open dialogue develops, the themes you bring begin to raise questions of their own, and our discussions gradually engage the process of Grounded Investigative Psychotherapy. At any time, you are free to ask me questions that you think may be helpful to you.
The core process of GIP is a collaborative investigation into your psychological and existential reality.
People differ in how they enter this work. You may bring extensive material from the outset, or begin with fragments, questions, feelings, or a less clearly formed sense of what needs to be explored. Whatever the case, our dialogue gradually opens up your psychological and situational landscape, sometimes through open-ended questions, and sometimes through clarification, reflection, examples, reformulation, or sustained attention to what is emerging.
The therapeutic narrative that gradually emerges from this work is neither something I produce for you, nor something you simply discover alone. It is developed through a shared investigative process.
You bring the lived material — experiences, feelings, memories, perceptions, assumptions, words and questions — while I help examine, clarify, differentiate, test and organise this material so that a more accurate and therapeutically useful understanding can take shape.
This is the investigative dimension of GIP: the dialogue follows the material itself, the themes that appear, and what needs to be clarified, differentiated, tested or described more fully. It involves looking carefully, patiently and concretely at your experience, rather than relying too quickly on ready-made psychological interpretations (including diagnostic labels), unexamined assumptions, or premature explanations.
My aim is to facilitate the development of rich descriptions. By this, I mean descriptions that are as complete, detailed, accurate, concrete, relevant and as little distorted by bias as possible. I call guided rich description the dialogical and collaborative process through which such descriptions are developed.
This work relies primarily on your own personal material: the components and aspects of your life and experience. But it may also extend beyond this in order to explore human phenomena and processes that are relevant to our discussions.
In this sense, GIP involves what I call inclusive investigation. This does not mean that everything must be explored, or that therapy becomes intrusive, exhaustive or indiscriminate. It means that, in principle, no relevant dimension of experience is excluded in advance. Personal history, present and past circumstances, bodily experience, feelings, thoughts, language, relationships, existential concerns and implicit assumptions may all become part of the investigation. So may the ways in which a person has been socialised into, and participates in, Western society and civilisation, as well as wider human realities relevant to what is at stake.
At all times, this work remains grounded: it stays as close to experience as possible, avoiding premature or unnecessary abstraction. Where intellectualisations arise, they are examined and, when necessary, their distorting influence is worked through or reduced. In this, GIP brings into therapeutic practice the same epistemological and methodological principles that underpin Grounded Psychology.
In practice, this may mean slowing down around a particular word, returning to a concrete situation, finding examples, distinguishing what happened from what you concluded, clarifying the meaning of a feeling, or noticing what emerges in you as you describe something.
In this process, you are not treated as an object of interpretation, or as an opportunity to apply a theory or framework. You are an active participant in the unveiling and development of your therapeutic narrative and understanding that remain answerable to your experience. Any formulation that emerges in the work remains open to examination, correction and refinement.
How guided rich description works
Much of what matters in our experience remains implicit in the way we talk about ourselves. Some of it is not yet conscious; some has not received sufficient attention; and some is simply not immediately available when we begin to speak.
For this reason, the biographical and psychological descriptions that you may provide spontaneously are often partial and uneven in detail. This is not because they are defective, but because human experience is complex, memory is selective, and attention does not distribute itself evenly across all aspects of one’s life.
Some areas may be described with clarity and detail, while others remain vague, compressed, absent or only indirectly present. Important experiences, or important aspects of experience, may therefore be left aside, even when they have real significance for understanding your psychological life.
At the same time, spontaneous descriptions may include elements whose relevance is uncertain or has not yet been established. This may involve, for example, premature self-diagnosis, which can veil what it aims to reveal, or early assumptions about the root cause of your difficulties.
In this sense, the initial account you bring to therapy is often selective. Some elements are missing or underdeveloped; others may be present but require clarification, qualification or repositioning. Through dialogue, clarification, careful attention and, where useful, questions, I help you bring more pieces into view, gather more detail about them, and examine how they fit together within the picture you are forming of your psychological life.
Your descriptions of yourself may also contain approximations, reconstructions, inconsistencies or contradictions. These are not treated as faults, but as important indications that further clarification is needed. My task is therefore to help identify and overcome potential sources of obscurity, distortion or inaccuracy.
This includes refining the main tool through which rich descriptions are produced: words.
A common source of imprecision and inaccuracy is an inappropriate use of words, or the lack of words needed to designate and express certain experiences. Various key terms in the English language are commonly misused or insufficiently understood. Some are overused, while others are neglected and underused. For this reason, I may occasionally raise the question of how well particular terms fit the experiences they are being used to describe.
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I may suggest alternative or additional terms, either borrowed from psychotherapy and the human sciences or, very often, from everyday language.
For example, a word such as “anxiety” may cover many different realities: fear, dread, agitation, anticipation, bodily alarm, shame, pressure, or a sense of impending collapse.
A phrase such as “I sabotage myself” may appear to explain something while actually concealing several different processes that need to be distinguished.
This is an aspect of therapy that is usually neglected, even though it plays a vital role in the improvement of psychological literacy. Revising one’s vocabulary and adjusting the meaning of terms helps us get closer to reality by increasing the descriptive power and accuracy of language. Conversely, identifying and overcoming imprecise or misleading uses of terms helps neutralise what can undermine or limit this descriptive power.
This important work allows you to clarify existing elements, bring previously unrecognised ones into view, and begin forming more accurate connections. However, words do not only name experience. They often carry assumptions, explanations and implicit theories about what that experience means.
GIP remains grounded not only by staying close to concrete experience, but also by recognising and examining the theoretical elements already present in your own descriptions.
You do not bring experience to therapy in a theoretically neutral form. Your narratives often contain implicit theories about your psychological life, the structure of your personality, the relationships between its different aspects, and the ways in which you relate to the world. These theories are not presented as theories, but appear as ordinary concepts, statements, assumptions, explanations, images, metaphors, evaluative or moral judgements, or recurring ways of making sense of experience.
An important distinction therefore needs to be made between explicit and implicit theory. Explicit theories are formulated and presented as theories or explanations, whether they appear in scientific, philosophical, psychotherapeutic or everyday discourse. Implicit theories are different. They are not usually announced as theories. They are embedded in ordinary ways of speaking, interpreting and making sense of experience. They do not merely appear as external explanations of psychological phenomena; they are often embedded in the very ways in which experience is perceived, expressed and understood.
Because a great deal of implicit theory is already contained within your material, part of the work of GIP consists in making these elements visible, examining their grounding, and assessing whether they help or hinder the development of a more accurate therapeutic narrative.
This also means distinguishing what genuinely belongs to your experience from what has been overlaid or distorted by imported terms, inherited interpretations, cultural clichés, diagnostic labels used too quickly, or theoretical fragments.
In this sense, GIP does not simply extract implicit theory from the material; it clarifies it and frees it, as far as possible, from elements that obscure its relation to experience.
Some of these theoretical elements may become valuable pieces of the puzzle when closer examination shows them to be well grounded in your experience. They may help reorganise the picture you have formed of your psychological life from within your own material, sometimes without any need to introduce additional theoretical explanations.
This distinguishes GIP from therapeutic processes in which the organisation of a client’s material depends primarily on theory supplied by the therapist or an external framework. In GIP, your own descriptions often already contain important theoretical and interpretive resources. The task is to identify them, examine them, and integrate or revise them according to their empirical grounding and therapeutic relevance.
As you describe your experiences, you frequently move beyond specifics and make general statements. You may also struggle to provide examples that give these statements solid grounding. However, because of their abstract nature, general statements easily lend themselves to assumptions and intellectualisations, even where the intention is to be descriptive and concrete.
Abstraction and intellectualisation are strong tendencies within Western culture and common features of everyday conversation. When they become detached from concrete experience, they can become major sources of bias and distortion. To ensure that close contact with reality is maintained, I usually bring the work back to concrete situations and to examples that allow broader statements to be examined against experience. I may also offer examples myself as a way of testing and, where necessary, challenging an idea.
The requirement to develop a concrete narrative helps establish which pieces are genuinely grounded in your experience and how they begin to connect. As the number of pieces grows, clusters can begin to form. However, this clustering process must not become artificial or based on logic alone. It needs to remain grounded in the reality of experience.
The investigative work of GIP also involves identifying recurrent psychological structures. By this, I mean patterns or organisations of experience and personality that become visible through concrete clinical and everyday material.
This differs from approaches in which your experience, or the structure of your personality, is prematurely translated into an existing theoretical language. Terms such as defences, schemas, attachment patterns, cognitions or trauma responses belong to other psychological and psychotherapeutic frameworks. They are not part of the descriptive language of GIP, whose task is not to translate your material into pre-existing categories, but to allow the relevant structures to emerge through a patient, careful and in-depth examination of the material itself.
GIP takes a different methodological route.
The starting point is your actual experience and the concrete expressions of your personality: what you say, how you say it, what you repeatedly encounter, what you avoid, what you feel, how you relate, how you position yourself, and how your sense of self changes across situations.
From this material, recurrent organisations may gradually become visible. These structures are not imported from a doctrine; they are identified through sustained engagement with the material and the recurrent organisations that become visible within it.
This is one of the ways in which GIP remains actively investigative while reducing the risk of interpretive distortion. It also forms a bridge between my clinical practice and my wider work on general human psychology: both are conducted within the same grounded epistemological and methodological framework, whether applied to therapeutic material or to human experience more broadly.
As you share and explore your biographical circumstances and psychological life, you will bring many pieces to your puzzle that are not themselves direct descriptions of your experience or circumstances. Some elements will be theoretical or interpretive in nature. They may come from you, from popular culture, from the media, from the field of psychotherapy, from past experiences with another therapist, from books or the internet, or from the human sciences.
Explicitly or implicitly, these theoretical and interpretive elements usually bring into view the wider puzzle of human psychology and the human condition, as well as the more specific puzzle of the society and civilisation in which your life has taken shape. These wider realities are not merely external to you; they have necessarily been internalised in certain ways. Your personal and biographical material therefore belongs within these wider contexts.
When this happens, I endeavour to examine these theoretical and interpretive elements against the richer empirical picture developed through the process of guided rich description.
The aim is to assess their empirical grounding and, therefore, their entitlement to offer a valid context for the biographical and experiential components of your puzzle.
Popular psychological culture is saturated with myths, misconceptions and premature explanations. Professional and scientific discourses are not immune to this problem either, especially when their concepts are simplified, overextended, detached from evidence, or absorbed into everyday language as if they were settled knowledge.
For this reason, part of my work involves identifying when the evidence calls their empirical validity into question or shows them to be potentially misleading. In such cases, these ideas need to be revised, abandoned or replaced with something more accurate. In psychotherapy, as in science, unlearning can be as important as learning. Frequently, it is one of the conditions of progress in therapy. You can therefore expect at least some of it to take place during our sessions, and in some cases a great deal.
In the course of therapy, I often introduce material from beyond your own immediate account when it helps clarify, extend or contextualise what is emerging. Frequently, this material originates simply from facts drawn from human experience, some of which may already be familiar or relatable to you. It may also come from my own research, which is descriptive in nature, or from the research of others, which I carefully select for its strong empirical orientation.
This additional material will always be introduced as a direct response to the themes and questions raised by our discussions. Therefore, wherever my own framework is introduced and offered for consideration, it is used to deepen and organise the understanding already developing through rich description.
The material will be accompanied by examples that make its empirical grounding visible and allow it to be examined against experience, and it will remain consistent with all of GIP’s principles. In this way, your personal experience is not treated in isolation. It is progressively positioned within the wider puzzles of human psychology, human life, and the civilisation in which your experience has taken shape.
The process of guided rich description involves working on and producing narratives. However, because these narratives are intended to remain empirically grounded rather than becoming detached from experience or merely organised according to logic, the process is distinctly different from an intellectual or reflective exercise.
It is a disciplined engagement with recollection, introspection, extrospection and precise narration. It involves accessing facts of experience and finding ways of expressing and reporting them that capture or preserve their lived reality.
Although GIP works through language, narration and understanding, it remains closely connected to experience and feeling. Clearer description and fuller, more authentic expression often bring you into sharper contact with your subjective experience, giving feelings, thoughts, intuitions, memories and meanings more room to emerge, be experienced and be processed.
By cultivating closeness with the reality of human experience at the descriptive level, GIP presents itself as a form of existential and psychological exploration that is both experiential and noetic: it involves understanding, but an understanding that remains connected to feeling and intuition.
In my clinical experience, clients often find that the outcomes of this descriptive process do not merely make sense intellectually, but also “feel right”. Far from interfering with the flow of their experiencing, the process often encourages and activates it. This is one reason why GIP is often particularly effective at bringing into awareness aspects of experience that might otherwise remain below the surface.
Ample space is therefore given during the sessions to the expression and processing of feelings, emotions, and other dimensions of experience. Although GIP is methodical rather than random, it is not protocol-driven. It remains informal in practice, shaped by the therapeutic relationship and its dynamics, while continuing to begin from and remain responsive to what you bring.
Far from being mechanical or artificial — sessions never take the form of an uninterrupted flow of questions, and not all questions are probing — GIP operates discreetly within the flow of the session, and discussions unfold in a natural and timely manner.
As the process of guided rich description advances, your initial puzzle undergoes major changes. It may shrink in places, as certain assumptions, explanations or interpretations are left behind. Elsewhere, new pieces come into view, existing pieces are revised or repositioned, and the overall picture becomes fuller and more accurately organised. It becomes more detailed, more precise, and more coherent.
Connections between the pieces become clearer and more visible. Clusters form. As these clusters themselves begin to connect and find their place in relation to one another, a more coherent overall organisation emerges. The larger picture progressively appears and asserts itself.
This often carries with it a feeling of renewed awareness and insight:
an experience of understanding that may not have been encountered before with such force, clarity and conviction.
You may still carry many questions, some of which may have emerged during the work itself. But a great number of the original questions will have been answered, transformed or disqualified. This more developed and reliable picture will put you in a much stronger position to understand what is happening in your life and within your psychological life. It will provide you with a more reliable map with which to navigate life and its challenges.
It often becomes an invaluable resource for engaging in the existential or psychological processes that may be awaiting you. These may include self-discovery and self-acceptance, the reconfiguration of your life or personality structure, the improvement of relationships, the growth of self-worth and confidence, the discovery of new meaning and purpose, the processing of feelings and emotions, or other forms of psychological and existential change, growth or healing.
In practice, GIP generally runs alongside these processes and plays a crucial role in facilitating them.
What you bring to the process
For this process to be fruitful, what is required from you is not prior knowledge of psychology or therapy, but a willingness, or at least a readiness, to learn; an openness to examine your experience carefully; and a mind sufficiently flexible to discover that some of what you currently believe about yourself, others, or life may need to be revised.
This openness does not mean accepting everything I say. It means being willing to look closely, patiently and honestly at what emerges as your experience is examined.
The principles described here can only give a partial sense of what the work is like in practice. To hear how clients have experienced this process, you may wish to read the Testimonials page.