Dr Guy Van de Walle — Psychotherapist & Psychologist | Chelmsford & Online (EN/FR)
Contact: 07475 520419 or
Principles, Aims and Process
Because GIP is not a conventional modality and represents a new formulation of what I regard as one of psychotherapy’s core processes, it cannot be adequately explained through the usual labels used in psychotherapy. This page therefore offers a fuller account of its principles, aims and process.
An overview
Grounded Investigative Psychotherapy, or GIP, is the clinical application of Grounded Psychology, whose principles I explain on the page “GIP Foundations”. As such, it has the same methodological and epistemological basis as GP: empirical grounding, rich description, an inclusive approach to human phenomena, careful attention to language, the reduction of bias and distortion, and the accurate understanding of human experience.
Within my therapeutic work, GIP is not the whole of the therapy I practise, but one of its central dimensions: the grounded, investigative and collaborative process through which I help clients move from the stories they currently hold about themselves towards what I call a therapeutic narrative.
By this, I mean a richer, more accurate and more therapeutically useful understanding of their life, their difficulties, their experiences, and their 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.
This understanding is not pursued for its own sake. It supports the client’s engagement in the wider therapeutic process, including the emotional, psychological and existential work it involves.
In accordance with GP, GIP gives central importance to the quality of access to psychological reality. In psychotherapy, it is possible to explore deeply, speak meaningfully, produce coherent explanations, or use familiar psychological concepts while still moving away from the phenomena themselves. A narrative may feel persuasive, emotionally compelling or therapeutically recognisable, yet still be shaped by bias, abstraction, cultural assumptions, premature interpretation or insufficiently examined theory. It may then place a veil over the very phenomena it claims to reveal.
GIP is designed to guard against this. It treats the reduction of distortion as a central part of the therapeutic process, because the way a client’s experience is understood directly affects the kind and quality of therapeutic work that can follow. The aim is not merely to produce a plausible or acceptable account of experience, but to develop a narrative that gives more adequate access to the psychological realities at work.
This is why, although psychotherapy often works with stories, meanings and interpretations, the specific grounded, investigative and descriptively exacting form I give to this work is, to my knowledge, extremely uncommon within psychotherapy.
Like Grounded Psychology, GIP arises in response to a wider problem, discussed in more detail on the page "GIP Foundations". Psychotherapy and the human sciences do not yet possess a sufficiently mature, empirically grounded and consensual understanding of the main structures and processes of human psychology. The ways in which human experience is described and understood remain theoretically divided, culturally shaped, and affected by a tendency toward over-intellectualisation, speculative reasoning, and concept-led abstraction.
GIP extends the response developed by GP into the field of psychotherapy. It addresses a key epistemological and methodological difficulty: how can therapy help clients understand their psychological reality without organising their experience through concepts, interpretations, and explanatory models shaped by this immature and over-intellectualising background?
This difficulty does not concern professionals alone. Most people have had little opportunity to develop an accurate and grounded understanding of human psychology, or of the structures, processes and forces that shape their lives, personalities and existential difficulties. For this reason, GIP has a dual function. It is a means of exploration and discovery, but also a means of education in the deepest sense: helping clients develop a clearer, more accurate and more personally relevant understanding of the psychological realities with which they are living.
It is important to distinguish between the epistemological foundations of GP and its theoretical framework. The epistemological foundations guide the whole process of GIP: they shape how experience is investigated, described, clarified, tested and protected from distortion. The theoretical framework of GP has a different role. It is not applied to the client as a ready-made system. It is introduced only where the material produced by GIP reveals its relevance and calls for its use.
In this sense, therapy begins not with the application of a theory, but with the process of GIP itself. As this process develops richer and more accurate descriptions of the client’s experience, aspects of GP may become relevant and help illuminate wider psychological, relational, social or existential structures. GP then complements the clinical work, but does not precede it as an interpretive grid imposed on the client.
This allows the therapeutic narrative to deepen and expand without losing its grounding. The client’s experience remains the primary point of reference, while wider psychological understanding is introduced only when it helps clarify what is already emerging from the work.
GIP does not replace the emotional, relational and existential dimensions of therapy with analysis or explanation. Its purpose is to support them. By helping clients come into closer and more accurate contact with what they live, feel, repeat, avoid, seek or suffer, GIP creates conditions in which deeper therapeutic processes can unfold with greater relevance and precision.
When experience is described and expressed through a more accurate and faithful language, its different components often become more accessible. What was vague, confused, misidentified, hidden beneath inadequate explanations or not yet conscious 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 clients come into fuller contact with what they 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 one can speak more truthfully about oneself and one’s life. It can also support shifts in relational patterns, the growth of self-worth and confidence, the reconfiguration of aspects of one’s 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 gives an important indication 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
Some clients come to therapy primarily needing their story to be heard. Sometimes this is their main need; sometimes it is a need that must be met before any other work can begin. In these situations, my posture is that of a listener and empathetic witness.
Other clients welcome therapeutic intervention and wish to engage in psychological work, but need the therapist to engage with their story as it is told, without trying to modify it too quickly. They need the therapist to meet them where they are, and to relate to them on that basis. In these cases, I work accordingly.
Most of the time, however, clients are not only concerned with telling their story and having it heard by someone compassionate and non-judgemental. They also want to develop a higher level of awareness and understanding of themselves and of the issues that brought them to therapy, and to make progress in relation to those issues. In this case, psychotherapy involves both helping clients understand what is going on for them and accompanying them through a process of psychological and, sometimes, existential change.
In therapy, clients share narratives that give access, directly and indirectly, to their existential and psychological configuration, as well as to the way they currently understand that configuration. 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 the client’s narratives, so that a therapeutic narrative can gradually emerge. By this, I mean a narrative that allows clients to see and make sense of their existential and psychological configuration more completely and accurately, and on this basis to engage in, or unblock, the psychological and existential processes required for their 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 the client’s experience. 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 a metaphor.
You can think of the components of your life story and personality as the many pieces that make up the puzzle of your existence and psychological life. These components sometimes appear to us as separate and unrelated. However, when looked at closely, they form an overall picture: the picture of your life, and a picture that tells your story.
As clients begin telling me their personal story, this puzzle gradually comes into view. Its state differs from one person to another, but two broad scenarios usually present themselves.
In the first case, the client feels that they have already uncovered many of the pieces of their psychological puzzle. They may have formed several clusters and even guessed the beginning of an overall picture. They may even believe that they have the full picture. However, to their 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 them resolve their personal issues. Their hope is that therapy will unblock this situation and possibly explain why this has happened.
In the second case, the client recognises that only some of the pieces of their psychological puzzle are visible to them. They 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 them.
They have only been able to form a few clusters, or perhaps none at all. Their psychological puzzle remains so unclear and insufficiently organised that they feel lost and confused. As a result, the overall picture remains vague and elusive. Their 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 assess, improve and progress your existential and psychological puzzle. The aim is to bring it to a state of greater completion and integrity, so that it carries with it greater insight and practical impact.
In other words, the aim is to increase your awareness and understanding of your circumstances and psychological life, which in turn helps support practical and psychological change.
As a principle, sessions are led by you. 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 information about 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 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.
Clients differ in how they enter the work. Some bring extensive material from the outset; others 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.
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 sometimes call a total 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, neutralised. In this, GIP follows the same methodology and principles that I apply to 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 production of narrative and meaning. 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 clients 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 the client’s 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 one’s difficulties.
In this sense, the initial account a client brings 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 clients bring more elements to their puzzle, gather more detail, and examine how the different pieces fit together.
Self-descriptions 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 misrepresentation.
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 the relevance and proper use of certain terms.
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, uncover new ones, 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 is grounded not only because it remains close to concrete experience, but also because it takes seriously the theoretical elements already present in the client’s own descriptions.
Clients do not bring experience to therapy in a theoretically neutral form. Their narratives often contain implicit theories about their psychological life, their personality structure as they implicitly or explicitly understand it, their relationships, and the way they 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 describe psychological phenomena from the outside; they often give them form and voice from within the client’s lived experience.
Because a great deal of implicit theory is already contained within the client’s 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 the client’s 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 precisely because they are native to the client’s own material. They may help reorganise the client’s original puzzle — the self-constructed story — from within the client’s own material, without the need for external theoretical input.
This distinguishes GIP from approaches that assume theory must be supplied by the therapist or by an external framework in order to organise the client’s material. In GIP, the client’s 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 clients describe their experiences, they frequently move beyond specifics and make general statements. Some also struggle to provide examples that illustrate and support these statements. However, because of their abstract nature, general statements easily lend themselves to assumptions and intellectualisations, even where the intention is to be descriptive.
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 illustrate and support broader statements. 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 identify which pieces genuinely belong 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 the client’s experience, or the structure of their 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 the client’s 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.
In GIP, the order is reversed. 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 drawn from the configuration of the facts themselves.
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 rely on the same grounded and descriptive methodology, 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 do not draw directly on factual material. 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 check these theoretical and interpretive elements against the process of 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 evidence brings their empirical validity into question and 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 to help fill the gaps. Frequently, this material originates simply from facts that belong to 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, its most immediate function is to prevent the process of rich description from stalling, and to allow it to continue and mature.
The material will always be illustrated and supported by examples that demonstrate its empirical grounding, 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 factual rather than abstract or merely logical, 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 clients into sharper contact with their 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.
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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, in my clinical experience, 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, and subject to the client’s ongoing leadership.
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. But the inclusion of new pieces offsets this loss. The puzzle changes in various places and, overall, expands. It becomes more detailed, more precise, and more coherent.
Connections between the pieces become clearer and more visible. Clusters form. 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 certainty.
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 improved puzzle will put you in a much stronger position to understand what is going on in your life and in your psyche. 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.
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 your experience reveals.
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.