About

After finishing my PhD in Counselling Studies, I had a bit of a crisis. My work was about creativity, the process of creation, finding your true self, and finding spaces between where creativity and the concrete world can meet.

I felt my ideas had reached their maximum complexity, and I did not feel like doing more. I did not feel like teaching and writing papers, so I dedicated myself to my practice.

I enjoyed some time out of the academic mindset. I felt freer to think without justifying everything in my head.

However, I had been learning non-stop and felt the itch to learn something new, so I started learning how to program out of curiosity. It felt nice at that point to keep doing something abstract and I enjoyed exploring new ways of logical thinking.

That path led me to learn Python and then Django, a web framework that made this site possible. I feel it like having a super power that allows me to communicate my thoughts and creations in a new way.

Almost avoiding it, I started writing some notes about my practice, little insights that slowly started to shape into something different from what I knew. These new ideas are influenced by exploring the logics of programming that encourage encapsulation and flexibility of plugging parts with each other to construct something new.

This new approach differs from the integrative world I trained in, as I feel integration is sometimes too rational and rigid at the point of connecting parts. Other approaches like pluralism seem to me to not always give you the tools to find and connect the plurality of options in the therapeutic world.

I wondered to myself, what if I could write something different, more playful, more about the process each therapist goes through, without sacrificing the knowledge we have accumulated?

That is how the profiles emerged as a new but old way of describing therapy. The positions are based on the main traditions but with a little twist; they open the possibility of moving between them.

This project does not aim to reinvent the knowledge but to put it together differently in a way that can be creative, like transitional objects, like the creation/discovery that Winnicott saw in children's playing.

I hope this tells you a bit about me as a person and a therapist. The site has been built from beginning to end by a therapist, which has allowed me to be playful, to open sections on the go, and to try them out to see if I like them.

I hope you can use it and send me some feedback so we can do it even better.

Gabriel Soler