What is Tift about?
Tift is a psychobiological concept, adapting the therapy process to the non-linear dynamics of complex systems and their inherent sensitivity to the "butterfly effect".
The healing process focusses on the client’s presenting traumatic gestalt as the winning and only available response to a dysfunctional attachment and childhood, holding the entire imprint of its past survival adaptations.
Tift’s therapy set-up follows the "musts" of secure attachment, combining the intersubjective bond between therapist-client the conditions allowing for neural integration. As a result, coherent movement and flow arise again in the organism.
The survival structure as solution, not as failure
The present gestalt reflects the fraught path the organism followed “since the protection of secure attachment” defaulted from the very beginning
The therapist respects the inherent intelligence of the client’s organism, while maintaining the responsibility for the resolution process
Evolution has honed organismic intelligence to provide the “best match” between ourselves and our environment to ensure survival.
From isolation to connectedness
The therapist-client connection of “meeting the client” is the foundation and catalyst for change as demonstrated by the power of the initial mother-infant dyad on the entire life cycle.
Feeling safe
Working in the client’s comfort zone is the key for this joining, signalling implicitly the feeling of being understood, of experiencing “I am no longer alone”.
Mayday mayday
Disconnecting, dissociating from body, sensations, feelings and emotions, the mind (being out of your mind…), from reality and from the person we are, are understood and treated in Tift as a lifesaving movement of “getting the hell out of” an intolerable, even life threatening situation.