Self-determination therapy, emphasizes people’s innate tendency towards self-determination, their ability to make choices, and need to manage their own life, not just at a conscious level, but also at an energetic subconscious level.
Dr. Michael Dadson maintains:
There’s a drive inside of each person towards self-determined and a need for individuals to make their own choices. This is a fundamental need and drive for individuals to be their own agent, to be an active force in the world. This drive represents not just what a person thinks, but who they are and who they want to be when they are connected to themselves at their core. The STD therapist looks for the impulse, the energy, or light in a person that wants to grow and wants to be empowered, that wants to be able to make changes.
When a therapist that sees this energy and impulse, they help make conscious, capture, nurture and direct growth and change. Recognizing and encouraging this impulse and validating the energy behind it can make conscious the tendency towards transformation that’s already inside of a person. Noticing this in the moment, goes with the flow towards change and helps empower a person as they move towards self-determination. In a sense, a person is consciously engaging in their own process of healing. Dr. Dadson adds, “Capturing and directing the energy inside that comes from the soul’s own cry for healing and well-being.”
Dr. Mike Dadson concludes:
If someone is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), often the triggers or activations intrusive of past traumatic memories and experiences are indicators that the experience as not been fully processed.
The very act of a person being triggered is the souls attempt to heal, reconcile, and to have that information flow through them. This means they move through the stress and find themselves at a peaceful equilibrium.
Some can experience the trigger or the activation of those unwanted, intrusive memories and experiences as the “enemy” to avoid, contain, or push it away. Actually, these flashbacks, or memories representative the soul’s quest for healing, and the energy that it takes to express that to find that place of healing.
By taking the energy and using it, or recognizing that the energy, it is catapulting or moving a person towards a greater sense of health and healing. In doing this people are in turn, motivated to intrinsically grow, not just through discipline, but by that innate and universal need to become more. “SDT likes to capitalize on this need, to nurture it, to find it, and then to find ways of helping a person act on it. This energy plays a very important role in the person’s well-being as it encompasses the very act of self-empowerment, states Dr. Dadson”
As a skilled therapist, Dr. Mike Dadson notes, “it’s my job to try to help facilitate that empowerment, to nurture the impulse towards self-determination.”
The process of healing goes beyond a person’s personal agency and their disciplined decision making for change. Dr. Mike Dadson interprets this as a metaphor:
Just like the arm that’s broken and is set by a physician, the healing process that takes place, isn’t caused by the physician. Rather, the patient’s own body acts to heal the bone structure and to moves the person to become well. By setting the bone in place, it channels that healing energy so that the outcome is optimal. With SDT theory, a therapist actively engages in a similar same way psychologically and helps direct the healing by making conscious the unconscious impulse toward growth and change.