Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT)
Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT) is a somatically-oriented Energy Psychology approach to healing trauma (unconscious and otherwise) that centers around the body’s wisdom and potential for releasing stored traumatic resonance.
It’s base is in Psychodynamic Theory that views suffering in the present as traceable back to one’s earlier exposure to traumatic patterning and toxic messaging (oftentimes from pre-verbal, complex and developmental trauma sources). AIT seeks to empower people to understand, integrate, and resolve that which has caused them distress in a safe, gentle, deep, and powerful way so that they can experience everlasting optimal health in the domains of mind, body, and spirit.
According to the website ait.institute:
“AIT hypothesizes that the basic issue psychotherapy must address is the effect on the human being of trauma, redefined as any occurrence which, when we think of it or it is triggered by some present event, evokes difficult emotions and/or physical symptoms, gives rise to negative beliefs, desires, fantasies, compulsions, obsessions, addictions, and/or dissociation, prevents or hinders the growth of positive qualities and spiritual connection and development, and fractures human wholeness. From this standpoint, everything that impinges in a hurtful way on a person comes from trauma, and can be treated as such.
AIT posits that most present-day issues and symptoms originate in one or more early traumas or patterns of repetitive trauma. These can be single traumatic incidents or traumatic patterns of commission or omission. When the earliest relevant trauma, the present symptom, and the connection between them are all energetically treated, the pattern that they are both part of stops recurring. AIT practitioners understand early experience to include not only childhood, but also the historical experience of the client’s culture, lineage and, where appropriate, the client’s past lives.
AIT begins with the development of a connection between client and therapist, trust building, and the gathering of the client’s history. As AIT treatment is most often based upon the causal connections between past life, cultural, lineage, and childhood developmental and incidental traumata on the one hand, and present issues and symptoms on the other, the therapist’s knowledge of the client’s history is crucial to therapeutic success.
Equally important, therapeutic presence is the hallmark of the AIT clinician. His or her full, grounded physical, psychological, and spiritual presence forms a safe container not only for the client’s most painful, dark, and disorienting truths, but also for the transformation of his/her being. Therapeutic treatment begins with a protocol that identifies and disempowers self-sabotaging beliefs about healing and transformation, and creates a healing alliance between the client’s conscious and unconscious. Client and clinician together choose the first issue to treat, exploring it and its origins. For the purpose of treatment, the therapist divides the theme into the three categories of trauma–the current issue and all its aspects, the earliest trauma that began the cycle of re-traumatization of which the present trauma is a part, and the connection between them.
AIT clients move their hands slowly down through a sequence of 13 energy centers on the front of their bodies while repeating a brief phrase that describes the trauma being treated. The placement of the client’s hands forms a circuit of electromagnetic energy that moves the traumatic emotions, sensations, behaviors, and cognitions that are the post-traumatic effects of that trauma out of the energy centers and the areas they govern, and then out of the body. These energy centers exist on and affect all levels of the human system–-as nerve ganglia on the biological level, as energy centers governing aspects of the psyche psychologically, and as spiritual centers that govern aspects of the spirit.
Once the traumas that comprise the theme have all been treated along with their earliest traumatic origins and the connection between them and those origins, the therapist and client identify any negative cognitions that have developed as a result of these traumas, and treat them energetically, replacing negative cognitions with neutral or positive realistic ones. AIT’s protocol for instilling core qualities such as love, courage, assertiveness, compassion or integrity, is used when a positive potential in a client has been crushed or rendered incapable of developing because the client has experienced too much trauma in his life. Clients are also often encouraged to develop a meditation practice since meditation lowers stress and enhances the client’s ability to cope.
Because AIT is theme-centered, therapy can be as short or long as circumstances permit; clients who can only manage short-term therapy can, unless the theme is unusually extensive, often complete much of the work on it in ten sessions or less; the client who is interested in his own development and transformation can utilize AIT therapy for the long term while he journeys on his path.
AIT opens up many healing possibilities because it marries the use of energy movement with psychodynamic, transpersonal, cognitive, and behavioral understanding. Anecdotal evidence indicates that it removes or transforms traumas and traumatic patterns, negative beliefs and qualities, and complexes and negative archetypal constellations that are the seeds from which individual and then collective negativity and violence grow. Each person who has experienced AIT has, to the degree that they have removed post-traumatic emotion, physical sensation, belief, distorted fantasy, and pathological behavior, reached a fuller state of presence and wholeness; the past’s toxicity need no longer be the lens through which the client experiences the present.”