Radix therapists work with the life force through talking, movement, breath, touch, vision, and sound to achieve healing and growth and to help people realize their full potential.
The founder of Radix, Dr Charles Kelley was an experimental psychologist who researched the relationship between vision and emotions. He developed and incorporated ways of working with the eyes into Radix work. Radix practitioners are very skilled in working with the pulsation and different expressions of the eyes. This assists them to bring clients more into the present moment, which facilitates healthy perception, addresses dissociation and enhances the integration of the work. The significance of being able to competently observe and actively work with this aspect of the body has recently been supported by advancements in neuroscience and neuropsychology.
Radix is a regulatory approach both in theory and practice. Our primary focus is working with the pulsation of the life force in the body/mind. In a practical sense, Radix practitioners focus on the many subtle ways that clients interrupt this pulsation in feeling, thinking and behavior, either by becoming more rigid or by going into chaos. In particular Radix practitioners are skilled in emotional regulation; they understand the therapeutic benefits of facilitating either emotional expression or containment.
During their training, along with the in-depth theoretical learning and conducting a practice with ongoing supervision, Radix Practitioners do a minimum of 150 hours of their own personal Radix work. Radix training is rare in this demand for ongoing, deep and comprehensive personal work. This enables the practitioner to be fully present with their clients, no matter what the issues are or what is being felt or expressed.
Historically, Radix began as an educational model, not a medical model. Our basic belief is that clients have the capacity to be healthy and functional, rather than seeing someone as being sick and needing to be cured, as in the medical model. Our work is to facilitate growth toward one’s ability to live fully in the world. In the process of growing up, people may have learned ways of interacting with the world that protected them, but that are no longer effective for their optimal functioning. This belief in the client’s basic health and ability to relearn ways of thinking, feeling and behaving in the world remains a fundamental philosophy or Radix theory and practice.
With this focus the Radix therapist is fundamentally empowering the client to take charge of their life. For this reason, Radix practitioners are reluctant to ‘diagnose’ using labels. Emphasis is more on how the client is struggling in their feelings, behavior or thinking. This assists the client to make sense of their process and to make informed choices of how to change and grow based on their experiential learning.