Psychology, Clinical Social Work & Professional Counseling

We humans grow in relation to each other. We are COCREATED. Interactions between infants and parents, family members, and individuals and their social environment all are the basis of making each person who she or he is. We are actors in a massive improvised drama, shaped by the other actors but also responding to and shaping them.

COCREATE refers to that process, and to more than that. Each of us carries in her or him a unique understanding of life, a unique reality and set of truths. In dialogue, those unique realities open to each other, expanding to understand the other, changing in response to that new understanding.

A client and a therapist sit down in a room. Each comes with their own truths and means of understanding. Each comes with their own blind spots and areas of ignorance. As they enter into understanding the universe that is the client, a new reality begins to emerge, something that wasn’t there before. New truths emerge, new ways of understanding reality. Some blind spots become known and some areas of ignorance transform into areas of awareness. Along the way, the client becomes more fully who she is, less haunted by the past, less constricted by fear. The therapist also becomes more fully himself, as he needs to challenge his own constrictions in order to fully apprehend the client. By the end of the therapy, each is more fully herself and neither is quite who she was before. This is what it means to COCREATE.