From Modalities to Relational Meaning: A Systemic Turn in Integrative Counselling - With Rick Murphy and Lisa Dvorjetz.

In this episode of The Systemic Way, we speak with Rick Murphy and Lisa Dvorjetz about their book A Systemic Approach to Integrative Counselling (2024) and the growing need to bring relational thinking into everyday therapeutic practice.

Together, we explore how familiar counselling models such as person-centred, psychodynamic, CBT, Gestalt, and action-based approaches can be reworked through systemic ideas of context, relationships, patterns, and meaning. Rather than locating distress solely within the individual, Rick and Lisa invite us to consider how problems are shaped and sustained through interaction, culture, family histories, and wider social systems.

We discuss what this means for therapists working one-to-one, how counsellors can develop systemic thinking without abandoning their core model, and why integration needs more than simply combining techniques. This is a rich conversation about practice, ethics, creativity, and the future of counselling.

Essential listening for counsellors, psychotherapists, family therapists, trainees, supervisors, and anyone interested in moving beyond individualised understandings of human struggle.

A Systemic Approach to Integrative Counselling (Amazon)

https://amzn.eu/d/02FDlcHh