What is IoPT?
Find out about the Intention Method
The question of what makes up a person's identity and how it is possible to live a good life is a recurring topic that has become increasingly important for many against the background of current world events.
What does it mean to live a good life? How is it possible to feel safe and happy, and to have loving relationships with friends, my partner, my family and my own children? What do I surfacing feelings of loneliness, insecurity, anger, powerlessness, fear or pain?
In IoPT (Identity-Oriented Psychotrauma Theory), the development of one's own identity from the point of conception in the womb is considered fundamental. The prevailing attitude towards life and the success of relationships are determined from here. The quality of the dependent relationship with one's own parents is decisive for later life. Therefore, for example, recurring conflicts with the partner, with work colleagues or one's own children can be an indication of traumatic experiences in one's own childhood.
Trauma can be a single shocking event (shock trauma) or an experience of emotional overload that extends over a long period of time, eg during childhood (developmental trauma). The theory and practical experience of IoPT shows that many shock traumas can also be a consequence of developmental traumas. Memories of traumatic experiences are fragmented. In everyday life, we often react to situations that activate our trauma memory and guide our behavior without us realizing it. In this way, we unconsciously re-enact our earlier experiences over and over again. Unprocessed trauma feelings always lead a life of their own.
Trauma is an injury that begins in the womb.
A prerequisite for a healthy, happy life is a mother who is happy in herself and unconditionally affirms the existence of her child. If a mother does not want a child, or if she is traumatized, she is not emotionally available to her child sufficiently.
Trauma means separation from myself.
The insecure living situation due to the mother's insufficient attention leaves a deep wound in the child that cannot be overcome. It has to repress the pain about it and split it off from its conscious memory. Only in this way is it possible to live in a dependent relationship with the mother.
Trauma means not being able to grow up.
In order to be able to grow emotionally, the child's needs for security, acceptance and nurturing contact must be answered empathetically by the mother at all times. If this does not happen, the child's needs will remain in adulthood.
Trauma is the no
to development.
In childhood, there are experiences with the father and other reference persons, which continue the original trauma and force the feelings to be suppressed further. Through this continued splitting, we lose touch with ourselves and therefore do not know who we really are. Our natural development is interrupted and our life potential cannot unfold freely.
Life becomes survival.
Trauma is a wound that does not heal by itself. Instead, we automatically develop survival strategies to maintain emotional repression. Survival strategies numb the pain and help us continue to cope with life despite injury. But they can also be destructive against ourselves and others and have the price that we no longer live out of ourselves.
This creates a kind of pseudo-life based on the needs and longings that were unfulfilled as an infant/toddler and on split-off fear. Instead of being able to lead an adult, self-determined life, we live compressed and driven by our survival strategies.
Unresolved trauma repeats itself in the here and now.
Early injuries and their repression later cause all sorts of suffering that can also express itself in the body. We often experience them as conflicts in our relationships with our partners, friends, colleagues and children, and through painful conditions within ourselves. An unfulfilled desire to have children, miscarriages and stillbirths, difficult birth processes and caesarean sections can also be the result of early trauma.
Trauma means fighting
instead of cooperation
The trauma creates a so-called perpetrator-victim dynamic, in which every victim can also be a perpetrator due to their traumatization. In the interpersonal relationship, people then fight against each other instead of cooperating with each other. In arguments, when we try to make our child's unfulfilled needs heard, we lose sight of our counterpart. Being a perpetrator is another survival strategy that wards off pain from one's own traumatic experiences.
Am I traumatized?
Trauma is often elusive. The lack of a nurturing relationship with the parents can be evident, for example, through physical or psychological violence, but it can also be subtle. Many people don't realize that their problems are a symptom of early trauma. They are often unaware of their injuries, perhaps because they were said to have children - or because they think they survived their childhood well despite their injuries. Trauma even alters our perception, so that we can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion. The IoPT assumes that almost all people have had early traumatic experiences.
Exit the trauma biography
With the help of the concern method, the IoPT shows ways in which we can get out of the trauma biography. In the active, investigative and compassionate turning to ourselves, we find our own solutions to take possession of ourselves again. Through the development of one's own identity, one's own liveliness also grows. The originally created ability for healthy autonomy and healthy cooperation gets a sustainable basis.
Intention Method
With the formulation of a concern and the implementation in a process, inner-psychic realities are reflected through resonance processes. Inner parts, which act separately from each other due to splits in us, are experienced in their dynamics. The submitter of the concern enters into a dialogue with his shares, which are represented by other participants (resonators), with the aim of finding out what they want to express. Depending on the concern, knowledge and insights can be gained or deep emotional processes can be felt. The resonators of a process can also gain insights into their own inner-psychic dynamics. During self-encountering, a safe space is created for the development of your process. The concern method protects you from being overwhelmed and gives you the space to take independent steps at your own pace.
I would be happy to accompany you on this.
Here Franz Ruppert explains the process of a self-encounter on his website: https://www.franz-ruppert.de/psychotherapie/meine-therapiemethode