THERAPEUTIC APPROACHES
Disability-informed
pluralism.
Given the complexity of disability, a pluralistic approach is often the most honest fit: therapist and client collaboratively choose methods, adapt to context, and stay open to being wrong about what will help.
What pluralism actually involves
- Collaboration and shared decision-making on goals, tasks and methods
- Metacommunication — talking openly about how the therapy itself is going
- Feedback-informed practice, taken seriously rather than as a formality
- Client agency and power awareness built into the frame, not added afterward
- Cultural humility and therapist transparency
- Adapting therapy to the actual person, rather than fitting the person to a modality
Why this fits disability specifically
No single model was built with disability in mind. Jungian work offers rich language for archetypes and projection but can drift into treating limitation as symbolic. ACT offers psychological flexibility but can understate structural barriers if used alone. Psychodynamic work offers depth on internalised belief but risks reading physical reality as defence. A pluralistic stance doesn’t resolve these tensions — it keeps them visible, and keeps the client’s own read on their situation as the deciding vote.