For years, one question kept bothering me:
How can you do meaningful therapy without beginning from psychiatric diagnosis?
As a psychotherapist, executive coach, clinical supervisor and researcher, I’ve spent over 20 years working with more than 1,200 clients. Across therapy, coaching and supervision, I found myself thinking less in terms of labels and more in terms of what I came to call functional difficulties.
Things like:
Too much feeling.
Too little feeling.
Too much control.
Too little control.
A fragile sense of self-worth.
Relationships organised around attack, withdrawal, approval-seeking, or collapse.
That led me to a deeper question:
What is the full set of human difficulties a person can have?
And by implication, what is the full set of human strengths a person can ideally develop?
That question eventually led to the Lifelong Capacities Map® and, later, PsycheVita®.
And it changed how I think about distress, growth, and what real personal development actually means.
I’ll unpack that properly in the next post.
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