What is Social Therapy?

A Powerful Discovery

People get better by creating environments where we can bring our emotional pain (loneliness, anger, humiliation, depression) and create something new with it — new conversations, new meanings, new emotions, new lives. To the extent that we're focused on ourselves, we can't effectively use all of our creative, emotional and social resources. Social Therapy helps people learn how to give emotionally and by doing so create environments in which we can get closer to the people we love. Social Therapy helps us experience the essential human activity of creating with others and enables people to transform their lives and the world.

A new approach to human development.

The Social Therapeutic approach — at the leading edge of the postmodernist movement in psychology — has "family resemblances" to narrative, social constructionist and systems therapies. Developed in the early 1970s by therapist and philosopher Fred Newman, and influenced by the extraordinary discoveries of psychologist Lev Vygotsky and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Social Therapy has inspired hundreds of practitioners and theoreticians interested in an activity-based approach to emotional growth. Newman's discoveries about human development and community building are the topic of numerous academic and popular texts.

Yes, you can change your world!

For more on training in the social therapy approach, learn about the ESISTP.