What is Affectus?

Affectus is an organic proposal that arises from our encounter; an attempt to live the relationship in a safe, affectionate and respectful way, where we feel pleasure and joy. It is an adventure that is born from our personal and joint history. We seek to share our baggage, our knowledge and our unique way of getting here: to a better relationship with ourselves and with the other person.

We fundamentally start from two traditions:

One is psychodynamics (created by Freud) which focuses on the individual. According to this tradition, our passage through the initial phases of psycho-emotional development leaves us with deficiencies. Therapy is responsible for shedding light on this reality by discovering the defenses created by the individual in order to overcome these difficulties. These defenses are cognitive, emotional and bodily in nature.

At the time they were necessary to be able to move forward; however, over time they can start to be more annoying than functional and cause the person to go into crisis. Opening up the possibility of revision.

Psycho-Body Integration (created by psychologist Marc Costa) is specifically framed within the aspect introduced by Wilhelm Reich, where the body dimension is the focus in both the defensive and therapeutic process. Therefore, from this perspective, childhood wounds affect our thoughts, our emotions and our body. Each individual process will have to determine what is the appropriate itinerary to heal these wounds as much as possible and recover the integrity of the person.

The other is systemic, historically subsequent to psychodynamics, and inheriting its limitations. The systemic tradition considers that focusing on the individual is reductionist. Problems arise in social environments and therefore must be addressed from the globality of social systems: the partner, the family, school, work, etc. Since one of the most important is the family, the main representative of this tradition is family therapy. There are family units that are functional and others that are not. The latter present problems in the form of pathologies of their members and/or negative relational dynamics. Therapy will seek ways to broaden particular perspectives and introduce the necessary changes so that the system returns to functionality.

For us, these are two complementary paths: one from individual knowledge to be more aware of what, how we think, feel and act. And the other how we relate to our environment.