Healing Is an Experience: Inside The Our Kind Method
At Our Kind Therapy, we developed a method that helps you move from understanding your pain to actually transforming it. Here’s how healing becomes a lived experience.
Why Talk Alone Isn’t Enough
You can know everything about yourself and still feel stuck.
You can understand your childhood, your patterns, even your triggers and still find yourself repeating them.
That’s because healing isn’t only about insight. It’s about what happens when understanding becomes felt.
At Our Kind Therapy, we call this The Our Kind Method, a therapeutic process where change happens not by talking about your story, but by experiencing it being witnessed, understood, and rewritten in real time.
Healing Is an Experience
Most therapy begins in the mind. You analyze, explain, and make sense of things. But the nervous system doesn’t speak in words, it speaks in sensation, emotion, and relationship.
The Our Kind Method bridges that gap. We help clients move from thinking about their feelings to experiencing what safety, love, and release actually feel like, in the body, in the moment, and in connection with another person.
When your therapist responds with genuine attunement, not neutrality, something shifts. A client’s shoulders drop. Tears surface. Laughter returns. The nervous system learns, experientially, that it’s safe to feel again.
Healing is an experience because true change is felt before it’s understood.
How the Our Kind Method Works
The Our Kind Method is a unified, attachment-based framework that integrates depth-oriented and experiential therapies into one cohesive approach to emotional and relational repair.
At its foundation is Attachment Theory, which helps us understand that most psychological distress stems from disrupted safety and conditional love.
When the body organizes around fear instead of trust, we work to rebuild secure attachment through consistency, emotional responsiveness, and relational repair.
Our therapists are active and emotionally present. They don’t hide behind neutrality, they listen, engage, and respond. Sometimes softly, sometimes directly. Always in service of helping clients feel truly met.
This responsiveness is what allows fear to reorganize into safety and love.
The Approaches We Integrate
Each client’s path is unique, but our framework draws from several complementary, evidence-informed models.
Attachment & Narrative Therapy
The foundation of our work. We explore how early experiences shape inner dialogue and relationships, and help clients re-author those narratives with compassion.
ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy)
A direct path to emotional honesty. We help clients move through anxiety and defenses to access the core emotions that drive change.
AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy)
The heart of the method. Through moment-to-moment attunement and co-regulation, clients experience “felt shifts”, new embodied experiences of safety and connection. Within AEDP, we often draw on IFS (Internal Family Systems) to recognize inner parts and Somatic Experiencing (SE) to regulate the nervous system.
Expressive & Experiential Methods
Guided imagery, role-play, and creative processing re-introduce imagination and flexibility, key for integration and emotional range.
Jungian Psychoanalysis & Psychodynamic Theory
The upper structure of meaning-making. We help clients integrate unconscious material and align with a more cohesive, purpose-driven sense of self.
This blend allows therapy to move fluidly between thinking and feeling, reflection and experience, structure and spontaneity, meeting each client exactly where they are.
What It Looks Like in Practice
Therapy begins with a collaborative consultation, a space to clarify what’s happening now and what’s being asked for beneath the surface. Clients leave that first meeting with direction and a felt sense of recognition and safety.
Early sessions focus on slowing down, tracking the body, and establishing trust. As safety grows, clients begin to experience emotional release, relational repair, and a natural clarity about what they want and need.
Within a few months, most clients notice greater honesty with themselves, improved emotional regulation, and deeper connection in relationships. Over six to twelve months, these changes consolidate into something more lasting: the ability to love, connect, and lead from safety rather than fear.
Why It Works
The Our Kind Method rests on one clinical principle: healing occurs through secure relationship.
When a client experiences consistent, attuned responsiveness (not just empathy, but real engagement) the nervous system learns a new reality.
Self-protection gives way to self-trust.
Performance gives way to presence.
We’ve seen it repeatedly: as clients experience safety and love within therapy, they begin to live it outside the room, in families, partnerships, and leadership.
Insight becomes integration.
Final Reflection
If you’ve been searching for a kind of therapy that feels like an experience, where the work happens not just in your mind but in your body, your relationships, and your daily life, The Our Kind Method was built for you.
Because here, healing isn’t something you talk about.
It’s something you go through — and come out of, more whole.
Ready to Experience This Work?
Written by Alaina Malik, LMHC
