What is the MATTERS™ Approach?
Multisensory Advocacy Tailored Therapeutic Emotion Regulation Support
Multisensory Advocacy Tailored Therapeutic Emotion Regulation Support
I initially created the Matters approach with misophonia in mind. Over time, I came to realize that the coping skills I was using for misophonia were also helping me with depression, OCD, and anxiety. I will say that it is possible that through helping one condition, the others are more easily managed. However, I think there are also instances such as ADHD, autism, trauma and other conditions where a multisensory advocacy approach can help improve the quality of life. During my graduate program in Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology, I became even more disenchanted with the cognitive behavioural one-size-fits-all approach to counselling and understanding the human brain and behaviour. I do not think that humans are just what we do, but are rather a cumulation of emotions, thoughts, feelings, and chemical compositions that can manifest in completely different ways.
The idea of a matters approach is two-fold. For one, the word is an anagram for the program itself, and two, focusing on our mental and neurophysiological traits is something that matters. It is, of course, what makes us human beings. While diagnostic tests exist for numerous mental and neurobiological conditions, I think it is far more important to focus on individual traits, expression, and ideas on one constitutes a condition. Rather than focus on a client “having” a condition, the matters approach is agnostic to diagnosis. Whatever problems that are facing the individual, whether it is struggling in their own brain in the world, addiction, trauma, or depression, the matters approach is designed to consider these differences. This is not to say that medical attention is not important: psychiatric patients should obviously listen to their psychiatrists, and persons with seizures should listen to their medical doctors. What this does say is that no matter the diagnosis or prognosis, the matters approach lives outside of that paradigm and instead utilizes advocacy, psychoeducation, self-regulation, and appropriate cognitive and behavioural strategies.
One thing I find incredibly uncomfortable with psychotherapy and counselling is the use of the term “intervention”. The use of this term is infantilizing. People who are struggling are reduced to the role of a misbehaved child. Instead of figuring out the neurophysiological basis for their choices, or even exploring their emotional motivations outside of the characteristics of the DSM, we are left with bullet points on a medical chart. I found myself cringing every time I heard this word throughout my program. “What intervention is your favourite?” was a common question, and my eyes would glaze over and I’d simply reply, “I don’t have one, definitely not CBT.” The academics and mental health practitioners are all struggling from a similar problem. Many conditions are either too complex to understand entirely, are either completely eradicated with medication or barely helped, and are less known than the headlines on Buzzfeed would have you believe. Psychology as a discipline is as old as humanity, and yet, also as young as the last two centuries. There is also a social construct to mental illness and depending on your culture you may have stigma against the idea that there are problems in the brain that the spirit cannot overcome. For me, the answer to the question of, “what are we” is far more complex and not something that any scientist, psychologist, counsellor, priest, shaman, or philosopher will ever know the answer to, and if they did, how boring would life be? So—if this question is so timeless, and so unanswered, why are we willing to hinge the very being of a human on the idea of a diagnostic criteria?
I am not here to say that every condition, behaviour, or human experience is due to their sensory systems, or even that mental illnesses and psychiatric conditions do not exist. That would be a throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater argument, and that is not the point at all. For some people, their emotional regulation problems do stem from behaviour or lived experiences outside of their neurophysiological state. This is entirely consistent with the Matters approach since one should always consider the individual above all else. Psychoeducation and academic research are heavily embraced in the matters perspective. One should always be seeking information and learning more about these conditions, and assuming matters are settled and sticking to old conceptualizations of disorders is just as bad as never believing the person has a disorder in the first place. Clinicians use diagnostic tools to help identify which courses of action might be helpful to their client or patient. This is not an unimportant part of psychiatric and psychological care, but it should always be viewed through the lens of limitations. It should also always be considered that labels can come with stigma attached.