What is Unified Therapy™?
Unified Therapy™ by Dr. Paul Canali, a pioneer in somatic healing, is a holistic approach designed to activate the body’s self-healing abilities. This therapy focuses on releasing stress and restoring balance to the nervous system, which can lead to improved health and well-being. It is particularly effective for conditions like PTSD, anxiety, and chronic pain.
Dr. Canali’s method integrates principles from neuroscience, mindfulness-based psychotherapy, and somatic therapies. The therapy is gentle and safe, aiming to turn off trauma responses quickly and efficiently. It also emphasizes increasing self-awareness, which helps individuals shift from feeling helpless to becoming active participants in their own healing process.
Timing and patience are absolutely essential, it’s the cumulative sessions that rewire the brain’s ability to connect to the body. It’s a new way of understanding, a new way of learning to create what we say in neuroscience – long-term potentiation. This means you have to do repetitive stimulus in new and innovative ways. This is essential.
As the person receiving the somatic therapy learns to direct their consciousness or brain in order to receive, to be open, to surrender to that which is generated from within, a whole New World will emerge – a world of experience, sensations, memories, emotions, and most importantly levels of consciousness, never imagined or experienced before. This will bring the ability to see beyond the veil of distraction and illusion – where joy, love, safety, and a sense of meaning and purpose arise from a single source of well-being.
What is The Science Behind Unified Therapy™?
The science behind Unified Therapy™ is rooted in a combination of neuroscience, psychophysiology, and somatic therapies. Here are some key scientific principles and mechanisms that underpin this approach:
Neuroscience and Neuroplasticity
Unified Therapy™ leverages the concept of neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections. This is crucial for healing trauma and stress-related conditions. Techniques used in Unified Therapy™ aim to rewire the brain’s response to stress and trauma, promoting healthier patterns of thought and behavior.
Psychophysiology
This field studies the relationship between psychological processes and physiological responses. Unified Therapy™ focuses on the autonomic nervous system, particularly the balance between the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) systems. By calming the nervous system through various techniques, the therapy helps reduce stress and promote healing.
Somatic Therapies
Somatic therapies involve the body in the healing process. Unified Therapy™ uses somatic awareness and body-based techniques to release stored trauma and tension. This can include gentle touch, movement, and mindfulness practices that help patients become more aware of their physical sensations and how they relate to emotional states.
Evidence-Based Interventions
Unified Therapy™ incorporates evidence-based interventions from various therapeutic models. This includes mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), trauma release exercises (TRE), and heart rate variability (HRV) training. These interventions are supported by research showing their effectiveness in reducing symptoms of stress, anxiety, and trauma.
Holistic Approach
The therapy takes a holistic approach, addressing the mind, body, and emotions. This comprehensive method ensures that all aspects of a person’s well-being are considered, leading to more effective and lasting healing.
By integrating these scientific principles, Unified Therapy™ provides a robust framework for addressing a wide range of physical and emotional issues, helping individuals achieve better health and well-being.
Unified Therapy™ has dual purposes:
Therapeutically for patients:
Our brains and bodies know far more than what is normally available to us. We are conscious of only a fragment of what we deeply know. The central nervous system perceives and processes a great body of information that is stored outside the range of everyday awareness. Some of this information is best handled on an unconscious basis. But conflict, pain, and unresolved problems can become the source of chronic uneasiness, block growth, and even cause illness.
During a Unified Therapy™ session, you will hear the therapist asking you to be present, tune in, focus, feel, and breathe into an area of your body.
What we are trying to do is re-establish the connection that is lost between the brain and the body.
The front part of the brain – the pre-frontal cortex – gets turned off and the autonomic nervous system gets overly stimulated when confronted with life’s stressors and this eventually can lead to burnout and exhaustion.
This state of mind and body is called “survival mode” because the brain and body have purposefully numbed out pain in order to continue on with life.
By learning to re-establish the broken connections between the mind and body, true innate healing will take place.
Teaching healthcare professionals across multiple disciplines.
Unified Therapy™ can be integrated with and complements other therapy treatments including psychotherapy.
This Unified Theory incorporates an interdisciplinary view aimed at finding the convergence (consilience) among independent fields to enable a unity of knowledge to emerge. An interdisciplinary approach bridges these separations and enables us to unite the healing arts and sciences into a new common language so that we may address the etiology or cause of conditions rather than simply managing and treating symptoms.
Dr Canali presents a variety of lectures, seminars, healing retreats, and training workshops both at the Evolutionary Healing Institute and as a guest lecturer.
We seek to make this language available to all healing practitioners so that we can work together in this greatest of all human endeavors.
Types of Clients
We find there are several types of clients who benefit from Unified Therapy™
The first stages of healing are the people with:
Pain Disorders, Trauma and Anxiety – people who have found minimal relief through traditional or other alternative treatments. Includes people who deal with PTSD, panic attacks, past abuse, and other emotional pain such as grief or depression.
Rehabilitative – those recovering from surgeries, car accidents, joint replacements, or new and reoccurring injuries that did not heal properly. Provides support for those receiving pre and post cancer treatments and helps support addiction recovery.
The advanced stages are the people who are seeking:
Prevention – reversing the process that led to ill health, rebuild what was lost and rebalance to prevent further ill health. Minimize the accumulative effects of stressors (ex: from family, work, overwhelming events or diagnoses). Overcome recurring health problems and avoid unnecessary surgeries.
Lifestyle, Wellness and Higher States of Consciousness – supports those that are on the spiritual quest who seek purpose, meaning, and more direction in life and develop tools to address not only the physiological but the psychological aspects of stress.
These advanced stages of Unified Healing Therapy™ aren’t just meant for aches and pains. It has been shown that more frequent visits develop a better brain. Just like more exercise and good nutrition develops better fitness, a better and more developed brain opens up new pathways in your brain that give you better coping skills to handle stress, recover quicker and help the body, mind and brain heal.
Dominic Petty Interviews Dr Canali
Dominic Petty, a student of Unified Therapy™, interviewed Dr Canali on a Healerology Podcast episode. During this hour-long interview, they discuss a general overview of Unified Therapy™, the theory and science involved in the process, and how Unified Therapy™ has helped people resolve pain, anxiety, trauma, and much more.