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Practitioner
What am I bringing into this room?
People · perspective · possibility
You can know a lot about therapy and still miss what this person needs.
Techniques matter. Models matter. But people arrive with histories, loyalties, meanings, fears and possibilities. Nine Realms Institute is for practitioners who want to see more before deciding what to do next.
The right technique used for the wrong understanding is still the wrong intervention.
Beyond the presenting problem
People are more than the problem they walked in with.
A client may say anxiety, pain, addiction, sleep or conflict. Useful descriptions, perhaps, but they are not the whole story. Behind the symptom is a life: experience, physiology, belief, emotion, relationship, context, identity and meaning.
A wider view does not make the work vague. It makes it more precise. The symptom still matters, but so do the reasons it exists, the job it may be doing, and the person who has to live with what changes next. A model should help us see more of that person. It should never gradually become the person.
Real change.
A more truthful world.
Sanomentology
The technique is rarely the hard part.
Most experienced practitioners do not need more techniques. They need to know what they are actually looking at, what matters now, and what should happen next. Sanomentology trains that judgement.
NoticeNotice more than the presenting symptom.
FormulateWork out what may actually be organising the problem.
DirectChoose and sequence the work for this person.
The Nine Realms
One person. Nine ways of looking.
The Nine Realms are nine perspectives on one human experience. They are not nine treatments or nine kinds of person. Each one asks a different question, because the question you ask changes what you notice.
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Consciousness
What is being noticed, ignored or unavailable?
03
Identity
Who does this person believe themselves to be?
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Emotional
What is feeling its way to be known?
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Healing
What needs to change, and what wants to stay?
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Liberation
What would a freer life look like for this person?
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Heroic
What becomes possible when this person meets challenge differently?
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Transformational
What needs to reorganise, rather than merely improve?
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Potentiality
What else might become possible from here?
Explore the Nine Realms →
Different lenses. Same person.
Here for yourself rather than practitioner training?
There is a different route through NRI for personal change.
No practitioner language. Start with what you are actually trying to change in your own life. You are not supposed to spend the rest of it working on yourself.
A note from Martin
I have been trying to work people out for 38 years. I am not finished.
Sanomentology came first. Nine Realms Institute grew around it as the wider home for the training, books, programmes and questions that would not fit neatly inside one method. I do not want a theory that explains everybody. I want better ways of seeing the person in front of us, and better reasons for what we do next.
Curiosity is a legitimate therapeutic tool.
A wider view
Same old answers do not create new worlds.
Wider perspective. Fairer practice. A more human future.
Explore the training →