Heart Assisted Therapy® (HAT®) is an integrative, humanistic, and mindfulness-enhancing approach to psychotherapy. The HAT model operates within a holistic mind-body-energy paradigm, and is a hybrid of traditional psychotherapy with learning from energy psychology approaches and energy science.
Heart Assisted Therapy is a psychotherapy model that incorporates a mindful whole of the individual’s cognitions, emotions, and sensory experiences using an integrative and self-nurturing protocol. HAT is a clinical mind-body and science-based approach that is client-centered and client-directed in keeping with the wisdom of psychologist, Carl Rogers and psychiatrist, Milton Erickson. The individual’s unique and personal meaning and associations regarding the identified Treatment Focus are paramount with HAT and are gently accepted and shifted by the individual. The influence of the heart, heart energy, respiration, and the body’s innate electro-magnetic physiology relative to experience, memory, emotion, and sensation are subtle yet integral components built into the HAT protocol to foster the change process. The HAT model of psychotherapy is gentle but can be deceptively intense as treatment gets “to the heart of the matter” quickly while promoting healing shifts.
The HAT model of psychotherapy maximizes the therapist’s skills in listening, observing, and planning while integrating procedures that enable the opportunity for the individual to be validated, and to heal, shift emotions and thinking, adapt, and move forward in life. HAT also incorporates “Awareness Streaming” and a stabilizing breathing treatment while overlapping hands are placed over the heart (“heart breaths”) throughout the protocol promoting self-regulation.
Heart Assisted Therapy is the original work of psychologist John H. Diepold, Jr., Ph.D. The HAT model constitutes a psychologically versatile and comprehensive treatment methodology that is mindful, gentle, self-nurturing, easy to use, and blends comfortably with all forms and orientations in psychotherapy. HAT has been used beneficially to address a wide variety of life issues.
