Dr. Keith Witt

Dr. Keith Witt

Dr. Keith Witt is a Licensed Psychologist, teacher, and author who has lived and worked in Santa Barbara, CA. for over forty years.

Dr. Witt is the founder of The School of Love, at www.drkeithwitt.com, where he offers his School of Love Lecture Series, blogs, e-copies of his five books, Therapist in the Wild webseries, and Integral Conversations audios and videos on health, love, relationship, sexuality, spirituality, development, and psychotherapy-related topics. He has give three TEDx talks, all available on his website.

In presentations around the country—including Integral Life's What's Next, Integral Theories Conferences, and his ongoing series, The Shrink and the Pundit with Jeff Salzman—Keith has explored love, intra and interpersonal relationships, and development from multiple perspectives, weaving neuroscience, Integral theory, wisdom traditions, and numerous forms of psychotherapy into a coherent cosmology of love and development.

Website: http://drkeithwitt.com

Posts by Dr. Keith Witt

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

How Self-Hatred Can Lead to Self Transformation

and

Leave a Comment

Dr. Keith and Corey explore how feelings of self-hatred and self-loathing, when combined with compassionate self-awareness and the natural resilience of Witness consciousness, can help us overcome our resistance to change and put us back on the path of increasing wholeness, happiness, and self-acceptance. It’s an incredibly powerful discussion that we hope will help you better navigate some of these darkest corners of your own psyche.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

How Attachment Theory Can Improve Your Relationships

and

6 Comments

As Dr. Keith often reminds us, “Everything is relationships.” And the earliest relationships we form in our lives often set the tone and cadence for all the other relationships we will ever form in our lives. The coping strategies we learn in preadolescence become our inner compass later in life, and our efforts as grownups can often be seen as expressions, compensations, or substitute gratifications for the sense of security we may or may not have felt as children.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Psychedelic Therapy and the Politics of Consciousness

and

2 Comments

In the recent 2022 midterm elections, Colorado joined the state of Oregon in its decriminalization of psychedelic substances for therapeutic use. Here Dr. Keith and Corey explore some of the major implications of this profound legal shift, both in terms of our overall emotional, psychological, and spiritual health, as well as our rapidly evolving “politics of consciousness” — those states of consciousness that are sanctioned by the state, versus those that are not.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

How Change Works: Supporting Vertical Development

and

Dr. Keith and Corey explore some critical strategies to help support ongoing growth to increasing wholeness in ourselves and in other people: finding a psycho-spiritual framework to help organize our knowledge, experiences, and practices (e.g. Integral metatheory), engaging in change work (psychotherapy, coaching, consulting, etc.), and seeking communities of people who we recognize as more developed than ourselves.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

How Healthy Relationships Manage Conflict

and

Dr. Keith and Corey discuss “post-issue relationships” — relationships where both partners have the awareness and skill to stay connected in warmth and acceptance all the time, where challenges such as irritation, anxiety, doubt, guilt, and frustration can be transmuted into problem solving and warm feelings towards each other.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Personality as the Base Note of Change Work

and

Watch as Dr. Keith offers a “Psychotherapy Masterclass” that helps us work with various personality types as a foundation for healing, change, and self-actualization. While intended for other psychotherapy professionals, this discussion offers valuable insight for all of us, and can be immediately applied to our personal transformational work, whatever that may be.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

How to Teach Kids About Sex and Gender

and

What exactly are “developmentally appropriate, age-appropriate” ways to teach kids about sex, gender, and identity, not only for kids in kindergarten through third grade, but throughout the rest of childhood and adolescence? Which aspects are more appropriate to teach at home, and which are appropriate to teach at school? Watch as Dr. Keith and Corey share their thoughts.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

An Integral Understanding of Narcissism and Gaslighting

and

Leave a Comment

In this episode, Dr. Keith and Corey take a careful look at the strategies and intended results of gaslighting (the effort to make you question your very sanity by convincing you that your memories and perception of reality are somehow incorrect, inconsistent, or unreliable) in our personal and professional relationships, as well as in media, marketing, politics, and society at-large. How can we can better inoculate ourselves from this pernicious form of psychological manipulation? Watch to find out!

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

From Codependence to Interdependence

and

Leave a Comment

Codependent relationships — those relationships where one person needs another, and the other person needs to be needed — are surprisingly common in our lives, regardless of our overall stage of development. In fact, there is a good chance that you have dealt with codependent relationships in the past, or are maybe even struggling with one right now. This discussion will help you to transform those relationships into genuinely interdependent relationships that can transcend and include both healthy dependence and independence.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

How to Manage Passive Aggression

and

15 Comments

Watch as Dr. Keith and Corey explore the many ways passive aggression, anger, and codependence create more separation between people and degrade our capacity for love, while assertive processing of anger creates more intimacy and safety. Learning how to take a pause before aggressive or passive-aggressive action gives the opportunity to cross-validate through all four quadrants, and to take our overall kosmic address into account.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Martial Arts and Psychotherapy

and

Dr. Keith and Corey explore the fertile intersection between martial arts, psychotherapy, and integral living. Watch as Keith shares the deep wisdoms he has received from his own lifelong martial arts practice, and how those wisdoms directly inform his approach to his own psychotherapy practice and the various healing strategies he draws upon.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Escaping Narcissism

and

1 Comment

In this episode of Witt & Wisdom we take a careful look at these narcissistic tendencies and how they express themselves in all four quadrants, and at every major stage of development. We hope that this discussion will help you identify whatever narcissistic traits you may be carrying with you, and to consciously wield your positive self-esteem without being seduced by our own self-importance.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Into the Dreaming

and

4 Comments

Our dreams are often drenched in meaning, significance, and symbolism. But it is often very difficult for us to make sense of our experiences in the dream world, and to hoist these treasures out of the surreal and into the real. Our dreams typically communicate to us in the language of the bizarre, and more often than not we need some guidance in order to better understand them and extract whatever wisdoms they may offer us. Watch as Dr. Keith and Corey explore the murky depths of our own unconsciousness, and try to shine some light upon some of the common features we experience in the dream world.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Integral Mastery

and

Leave a Comment

The mastery process has been heavily researched — from the initial ignition of passion that makes us want to excel is some area, to embracing growth as progress as the ongoing goal, independent of outcomes. Join us for a fascinating exportation of integral growth and mastery that goes far beyond the typical discussion of “10,000 hours”.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

The Meaning of Coincidence

and

Dr. Keith and Corey take an integral look at synchronicity, exploring this elusive phenomena through the lenses of the four quadrants, the major states of consciousness, the twenty tenets, and Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance. It is a fun and fascinating discussion, and one that will hopefully help you pay a bit closer attention whenever you feel your own four quadrants falling into perfect and seamless symmetry.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Creating a Coherent Life Story

and

3 Comments

Dr. Keith and Corey discuss the primary goal of psychotherapy — to help people experience themselves every day as living a happy ending to their life so far, and at the very beginning of a wonderful and exciting new chapter. This goal, of course, requires a more integrated self in order to meet the inevitable challenges, triggers, and opportunities that we will encounter on the path of growing up, and for us to be able to create a cohesive and coherent life story for ourselves as we move forward

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

The Art of Happiness (with Dr. Keith Witt and Corey deVos)

and

Embodying happiness-increasing practices like performing kind acts and celebrating loved ones victories and triumphs are healing, and also open us up to deeper compassionate understanding and equanimity. Embracing happiness-producing perspectives like an optimistic explanatory style and growth mindsets help us become more joyful and wise. Engaging in kind acts, celebrating loved ones’ victories, and cultivating optimistic explanatory styles and growth mindsets are particularly potent practices and perspectives, but there are lots more!

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

An Integral Understanding of Suicide

, and

25 Comments

Suicide has been in existence as long as self-aware consciousness has been in existence. The gift of self-aware consciousness included the capacity for humans to anticipate and understand the inevitability of their own deaths, and all gifts come with a price. In this series of videos, Dr. Keith Witt talks to Jeff Salzman and Corey deVos about bringing a more integral understanding and compassion to the topic of suicide.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

The Power to Serve

and

2 Comments

Dr. Keith talks to Jeff Salzman about Integral Life’s recent “Tap Your Power” event in Denver, CO, which featured exquisite teachings from himself, Ginny Whitelaw, Beena Sharma, and Ken Wilber on the many facets of power in today’s world — interior and exterior, individual and collective, all the way up and down the spiral of human development.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

The Butterfly and the Hawk: How “Dual Focus” Can Help You Overcome Pain, Anxiety, and Trauma

and

2 Comments

A common element of many trauma treatments, most psychotherapy, and much spiritual practice is something called “dual focus” — our capacity to anchor ourselves in the feeling of being safe, capable, and worthy in the present moment, while simultaneously extending our awareness to distressing feelings, thoughts, memories, impulses, judgments, and events.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Heal Thyself: How to Repair Interpersonal and Cultural Injuries

and

2 Comments

The Buddha had it right with “life is suffering”! We all regularly feel injured by other people, our own interior struggles, cultural events, or random chance. Repairing these injuries is a big deal! Luckily, Integrally informed psychology can help us recognize and repair injuries. In this upcoming episode of Live with Dr. Keith we’ll talk about how we all become injured and the steps we often need to take for effective repair.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Normal Crazy vs. Extra Crazy: Disarming Your Defensive States

and

Leave a Comment

When we feel safe, we are usually comfortably social with ourselves and others. When we feel threatened, our nervous systems (our adaptive unconscious, our Shadow selves) can generate defensive states to protect us. These states amplify or numb emotions, distort perspectives, pump out destructive impulses, and diminish self-reflection and empathy. Watch as Dr. Keith Witt offers some valuable guidance to help you disarm these defensive states whenever they arise for you.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Growing, Relating, Connecting: An Integral Tour of Couples Therapy

and

1 Comment

In this episode of Psychology Now, Dr. Keith and Dr. Mark dive into the wide world of couples therapy and relationships, using the Integral lens to locate some of the deeper principles and key insights that leading couples therapists’ employ to help couples develop loving, growth-orientated, grounded relationships. Includes six key practices that you can try right now to enhance your relationship.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Psychedelics in Psychotherapy

, and

Leave a Comment

Special guest Dr. Elliott Ingersoll joins Doctors Keith Witt and Mark Forman to share their personal and professional experiences with psychedelics while reviewing relevant research, current practices, and the amazing potentials of these treatments. Therapists need as many tools as possible to remediate symptoms, enhance health, and support development. The way we see it therapies utilizing psychedelics will become increasingly available and likely useful in the years to come.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Into the Void and Back Again: Understanding and Recovering From Depression

and

Leave a Comment

Depression is a powerful mood disorder and – after anxiety – the most prevalent of all mental health challenges. In this episode of Psychology Now, Dr. Witt and Dr. Forman dive deeply into the topic of depression, and how our struggles with depression can lead to deepened commitment to change, heightened self-understanding, and increased empathy for the suffering of others.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Loving Completely Web Course

Loving Completely is a groundbreaking training program designed to help you and your partner improve your connection on every level: physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Crafted by Dr. Keith Witt and Integral Life, Loving Completely will help you uncover a wealth of personal and interpersonal dynamics that you may not even have known were there. Your personal guide through the wilderness of the heart.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

The Art and Practice of Self-Love

Leave a Comment

Do you deeply and truly love yourself? What is preventing you from loving yourself completely? Is your capacity to love yourself contrained by poor self-esteem, internalized criticisms, or false modesty? Can you distinguish your self-love from self-absorption, narcissism, and the siren call of your own ego? Listen as Dr. Keith Witt explores the tremendous importance of self-love, and daily practices to help you explore the undiscovered regions of your own heart.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

How to Create a More Fulfilling Sex Life

and

Leave a Comment

In a healthy intimate relationship, the partners don’t have to be turned on by each other all the time, says Dr. Keith, “but they do need to be turned on by each other regularly.” Every couple has a balance of how much sex is needed to keep things vibrant, and it’s the responsibility of each partner to make it happen. For many couples, this is something that must be learned and practiced. Here’s how.

SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE

The Spectrum of Brokenness: What to Do When You’re Dealing With a Personality Disorder

and

Leave a Comment

Nearly 1 in 10 people possess some form of personality disorder. Which means there’s a very good chance that you will encounter someone with this disorder at some point in your life… if you haven’t already. They might be your boss, your lover, your parent, your spiritual teacher, or even your presidential candidate. How can we engage these personalities with care and compassion, while remaining fully attentive to our own personal boundaries? Listen to find out!