A philosophical, organismically informed psychotherapy for growth, meaning, and excellence of character
Most psychotherapy today is focused on symptom reduction, distress management, and “what works” in the short term. While these aims are often necessary and deeply helpful, they do not always answer the deeper question many people eventually face:
What is my life for?
What is this suffering shaping me into?
How can I grow into a stronger, wiser, more grounded version of myself — not merely function again?
Aretotherapy was created for those who do not only want relief, but development— those who want to understand the deeper logic of their experience and become more capable, more integrated, more aligned with reality.
Aretotherapy is a one-on-one psychotherapy that combines modern evidence-informed methods (including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Motivational Interviewing) with a philosophical foundation drawn from Stoicism, Socratic self-examination, and the long tradition of process-oriented thinkers.
But unlike approaches that seek only to restore equilibrium, Aretotherapy aims at something older and more ambitious:
The enhancement of the person as an organism — flourishing, excellence, virtue, and maturation of the soul.
The Organismic Foundation: Trusting the Wisdom of Nature
Aretotherapy begins from a fundamental philosophical premise:
You are not a machine that needs fixing.
You are a living organism — adaptive, striving, meaning-making — shaped by Nature to grow through challenge.
This approach is grounded in the belief that there is an actualising power within each person: a deep, natural movement toward coherence, strength, understanding, and wholeness.
Even when life is painful, even when we feel lost, the organism does not stop striving. Growth continues:
- through conscious effort and deliberate choice
- and through deeper, often unconscious processes occurring in the whole being
Aretotherapy aims to help you develop a felt relationship with this organismic truth — not merely as an idea, but as an experience.
When a person learns to trust their own striving and reconnect with their organismic reality, something profound often happens: life begins to feel less like meaningless chaos, and more like something that can be integrated.
The Stoics had a name for this orientation toward reality: Pronoia— the sense that the cosmos, though sometimes harsh, is not fundamentally hostile. That events can be met as materials for development. That what is given, though not chosen, may still be usable in service of growth.
In this view, Nature acts toward the organism as if what it encounters is what it needs in order to evolve into what it can become.
This is not naïve optimism.
It is not denial of suffering.
It is a deeper stance:
“Whatever happens, I can make use of it.”
“Whatever comes, I can become larger than it.”
Arete: The Excellence of the Organism
The word Aretotherapy derives from the ancient Greek aretē— usually translated as “virtue,” but more truly meaning:
excellence, maturity, fulfilment, the full realisation of a being’s potential
Aretotherapy therefore does not treat life as something to “get through,” but as a process of becoming — one in which our challenges, restraints, and losses are not merely interruptions, but training grounds.
The goal is not perfection.
The goal is not comfort.
The goal is the evolution of character and consciousness.
A Process-Oriented Philosophy of the Self
Aretotherapy is grounded in the idea that the self is not a fixed entity but a living development — an unfolding.
This view is found across history, and especially within “process thinkers” who understood that the soul becomes what it becomes through time, struggle, reflection, and transformation.
In Aretotherapy, you are invited into a lived encounter with this lineage — a perspective shared (in different forms) by thinkers such as:
Heraclitus, Socrates, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, Spinoza, William James, and A. N. Whitehead, among many others.
Across their differences, these thinkers share a common intuition:
that human beings are forming beings — beings shaped by what they meet, and by how they relate to what they meet.
Aretotherapy offers a space for this process to be consciously participated in — so that you are not merely carried by life, but become a collaborator with it.
Who I Am: Courtney Shipley
I’m Courtney Shipley, a client-centred process psychotherapist and the founder of Aretotherapy.
My work is grounded in a deep respect for persons — not as “patients,” but as living beings with:
- inner wisdom
- adaptive capacities
- an inherent striving toward meaning and integration
- and the right to be the author of their own development
I believe you are the expert of your own life.
Therapy, to me, is not the therapist imposing answers — it is an encounter where we learn to listen more deeply to what is already present in you.
At the same time, Aretotherapy is not vague, passive, or merely supportive. It recognises that human beings also need something else:
a rational and emotional scaffolding — tested and refined over millennia — that helps us interpret life clearly, endure hardship nobly, and direct ourselves wisely.
Ancient philosophical schools were not simply abstract theory. They were systems of psychological training, designed to help individuals develop clarity, courage, self-governance, and peace of mind.
Aretotherapy restores this original spirit — and integrates it with modern therapeutic science.
How Aretotherapy Works (As Psychotherapy)
1) Therapy isn’t magic words — it’s gradual scaffolding
Aretotherapy does not assume that change occurs because a therapist says something clever, or because a technique is “applied correctly.”
Words and techniques can help — but they are not the cause of transformation.
Change happens because therapy participates in a longer process:
the gradual building of rational scaffolding
…a philosophical structure that repeatedly reminds the person:
This is a process. You are becoming. This experience is shaping you.
In this framework, therapy becomes less like “repair” and more like education of the soul — an orientation toward reality that strengthens the person over time.
2) You feel seen and supported while life trains you
Aretotherapy offers deep emotional support — but not as a substitute for your capacities.
Rather, it aims to help you experience something more empowering:
- that your struggles are real and human
- that you are not alone
- and that you are already developing capacities through your encounter with life
Obstacles become intelligible as restraints that refine us.
Many people suffer not only because of hardship, but because hardship feels meaningless. Aretotherapy aims to restore meaning, intelligibility, and inner direction — so the person can meet life with increasing trust in themselves.
3) The therapist helps when your own resources don’t feel enough
There are moments when a person truly feels:
- overwhelmed
- stagnant
- bitter
- defeated
- incapable
- or unable to see the next step
This is where my role becomes most active.
Aretotherapy integrates modern therapeutic skill — including CBT and MI — so that we can work with:
- limiting beliefs and self-defeating interpretations
- inner conflict and ambivalence
- avoidance patterns
- low agency and learned helplessness
- emotional dysregulation
- values-confusion and loss of meaning
CBT provides clarity and behavioural traction.
MI provides a respectful, autonomy-supporting way of drawing out your own motivation and wisdom.
But these are used in service of a larger purpose:
helping you attune to your organismic striving for enhancement,
and connecting your personal transformation to the oldest traditions of self-knowledge.
A Modern Innovation — and an Ancient Path
By modern standards, Aretotherapy is innovative because it takes seriously what many modern approaches neglect:
- the existential dimension
- the spiritual and philosophical dimension
- and the developmental dimension of the self
But by ancient standards, it is simply a continuation of a tradition once considered essential:
philosophy as the care of the soul.
It is psychotherapy in the deepest sense — not merely helping you cope, but helping you become.
An Invitation
If you feel that the deepest task of life is not merely to be comfortable, but to become strong, wise, and whole — Aretotherapy may be for you.
This work is for those who want their life to make sense as a process of transformation.
As Socrates famously said:
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Aretotherapy is an invitation to examination — not as intellectual performance, but as a lived turning toward reality, so that life itself becomes the ground of your development
