ABSTRACT
Age regression is a common occurrence in everyday life. We have all experienced moments of high emotion or stress in which we found ourselves thinking, feeling, and acting as we did in earlier stages of our development. Psychotherapy, as it focuses on affect, on development, and on phenomenological experience, can create such moments for the client, and it is not surprising that age regression occurs during psychotherapy. Integrative psychotherapists utilize such regressions in two major ways: diagnostically, as another indicator of the nature of contact and relational disruptions and the strategies that the client has developed to deal with such disruptions; and therapeutically, as a way to access and work with the traumatized or split-off parts of the self in order to facilitate growth.
