About

Psychotherapy is not a menu of techniques. It is a set of living arguments about what suffering is, where it lives in the body, how it gets transmitted between people, and what it takes to change. Every modality carries these arguments — usually without stating them.

Epoché Clinical makes those arguments visible. Each of the 151 modality pages documents not just what an approach does but what it assumes — about the nature of the problem, the role of the therapist, the mechanism of change, and the philosophical lineage that makes those assumptions feel self-evident to people trained in that tradition. Where the evidence is strong, we say so. Where it's weak, we say that too. Where the founders have faced legitimate ethical criticism, that's documented with sources.

Most clinical training teaches technique without philosophy. A student learns EMDR and CBT as separate methods without understanding that they rest on fundamentally different accounts of what memory does, what the body knows, and what change requires. A therapist trained in IFS and a therapist trained in behavioral activation are not just using different tools — they are operating from different ontologies. This site exists because that gap matters, and because understanding it makes you a better clinician.

What's Here

151 therapeutic modalities with mechanisms, evidence, training requirements, blind spots, contraindications, controversies, and philosophical roots. 102 philosophers and theorists whose ideas shape clinical practice. 22 conditions with treatments ranked by evidence tier. 22 clinical vignettes showing how different modalities formulate the same case. Interactive tools for comparing modalities, screening client fit, studying concepts, and identifying your own clinical orientation. A training directory with costs, hours, and certification requirements. Everything cross-referenced. Everything cited.

About the Author

Matthew Sorg is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) and EMDRIA Certified Therapist practicing on Capitol Hill in Seattle. He holds an MA in Existential-Phenomenological Psychology and a Master of Library and Information Science — a combination that shapes both the clinical orientation of his work and the information architecture of this site.

His private practice, Epoché Psychotherapy, specializes in trauma therapy for adults, using EMDR, Brainspotting, Flash Technique, and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP), grounded in an existential-phenomenological orientation. Before training as a therapist, he spent a decade in scholarly publishing and information architecture.

A Note on the Name

Epoché (ἐποχή) is the phenomenological practice of suspending what you think you know — bracketing assumptions, theories, and prior interpretations — in order to attend to what is actually present. It is a useful discipline in philosophy. It is an essential one in clinical work. The name reflects what this site asks of its readers: before you commit to a modality, understand what it assumes. Before you dismiss an approach, understand what it sees that yours might not.