Shaun Martin

Personal Experience & Biography

We live in a complex and overwhelming time in human history where many of us feel deeply alienated from and disillusioned with the current state of our world. My personal calling to this work stems from a lifelong striving to better understand the pain that permeates the human condition and the inner workings of our psychosomatic and emotional suffering that I feel at their root are of a spiritual nature. My psychotherapeutic approach is to infuse every therapeutic relationship with greater contact between our individual consciousnesses and personal wounds to the macro-level fragmentation of the collective human soul. My undergraduate training is in behavioral science; I have a master’s degree in transpersonal psychology with a focus in consciousness studies, as well as a master’s degree in clinical social work. I am also training to become a Jungian Analyst under the guidance of my mentor from the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts.

My primary interests lie in the origins and spiritual implications of the widespread, ever intensifying issues related to mental health in our local and global communities utilizing an eclectic approach that incorporates various schools of modern thought and ancient wisdom, including areas such as ayurvedic understandings around vitality and Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic work that highlights uncharted territories within human development. My focus is on the integration of unconscious contents to support the development of personality structures, the somatic reconfiguration of dysregulated/traumatized nervous systems, and expanding culturally rigid perspectives to identify the messages and insights hidden in our neuroses to move through our most self-destructive, not to mention collectively destructive tendencies, perceptions, misunderstandings, and subconscious projections. I feel there are a variety of factors contributing to the growing mental health crises in modern society starting with a general lack of meaning, an inability to distinguish between conventional markers of success from genuine fulfillment, an infantile cosmological context, and the onslaught of toxic propaganda we regularly receive from an acutely capitalistic, exploitative, cold-hearted, and meritocratic value system that is generating this alienation of human beings from nature inner and outer. We are force fed an almost perpetual overemphasis on curating a superficial, surface-level persona that can falsify and degrade our most intimate relationship with ourselves and our relationships with others, all to navigate our sometimes soulless society.

I look forward to working with those of you who resonate with this therapeutic style and seek to live in greater alignment and congruence with your deepest values; values that may have become lost in translation while trying to survive in our chaotic world. Together we will explore what our hearts may be desperately calling us to finally confront and honor within ourselves despite being buried underneath a sleuth of coping mechanisms and harmful inheritances while building a healthier, better connected, and more meaningful life.