Her path is a singular one: it begins on the side of scientific research, in the study of the brain, emotions, stress and trauma, before gradually moving towards clinical practice. This passage from neuroscience to psychotherapy is no mere change of career. It speaks, rather, to a fundamental question: how do we understand human functioning without losing sight of people’s real suffering?

At the heart of this interview, Stéphanie Khalfa offers a very powerful sentence:

That sentence runs through the whole episode. It says something about her commitment, about her way of thinking about care, but also about her exacting standards: help quickly, help well, help without needlessly adding pain.

From EMDR to mosaic therapy

Stéphanie Khalfa looks back at length on her encounter with EMDR, notably through the work and teaching of David Servan-Schreiber. At the time, bilateral stimulation and eye movements still met with a great deal of scepticism in the medical world. Yet her research and her clinical experience would gradually show her the value of these mechanisms in treating stress and trauma.

Drawing on her research, her practice and her training in brief therapies, hypnosis, and solution-focused and strategic approaches, she would gradually turn the usual logic on its head. Where EMDR starts from the problem, from the traumatic memory or the emotional charge to be desensitised, Stéphanie Khalfa imagines another route: starting from the solution.

It is in this reversal that mosaic therapy is born. The central idea is at once simple and deeply clinical: rather than forcing the person to plunge back into what hurts, why not first mobilise their resources, their skills, their sensations of safety, their experiences of solution? In other words, build a therapeutic path that is not organised solely around suffering, but also around what already makes it possible to move beyond it.

A therapist between science, humanity and creativity

What is striking in this interview is the way Stéphanie Khalfa weaves several worlds together. There is in her a scientific rigour that comes from neuroscience, but also close attention to the relationship, to subjective experience and to the therapist’s stance.

She mentions several important influences in her journey:

• Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication;
• Richard Schwartz’s IFS;
• strategic approaches;
• solution-focused therapies;
• a more existential and spiritual dimension around the meaning of human experience.

Her therapeutic style seems marked by clarity, humour, speed, reframing and a form of clinical optimism. Not a naive optimism, but a capacity to see, sometimes before the patient does, that a way out is possible.

In the episode, she also talks about what personal life transforms in therapeutic practice. Hardships, relationships, wounds, parenthood, moments of crisis: none of this is separate from the profession. On the contrary, it can at times deepen one’s understanding of human suffering.

What young therapists can take away

One of the important passages in the interview concerns the advice she offers therapists in training or at the start of their practice. For Stéphanie Khalfa, working on oneself is indispensable. You cannot accompany others without having encountered your own vulnerabilities, limits, areas of pain and resources.

This episode is therefore at once the story of a journey, a reflection on trauma, an introduction to mosaic therapy and an invitation to think differently about the therapeutic stance.

• How do you relieve suffering without locking the person inside their problem?
• How do you bring neuroscience and psychotherapy together?
• How do you keep hope alive in the face of complex situations?

So many questions that this conversation with Stéphanie Khalfa allows us to explore in depth.

You can find the full interview in this new episode of Confidence de thérapeute.