Treatment Descriptions

Strategies that improve couples relationship, through enhancing better friendships, learner to manage conflict, and create ways to support each other's hopes for the future. Drs. John and Julie Gottman have shown how couples can accomplish this by paying attention to what they call the Sound Relationship House, or the seven components of healthy relationships.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories (Shapiro, 1989a, 1989b)

EMDR therapy facilitates the accessing and processing of traumatic memories and other adverse life experiences to bring these to an adaptive resolution. After a successful treatment, affective distress is relieved, negative beliefs are reformulated, and physiological arousal is reduced.

During EMDR therapy, the client attends to emotionally disturbing material in brief sequential doses while simultaneously focusing on an external stimulus. The therapist directed bilateral stimulation i.e. eye movements, hand pulsar or audio stimulation (Shapiro, 1991).

EMDR therapy uses a three-pronged protocol.

1) Dysfunction past events are processed, forging new associative links with healthy adaptive information.

2) Current internal and external triggers that elicit distress are targeted and desensitized.

3) Future events are incorporated, with healthy cognitions to assist in acquiring the skills needed for the future.

Stresses the role of thinking in how we feel and what we do. It is based on the belief that thoughts, rather than people or events, cause our negative feelings. The therapist assists the client in identifying, testing the reality of, and correcting dysfunctional beliefs underlying his or her thinking. The therapist then helps the client modify those thoughts and the behaviors that flow from them. CBT is a structured collaboration between therapist and client and often calls for homework assignments. CBT has been clinically proven to help clients in a relatively short amount of time with a wide range of disorders, including depression and anxiety.

Is the treatment most closely associated with borderline personality disorder (BPD) but has also been shown effective for anxiety and depression. Therapists practice DBT in both individual and group sessions. The therapy combines elements of CBT to help with regulating emotion through distress tolerance and mindfulness. The goal of Dialectical Behavior Therapy is to alleviate the intense emotional pain.

Thorough the client's sharing their life's story the therapist supports the client in understanding how they construct meaning in their lives, rather than focusing on how they communicate their problem behaviors. Narrative Therapy embraces the idea that stories shape our behaviors and our lives and that we become the stories we tell about ourselves. There are helpful narratives we can choose to embrace as well as unhelpful ones. Although it may sound obvious, the power of storytelling is to elevate the client who is the authority of their narrative rather than the therapist, as the expert.

This uses a non-authoritative approach allowing clients to take a lead in the discussions so that, in the process, they will discover their solutions. The therapist acts as a compassionate facilitator, listening without judgment and acknowledging the client's experience without moving the conversation in another direction. The therapist is there to encourage and support the client and to guide the therapeutic process without interrupting or interfering with the client's process of self-discovery.

This is sometimes called "brief therapy" because it focuses on what clients would like to achieve through therapy. The therapist will help the client envision a desirable future, and then map out the small and large changes necessary for the client to undergo to realize their vision. The therapist will seize on any successes the client experiences, to encourage them to build on their strengths rather than dwell on their problems or limitations.

This approach emphasizes traits, thinking patterns, behaviors, and experiences that are forward-thinking and can help improve the quality of a person's day-to-day life. These may include optimism, spirituality, hopefulness, happiness, creativity, perseverance, justice, and the practice of free will. It is an exploration of one's strengths, rather than one's weaknesses. The goal of positive psychology is not to replace those traditional forms of therapy that center on negative experiences, but instead to expand and give more balance to the therapeutic process.

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Is an approach to therapy that helps clients identify their emotions, learn to explore and experience them, understand them, and then manage them. EFT embraces the idea that emotions can be changed, first by arriving at or 'living' the maladaptive emotion (e.g. loss, fear, or shame) in session, and then learning to transform it. EFT for couples seeks to break the negative emotion cycles within relationships, emphasizing the importance of the attachment bond between couples, and how nurturing the attachment bonds and an empathetic understanding of each other's emotions can break the cycles.

Therapists view problems within the family as the result not of particular members' behaviors, but of the family's group dynamic. The family is seen as a complex system having its language, roles, rules, beliefs, needs, and patterns. The therapist helps each member understand how their childhood family operated, their role in that system, and how that experience has shaped their role in the current family.

Is an approach to psychotherapy that identifies and addresses multiple sub-personalities or families within each person’s mental system. These sub-personalities consist of wounded parts and painful emotions such as anger and shame, and parts that try to control and protect the person from the pain of the wounded parts. The sub-personalities are often in conflict with each other and with one’s core Self, a concept that describes the confident, compassionate, whole person that is at the core of every individual. IFS focuses on healing the wounded parts and restoring mental balance and harmony by changing the dynamics that create discord among the sub-personalities and the self.

This modality can be integrated into EMDR.

Is a form of therapy that applies to interventions or approaches based on attachment theory, which explains how the relationship a parent has with their child influences development.

Seeks to integrate the client's behaviors, feelings, and thinking, so that their intentions and actions may be aligned for optimal mental health. The therapist will help the client become more self-aware, live more in the present, and assume more responsibility for taking care of themself. Techniques of gestalt therapy include confrontation, dream analysis, and role-playing.

Life coaches focus on helping individuals realize their goals in work and life and do not address any mental illness that many be a contributing factor. An executive coach, for example, may be enlisted to help a chief executive become a better manager, while a "love" coach may map out a plan to help a client find romantic fulfillment. Life coaching is unregulated