Anger Management
Anger management therapy provides relief to the person struggling with anger issues, as well as those around them. Having uncontrollable anger can create harmful psychological and physical conditions. By reducing and controlling anger, an individual can reduce their stress and significantly lower their risk for serious health problems, including heart disease and high blood pressure, among others. The goal of anger management therapy is to teach an individual how to accurately examine their triggers and their perceptions of situations, and learn healthy, constructive ways in which to express their anger and frustrations.
Art Therapy
Art therapists have a comprehensive understanding of the powerful healing effect that the creative process has on the client, and they use psychological, spiritual, and artistic theories coupled with clinical techniques to achieve the desired outcome. Valuation tools and treatment methods are guided by artistic principals, and clinicians share these findings cooperatively with other treating professionals. Art therapists work with individuals as well as groups, families, and communities to improve the awareness of clients' own emotional states.
Client-Directed Outcome-Informed Therapy
This innovative and simple technique involves posing a series of questions to a client, both before and after a therapy session. The emphasis of this therapy is not on the talk therapy processes, but rather the alliance formed between the therapist and client and the client's evaluation of the experience as a compass for further treatment techniques.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
is a short-term, problem-focused form of behavioral treatment that helps people see the relationship between beliefs, thoughts, and feelings, and subsequent behavior patterns and actions. Through CBT, people learn that their perceptions directly influence their responses to specific situations. In other words, a person's thought process informs his or her behaviors and actions.
conflict resolution therapy
Conflict resolution therapy incorporates imagery and communication as the primary tools for exploration and conflict resolution. By identifying dysfunctional behaviors and origins of discord, resolutions can be found. Skills are developed that allow participants to unite when facing difficult situations. Rather than combatting one another, members are encouraged to work together to overcome issues that if left untreated, can create feelings of anxiety, depression, or contempt.
In order to eliminate these feelings, a therapist works as a facilitator to help clients discover win-win scenarios.
dialectical behavioral therapy
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is founded on the belief that environmental and biological factors that remain undetermined cause some people to respond to emotional states more quickly, and sustain a heightened emotional affect for an extended period of time before they return to baseline. This discovery gives credence to the symptoms of Bipolar Disorder which include lives fraught with crisis and severely shifting emotional peaks and valleys. DBT helps these people learn coping techniques.
dreamwork
Dreamwork is a general self-help method that can be aided by a therapist and refers to the systematic inquiry into or use of dreams for the purpose of healing or self-development. It is an ancient approach integrated by various practitioners into self-help and psychotherapy methods. Dreamwork strives to examine the many different emotions and images that are elicited from a dream while refraining from identifying one specific purpose or message of the dream. This is one way in which dreamwork approaches therapy from a different perspective than classical dream interpretation. By leaving the meaning of the dream unnamed, it gives it the ability to continue living. This provides the opportunity for the clinician and client to revisit the dream and interpret it on different levels and from different perspectives.
emotion freedom techniques (EFT)
EFT is a revolutionary treatment method that offers healing from physical and emotional pain and disease. Without the use of needles, this form of acupressure uses the fingertips to stimulate energy points on the body. This is an easily mastered technique that can be performed virtually anywhere. This treatment sprang from the idea that, "The cause of all negative emotions is a disruption in the body's energy system."
EFT works by tapping on acupressure meridians to release blockages. When these blockages are released, the problem feeling can be released and move through the body.
eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR)
Although EMDR was originally designed to treat posttraumatic stress, it can be used to address other adverse life experiences or negative beliefs.
EMDR therapy is an eight-phase approach that identifies and processes memories of negative and traumatic events that contribute to present problems. After the person in therapy briefly accesses an unresolved memory, he or she will focus on external stimulus delivered by the therapist. These cues can include eye movement, taps, or tones. During each set of bilateral stimulus, or dual attention, new associations emerge in the form of insights, other memories, and new emotions. After each set, the client briefly reports what emerged in consciousness and the next focus of attention is identified for processing. The processing targets during EMDR therapy include past events, current triggers, and future needs.
family systems therapy
Family systems therapy draws on systems thinking to view the family as an emotional unit. When applied to families, systems thinking—evaluating the parts of a system in relation to the whole—suggests that an individual's behavior is informed by and inseparable from the functioning of his or her family of origin.
Gottman Method
Gottman Method is an evidence-based form of couples therapy that strives to assist couples in achieving a deeper sense of understanding, awareness, empathy, and connectedness within their relationships that ultimately leads to heightened intimacy and interpersonal growth. By combining therapeutic interventions with couples exercises, this type of therapy helps couples identify and address the natural defenses that hinder effective communication and bonding.
Guided Therapeutic Imagery
Therapeutic Imagery relies on the client's own ability to access their emotions through a subtle method of relaxation. This allows a person to circumvent the censor called the brain, and focus directly on the issues and belief systems at hand. This form of therapy utilizes imagery, which is recognized by the mind on a subconscious level, to address challenges and obstacles in behavior. Additionally, the use of imagery coerces the physical body to unveil its own restorative and healing powers.
Humanistic Psychology
Humanistic psychology is founded on the belief that moral and ethical values and intentions are the driving forces of our psychological construct and directly determine our human behavior. This value-oriented approach views humans as inherently driven to maximize their creative choices and interactions in order to gain a heightened sense of liberty, awareness, and life-affirming emotions.
Hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy employs the use of hypnosis—an altered state of consciousness caused by little more than the power of suggestion—to help facilitate behavioral and emotional change. A trained hypnotherapist can cause a trancelike state in clients by using auditory, visual, or other perceptual cues. Once the person enters the hypnotic state, he or she is much more suggestible, making it easier to discuss memories, gain insight, and alter behavior.
Journal Therapy
Journal therapy, also referred to as journal writing therapy or simply writing therapy, involves the therapeutic use of journaling exercises and prompts to bring about awareness and improve mental health conditions as a result of inner and outer conflicts. According to the Center for Journal Therapy, it is the "the purposeful and intentional use of reflective writing to further mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health and wellness."
Mindfulness based approaches/contemplative approaches
Mindfulness Based Approaches are designed to deliberately focus one's attention on the present experience in a way that is non-judgmental. Mindfulness has its roots in Eastern techniques, in particular Buddhist meditation. The practice requires that one intentionally directs focus away from states of mind that would otherwise occupy them, such as frightening or worrisome thoughts, and instead observe and accept the present situation and all it has to offer, regardless of whether that is good or bad.
Mindfulness based cognitive therapy
While undergoing this form of therapy, a client is instructed to recognize their sense of being and to see themselves as separate from their thoughts and moods. This disconnect allows a client to become liberated from obsessive thought patterns that often replay the same negative messages over and over. Rather than being forced to live the mood, the client gains an awareness of the separation and begins to understand that they are in the present moment and the mood is actively existing, albeit at the same time, but not in the same dimension. This insight affords the client the opportunity to heal themselves by interjecting positive thoughts and responses to the moods in order to disarm them.
motivational enhancement therapy
MET is commonly used for the treatment of addictions, including abuse of alcohol and other substances. MET is administered in a receptive atmosphere that allows a client to receive feedback from the therapist for the purpose of fortifying the client's resolve for transformation and to empower the client with a feeling of self-control. Rather than engaging the client's defense mechanisms through confrontational discourse, the therapist works with the client to create positive affirmations and a sense of inner willingness to facilitate change. Once that is achieved, the client becomes receptive to the healing process and progresses toward wellness.
music therapy
Music therapy integrates music and all of its elements and delivers it through a therapeutic protocol to provide healing of mind, body, emotion and spirit. Music, by its very nature, embodies creative, emotional, structural and nonverbal language. A trained music therapist uses this technique to initiate contact with the client and to help foster a relationship that will allow the client to gain self-awareness, personal development and self-expression through communication and knowledge.
parent work
Parent Work is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on the parent and their relation to the child. Different from individual adult psychotherapy, this type of therapy provides the parent with the opportunity to explore various themes and determine the effects each has on his or her parenting. By being able to recognize particular "stories," a parent will develop the skills to make the necessary changes to effectually rewrite the story of their parenting.
relational psychotherapy
Relational psychotherapy is the widely accepted term to describe the practice of assessing people's psychic formation--the source of all of their interpersonal relations and conflicts--to ascertain the root of the issues at hand. This form of therapy is broadly recognized and is commonly used by practitioners and clinicians throughout the world. Unlike the traditional view that states that organized drivers and characteristics are the foundation of our psychic structure, relational sychotherapy focuses on connectedness to others.
relationship enhancement therapy
Relationship Enhancement (RE) Therapy is utilized for the individualization of each partner in a couple scenario in which one partner has been diagnosed as having Borderline Personality Disorder. In addition, this method of therapy is useful for teens with mental illness and is often applied as a method of intervention. By reviewing a case study of the client, RE therapy skills, concepts, and techniques are used as an accompaniment to a transcript that outlines RE's potential to transform inter-relational behavior patterns.
self psychology
Self psychology strives to instill in the therapist a profound insight into the basic needs of the client. The relationship is one of empathy and strategies used in this form of therapy address the need of twinship, mirroring, and idealizing. This method developed out of the study of experiences with other people, and that these experience form the identity, self-esteem, and self awareness of the person involved in the experience.
self-acceptance training
Self-Acceptance is achieved when a person can be with himself completely at any point in time without any feelings of inadequacy, judgment, or self-criticism. By experiencing the present moment without regard to emotions such as regret or resentment about the past or anxiety or worry about the future, is to be self-accepting. It occurs only at one moment in time, not continuously. Self-acceptance training teaches a person to become aware and accepting of all of his emotions in order to gather information and understand life experiences and the world around him. True self-acceptance occurs only when a person can experience all of his emotions, good and bad, and realize that they are separate from them. When a person masters the ability to let those feelings go, he or she has achieved a moment of self-acceptance.
solution-focused brief therapy
Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) is goal oriented, targeting the desired outcome of therapy as a solution rather than focusing on the symptoms or issues that brought someone to therapy. This technique emphasizes present and future circumstances and desires over past experiences. The therapist encourages the client to imagine the future that he or she wants and then the therapist and client collaborate on a series of steps to achieve that goal. This form of therapy involves developing a vision of one's future, and then determining what skills, resources, and abilities a person already possesses that can be enhanced in order to attain the desired outcome.
sport/fitness psychology
Sport and fitness psychology focuses on research, theory, and practice intended to improve performance in sport and exercise settings. Researchers in the field attempt to understand how psychological factors affect motor performance and how participation in physical activity affects psychological development. Practitioners are concerned with the effects of social and psychological interventions on the well–being of athletes, teams, coaches, parents, spectators, trainers, exercisers, and participants engaged in physical activities.
Systems theory/therapy
This dynamic and widely recognized form of psychotherapy believes that the family or community is a vital component in its own recovery and to its psychological health. Families, couples, or members of an organization are directly involved in their own therapy in order to resolve the issue, even if it is one of an individual basis. One of the tools used in this type of therapy is communication. Dialogue is constructed in such a way as to facilitate the recognition and development of knowledge, strengths, and support for the entire entity.
