Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) encourages people to embrace their thoughts and feelings rather than fighting or feeling guilty for them. It is a type of therapy that aims to help people accept what is out of their control and commit to actions that enrichen their lives. ACT incorporates mindfulness skills to help individuals live and behave in ways consistent with personal values while developing psychological flexibility.
Art Based Therapeutic Work
Art based therapeutic work invites the participant to use the process of creating tangible art pieces with clear clinical intent, a less verbal or cognitive method of expression. Sometimes things that are difficult to grasp or explain in words can emerge or be uncovered through non-verbal means. Through this approach one can bridge levels of consciousness in a way that greatly informs the therapeutic process.
Brainspotting (BSP)
Brainspotting (BSP) is a powerful, focused treatment method that begins by identifying, processing and releasing core neurophysiological sources of distress. Emotional and body pain, the effects of trauma, dissociation and a variety of other challenging symptoms are held deeply in the non-verbal, non-cognitive areas of one’s neurophysiology. BSP uses bilateral sound and fixed eye positions to enhance deep, direct and powerful healing. The therapist helps the client locate internal resources to contain emotional reactions. BSP is especially applicable for treating trauma. People typically respond to traumatic experiences through primitive flight, fight or freeze instincts. BSP allows clients to significantly reduce and eliminate the tension and hyper-arousal associated with these survival instincts. Clients can look forward to integrating healing on emotional, somatic, psychological, and spiritual levels.
More information at https://brainspotting.com
Breath Work
Breath Work helps a person feels calm and focused by attuning to their body sensations and awareness. It is often combined with other approaches and techniques to buffer the distress and intense emotional experience that may accompany healing.
Buddhist Informed Therapy
This mode of therapy has aspects of conventional psychotherapy, coaching with traditional Buddhist philosophy. Buddhist psychology helps us to refrain from ways of thinking and behaving that create unnecessary suffering.
Child Centered Play Therapy
Child Centered Play Therapy is rooted in the research and studies of Gary Landreth, Ed.D., LPC, RPT-S among other notable Play Therapy theorists. The approach is focused on building a relationship at a child’s comfort level and pace of trust. This approach uses the basis of “A child’s play is their core and basic level of communication and toys are their words to use.”
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a type of talking treatment, which focuses on how your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes affect your feelings and behavior, and teaches you coping skills for dealing with different problems. It combines cognitive therapy (examining the things you think) and behavior therapy (examining the things you do). CBT is based on the idea that the way we think about situations can affect the way we feel and behave.
Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS)
Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) is an evidence based practice that calms behavior challenges, opens up new pathways of thinking, and builds the skills to meet expectations. Helping your family member improve areas like frustration tolerance, flexibility and problem solving can improve the relationships regardless of age.
Contemplative Dialogue
Contemplative Dialogue involves deeply engaged and reflective discussion. While most therapy could potentially be described in this manner, contemplation pays particular attention to a client’s inner process and intuition. Most therapies are focused on the exchange between the mind and behavior. Contemplation seeks to open a holistic, spiritual and transcendent dimension of experience using dyadic exchange. This deepens and expands beyond traditional narrative therapy.
Dream Analysis
Dream Analysis allows the participant to document and examine messages which may be coming to them during expanded sleep states. Together, we reflect upon these messages to see what helpful information might inform the therapeutic healing process.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is based on the discovery that imbalances in the body’s energy system have profound negative effects on one’s emotional well-being. Correcting these imbalances, which is done by tapping on meridian points on various parts of the body, often leads to rapid relief.
Energy Healing (Reiki and other modalities)
Energy healing is a holistic practice that activates the body’s subtle energy systems to remove blocks. By breaking through these energetic blocks, the body’s inherent ability to heal itself is stimulated.
The term “reiki” comes from the Japanese words “rei,” meaning universal, and “ki,” which means vital life force energy that flows through all living things. Some practitioners describe reiki as acupuncture without the needles.
Reiki is a complementary health approach in which practitioners place their hands on or just above different areas of the body. It’s based on an Eastern medicine belief that living beings have energy fields that support their health and vitality.
Energy blocks, on the other hand, impede innate flow of energy, causing not only health problems, but also negative life circumstances like financial troubles or relationship problems. Reiki practitioners focus on sensing energy blocks and moving the energy for the greatest good of the client.
Experiential Therapy
Experiential Therapy involves a wide range of activity based work. Often there is movement involved and can be done indoors and out. Engaging through experience rather than only talking can reduce resistance and provide participants a “ground up” sense of safety and awareness of internal physical responses to stress.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes.
EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Using the detailed protocols and procedures learned in EMDR therapy training sessions, clinicians help clients activate their natural healing processes.
More information at https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
Filial Therapy
This focused and manualized approach uses a Child-Parent Relationship Therapy model. This modality builds on Child Centered Play Therapy and presents it in a parent-friendly model and adapts core Play Therapy elements and delivers them in a way for parents to use. A common experience for participants is to experience not only increased parental confidence, but ultimately a stronger Child-Parent relationship.
Hakomi Method
The Hakomi Method of Experiential Psychotherapy, a body-centered approach that combines somatic awareness with experiential techniques to promote psychological growth and transformation. Hakomi theory holds the body to be a window to the unconscious and works to help those in therapy identify somatic indicators of unconscious beliefs and then bring these indicators into awareness, thus aiding the process of change.
HeartMath™ emWaveII
HeartMath™ emWaveII devices monitor heart wave variability to assist clients in awareness of internal states of emotional dysregulation. Using this device can help in learning awareness of internal feelings of safety and assess interaction in practicing relationship.
Hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy involves using imagery, breathing, guided visualization and focused attention. This induces suggestibility and openness, and facilitates desired change. Hypnotherapy can have a profound and lasting positive impact on behavior and perspectives. Hypnotherapy has been an effective tool for many issues including pain management, anxiety, sleep difficulties, smoking cessation, weight management and addiction. It offers a powerful alternative to medication alone.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an approach that identifies, addresses and validates 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.
Mindfulness Based Meditation
Mindfulness Based Meditation is the practice of increasing awareness by bringing one’s complete attention without judgment to the present experience on a moment-to-moment basis. Formal and informal meditation are often associated with the practice of mindfulness. This promotes a relaxed, focused and clear state of mind. Mindfulness practice is an effective intervention for trauma, attention difficulties, depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, impulse control, and numerous other issues.
Non-Monogamy/Kink Informed Therapy
This mode of therapy presents a unique look at traditional and non-traditional relationship systems and uses supportive techniques to give space to create a relationship system that fits those involved. This style of therapy focuses on autonomy and choosing a style of relationship system that benefits all partners involved. It may also include increased education and assistance for those transitioning from more traditional relationships to more creative and collaborative relationship styles.
Polyvagal Theory
We come into the world wired to connect. With our first breath, we embark on a lifelong quest to feel safe in our bodies, in our environments and in our relationships with others. The autonomic nervous system is our personal surveillance system, always on guard, asking the question “Is this safe?” Its goal is to protect us by sensing safety and risk, listening moment by moment to what is happening in and around our bodies and in the connections we have with others.
This listening happens far below awareness and far away from our conscious control. Dr. Stephen Porges, who first researched PVT coined the term neuroception to describe the way our autonomic nervous system scans for cues of safety, danger, and life-threat without involving the thinking parts of our brain. Because we humans are meaning-making beings, what begins as the wordlesss experiencing of neuroception drives the creation of a story that shapes our daily living.
– Deb Dana from “The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy”
Problem Solving Therapy
Problem solving therapy is a form of therapy that provides clients with tools to identify and solve problem that arise from life stressors. Problem solving therapy is very practical in its approach and is concerned with the present. This orientation embraces self-efficacy and accepts the idea that problems are a normal part of life.
Psychedelic Integration/Harm Reduction
Psychedelics assist in giving us a glimpse into the unconscious mind. With the assistance of talk therapy these medicines help us work through and examine emotions in a safe and freeing environment. Psychedelic Integration (& Preparation) Therapy involves preparing for an upcoming journey/ceremony/healing experience with a plant medicine or psychedelic medicine, and/or processing a psychedelic experience in a therapeutic context afterwards. Harm reduction comes as a part of the education of plant medicine or psychedelic so that the participant is coming into the experience with full consent and understanding of what to look for in case help is needed. It is through a healer or clinician that we can gain tools and understandings to have the experience the medicine is offering to humanity.
Sandtray
Sandtray is a powerful, non-verbal, therapeutic technique that facilitates one’s natural capacity for healing. Sandtray uses objects and figures placed in a sandtray to create scenes of miniature worlds that reflects a person’s inner thoughts, struggles and concerns. By moving the miniatures in response to a given prompt, new insights and clarity help the client overcome their struggles.
Solution Focused Therapy
Solution Focused Therapy is a goal-focused, respectful collaborative, therapeutic approach, which helps clients change by constructing solutions rather than focusing on problems. In the most basic sense, it is a hope friendly, positive emotion eliciting, and future-oriented vehicle for formulating, motivating, achieving, and sustaining desired change. Therapist and client carefully search through the client’s life experience and behavioral repertoire to discover the necessary resources needed to co-construct a practical and sustainable solution that the client can readily implement.
Somatic Experience (SE)
Somatic Experience (SE), “pioneered by biological physicist and psychologist Peter Levine, Ph.D., is an approach that uses internal body awareness and kinesthetic sense” (Naparstek B., Invisible Heroes) to gradually move past the parts of traumatic experience that feel stuck in the body. Trauma is often experienced as a frozen event in one’s body that will be repeated through time. Through an imagined oasis of calm and safety, the person is able to gradually dispel the traumatic reaction through responses the body wishes to make that were unavailable during the original traumatic event.
Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT)
Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT) uses a gentle acupressure pose near the bridge of the nose, gentle pressure on the occipital area at the back of the head, and stimulation of the sixth chakra point to effect a positive change. The client focuses on a particular problem, emotion, image or sensation during this pose.
Trauma Informed Therapy
Trauma Informed Therapy is a framework for understanding the impact of trauma on the mind, body and overall well-being. Specific attention and respect is given to the detrimental effects of trauma on health, relationships, thinking and behavior. Treatment serves to clear traumatic residue which often persists long after the traumatic situation or event.