Integrating Mind & Body
PSYCHOTHERAPY CLINICAL APPROACHES
Wellness at Your Fingertips
MINDFULNESS BASED THERAPY
Mindfulness brings full awareness into the present moment. Many times we are living our life on an unconscious hamster wheel that has us acting on auto pilot as we move about the habits of our daily lives. In this space we are not fully living in our conscious bodies and minds maximizing every moment in a present state of awareness that allows for positive change and awakening into our lives. Life just passes us by. This approach embodies both mind and body living to promote total life wellness and joy.
STRENGTH BASED THERAPY
Strength based therapy utilizes a client’s strengths and internal intuitive self to break out of unhealthy, unproductive patterns and move forward to achieving their goals. Instead of focusing on the presenting problems and feeling like a victim, strength based therapy focuses on previous successes and uses these alternatives to empower you as the individual to realize your own self-efficacy. This approach focuses on finding the positive in any situation and how you can reframe your story into one of being a survivor. This model fosters hope as it takes energy away from the ruminating of “all that is wrong” and instead begins to utilize positive energy to break out of unhealthy patterns and look for what went right in a given scenario. In this approach the therapist acts more as a guide and allows the power differential to be lessened in the forming of the therapeutic bond.
SOLUTION FOCUSED THERAPY
Solution Focused Therapy invites clients to make progress through the discussion of their preferred futures. Creating a vision for what is the hope for their future selves allows clients to begin to feel empowered to move out of their problem laden past and seek an alternative future. Once the larger vision is realized, the therapist hopes to coach the individual on forming the short-term achievable goals or stepping stones towards achieving this larger vision. These goals are small, achievable steps that allow self-confidence, self-acceptance and positive life balance to improve as empowerment increases. Instead of clients trying to analyze how they’ve got the life they have, the work focuses on redirecting the energy into getting the life they want. This tends to be a brief therapy model and works in the present tense to support a more directive approach that puts the client in charge of pushing forward into their true vision of their hopes and dreams.
COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (CBT)
Cognitive theory is based on the common sense model of the relationship among cognition, behavior and emotion in human functioning. This premise focuses on the internal healthy or unhealthy perceptions we hold as truths and how they affect our relationships to our selves and others. Three aspects of cognitions are emphasized: automatic thoughts, underlying assumptions, and cognitive distortions. The therapist is seen within this theory as a collaborator. We will utilize this model to help you recognize the cognitions and other factors that cause problems for you, utilize reality testing to determine if your automatic thoughts are based in fact or you are “catastrophizing” your thinking. This type of thinking leads to black/white beliefs, all or nothing feelings, and personal judgments about our selves as being perfect or absolute failures. Within this model, we will identify and correct distortions within our automatic belief systems about who we are and who we “should” be according to our internal judgments. This model recognizes that we are our own worst enemy at times as we judge, criticize and internally cut our selves down as we challenge the distortion around what is “good enough”.
