Compassionate Healing for Trauma and Relationships

Cognitive-behavioral therapy 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.

Culturally sensitive therapists provide therapy that is culturally sensitive. They understand that people from different backgrounds have different values, practices, and beliefs, and are sensitive to those differences when working with individuals and families in therapy.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is the treatment most closely associated with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). 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 associated with BPD.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an information processing therapy that helps clients cope with trauma, addictions, and phobias. During this treatment, the patient focuses on a specific thought, image, emotion, or sensation while simultaneously watching the therapist's finger or baton move in front of his or her eyes. The client is told to recognize what comes up for him/her when thinking of an image; then the client is told to let it go while doing bilateral stimulation. It's like being on a train; an emotion or a thought may come up and the client lets it pass as though they were looking out the window of the moving train.

Family Systems 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 own language, roles, rules, beliefs, needs and patterns. The therapist helps each individual member understand how their childhood family operated, their role in that system, and how that experience has shaped their role in the current family. Therapists with the MFT credential are usually trained in Family Systems therapy.

The Gottman Theory For Making Relationships Work shows that to make a relationship last, couples must become better friends, learn 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.

Imago Relationship Therapy is a form of marriage therapy that takes a relationship approach rather than an individual approach to problem solving in a marriage. Imago therapy is a wonderfully effective and safe approach to helping relationship partners grow into understanding each other more fully and relating more honestly as they evolve into greater wholeness as individuals within the relational context they share. Imago is also relevant for single individuals as we are all in many relational contexts.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) 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.

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a method of therapy that works to engage the motivation of clients to change their behavior. Clients are encouraged to explore and confront their ambivalence. Therapists attempt to influence their clients to consider making changes, rather than non-directively explore themselves. Motivational Interviewing is frequently used in cases of problem drinking or mild addictions.

Unlike traditional psychology that focuses more on the causes and symptoms of mental illnesses and emotional disturbances, positive psychology 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.

Psychodynamic therapy, also known as insight-oriented therapy, evolved from Freudian psychoanalysis. Like adherents of psychoanalysis, psychodynamic therapists believe that bringing the unconscious into conscious awareness promotes insight and resolves conflict. But psychodynamic therapy is briefer and less intensive than psychoanalysis and also focuses on the relationship between the therapist and the client, as a way to learn about how the client relates to everyone in their life.

Solution-focused therapy, sometimes called "brief therapy," focuses on what clients would like to achieve through therapy rather than on their troubles or mental health issues. 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.

Trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) helps people who may be experiencing post-traumatic stress after a traumatic event to return to a healthy state.