Heal Trauma and Find Your Authentic Self

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

Supervision services are offered by qualified practitioners who provide feedback and expertise for less experienced professionals. While each state and licensing board has its own unique requirements, professionals offering supervision play a key role in helping new practitioners advance their clinical knowledge, as well as satisfy requirements leading to licensure.

Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) may assist individuals who struggle with mood disorders, anxiety, or feelings of shame and self-criticism, often stemming from early experiences of abuse or neglect. Through exercises like role-playing, visualization, meditation, and activities that promote gratitude for everyday life, CFT teaches clients about the mind-body connection and guides them in practicing awareness of their thoughts and bodily sensations. This helps clients cultivate self-compassion and compassion for others, which can help regulate their emotions and foster a sense of safety, self-acceptance, and comfort.

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.

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.

Experiential therapy is a therapeutic technique that uses expressive tools and activities, such as role-playing or acting, props, arts and crafts, music, animal care, guided imagery, or various forms of recreation to re-enact and re-experience emotional situations from past and recent relationships. The client focuses on the activities and, through the experience, begins to identify emotions associated with success, disappointment, responsibility, and self-esteem. Under the guidance of a trained experiential therapist, the client can begin to release and explore negative feelings of anger, hurt, or shame as they relate to past experiences that may have been blocked or still linger.

Family and Marital therapists work with families or couples both together and individually to help them improve their communication skills, build on the positive aspects of their relationships, and repair the harmful or negative aspects.

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.

Feminist therapy is an integrative approach to psychotherapy that focuses on gender and the particular challenges and stressors that women face as a result of bias, stereotyping, oppression, discrimination, and other factors that threaten their mental health. The therapeutic relationship, based on an authentic connection and equality between the therapist and the client, helps empower clients understand the social factors that contribute to their issues, discover and claim their unique identity, and build on personal strengths to better their own lives and that of others.

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.

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.

Multicultural awareness is an understanding and sensitivity of the values, experiences, and lifestyles of minority groups. Differences in race, culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, are all tackled by Multicultural counseling. In the counseling setting, the counselor recognizes that the client is different from the counselor and treats the client without forcing the client to be like him or her.

Narrative Therapy uses the client's storytelling to indicate the way they construct meaning in their lives, rather than focusing on how they communicate their problem behaviors. Narrative Therapy embraces the idea that stories actually 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 expert.

Generally for children ages 3 to 11, play therapy is a form of counseling that relies on play to help therapists communicate with children and understand their mental health. Because children develop cognitive skills before language skills, play is an effective way to understand a child. The therapist may observe a child playing with toys--such as playhouses and dolls--to understand the child's behavior and identify issues.

Relational life therapy offers strategies to combat marital dysfunction and restore harmony in relationships. Couples--those recovering from affairs, traumatic events, or a lull in passion--can find RLT helpful. To repair discord, the therapist identifies the main conflict upsetting the couples' emotional intimacy. Once the partners see how they both contribute to the problem, the therapist teaches them skills to improve the ways they relate to each other. Couples may see a change in their relationship within three to six months.

Sandplay therapy establishes a safe and protected space, where the complexities of the client's inner world can be explored. Often young children, clients place miniature figurines in a small sandbox to express confusing feelings and inner experiences. This creates a visual representation of the client's thoughts and feelings and can reveal unconscious concerns that are inaccessible. The therapist does not interpret, interfere with, or direct the client's sand play but maintains an attitude of receptivity and acceptance, so the client can bring unconscious material into consciousness without censure.

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.

Strength-based therapy is a type of positive psychotherapy and counseling that focuses more on your internal strengths and resourcefulness, and less on weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings. This focus sets up a positive mindset that helps you build on you best qualities, find your strengths, improve resilience and change worldview to one that is more positive. A positive attitude, in turn, can help your expectations of yourself and others become more reasonable.

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.