INDIVIDUAL COUNSELING
“We may define therapy as a search for value.” – Abraham Maslow
METHODS & STRATEGIES
Cognitive Behavior for your thoughts
“There are a variety of techniques to help people change the kind of thinking that leads them to become depressed. These techniques are called cognitive behavioral therapy.” – Irving Kirsch
Change occurs by learning to modify dysfunctional thought patterns. Once a patient understands the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, s/he is able to modify or change the patterns of thinking to cope with stressors in a more positive manner.
The therapist is a collaborative teacher who uses structured learning experiences that teach patients to monitor and write down their negative thoughts and mental images. The goal is to recognize how those ideas affect their mood, behavior, and physical condition. • Therapists also teach important coping skills, such as problem solving and scheduling pleasurable experiences. • The therapist creates structured sessions and provides homework for clients to continue to work on problems in-between visits.
Goals • Patients learn to recognize negative patterns of thought, evaluate their validity, and replace them with healthier ways of thinking. • Patients’ symptoms or problems are relieved. • Patients develops positive coping skills and strategies
Automatic Thoughts: Thoughts about ourselves or others that individuals are often not aware of and thus are not assessed for accuracy or relevancy. •
Maladaptive Automatic Thoughts: These are automatic thoughts that are typically centered on negative themes or distorted reflections that are accepted as true.
Anxiety Management Training: Teaches skills for specific situations using imagery. The client practices relaxation until anxiety is reduced then continues with imagery.
Assertiveness Training: Teaches client to specify desires and needs using minimally effective responses to assert their position. Used with unassertive or overly aggressive clients.
Problem-Solving Training: Teaches a step approach of orienting to the problem, problem definition, generation of alternatives, decision making and solution implementation and verification of results
Relaxation Training: Teaches client to relax muscles to condition a relaxation response to counter tension. Uses imagery, music, and other stimuli to assist in acquiring response.
Beginning: Establish safe and supportive therapeutic relationship; Complete a functional analysis to assess and define the problem and negative thought patterns; Educate and explain CBT; Set collaborative goals.
“The first principle of cognitive therapy is that all your moods are created by your ‘cognitions,’ or thoughts. A cognition refers to the way you look at things – your perceptions, mental attitudes, and beliefs. It includes the way you interpret things – what you say about something or someone to yourself.” – David D. Burns
Psychodynamic Theory
Psychodynamic therapy is an approach that involves facilitation a deeper understanding of one's emotions and other mental processes. It works to help people gain greater insight into how they feel and think. By improving this understanding, people can then make better choices about their lives.
"As a child, I was not allowed to express my feelings, so I had to go back through therapy and express the child's pain." - John Bradshaw
Solution Focused Theory
Having trouble with finding solutions to your problems look no more. Change occurs through accessing client’s strengths and resources. Emphasizes finding solutions to a problem, not on discovering the cause or origins of the problem.
Goals • Client implements small and large changes to achieve their preferred future • Client builds on current strengths and resources
Phases of Treatment
Beginning: Join with client competencies; Envision preferred future; begin to identify client’s strengths; use solution-oriented language; come up with achievable goals.
Middle: Identify strengths, resources and traits client already has used to deal with problem; Utilize solution-talk; Identify exceptions to problems; Utilize scaling questions to reflect on the nature of change the client has experienced; Feedback to clients that include compliments and tasks; catch and highlight small changes; compliments / cheerleading.
End: Assist client to identify things they can do to continue the changes they have made; Identify hurdles or perceived barriers that could get in the way of the changes they made.
Play Therapy
Helps children express their emotions through play. A way of being with the child that honors their unique developmental level and looks for ways of helping in the “language” of the child – play. Licensed mental health professionals therapeutically use play to help their clients, most often children ages three to 12 years, to better express themselves and resolve their problems.
Play therapy works best when a safe relationship is created between the therapist and client, one in which the latter may freely and naturally express both what pleases and bothers them.
Mental health agencies, schools, hospitals, and private practitioners have utilized play therapy as a primary intervention or as supportive therapy for:
Behavioral problems, such as anger management, grief and loss, divorce and abandonment, and crisis and trauma.
Behavioral disorders, such as anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity (ADHD), autism or pervasive developmental, academic and social developmental, physical and learning disabilities, and conduct disorders.
Research suggests play therapy is an effective mental health approach, regardless of age, gender, or the nature of the problem, and works best when a parent, family member, or caretaker is actively involved in the treatment process. For more information on play therapy including research citations we invite you to view Play Therapy Makes a Difference!
BOWEN THEORY
Bowen family systems theory was developed by psychiatrist and researcher Dr Murray Bowen (1913–90). It is a theory backed up by a growing body of empirical research.1 In recent years Bowen’s concept of ‘differentiation of self’ — which describes differing levels of maturity in relationships — has been shown by researchers to be related to important areas of well-being, including marital satisfaction, and the capacity to handle stress, make decisions and manage social anxiety.
Bowen’s theory doesn’t focus on mental illness but on the challenges of being human in the relationships which affect us all. It’s not an easy theory to grasp, as it focuses on the big-picture patterns of a system rather than the narrower view of what causes difficulties for one individual. These ideas invite us to see the world through the lens of each family member rather than just from our own subjective experience; they don’t allow room for simply seeing victims and villains in our relationship networks. Seeing the system takes people beyond blame to seeing the relationship forces that set people on their different paths. This way of seeing our life challenges avoids fault-finding and provides a unique path to maturing throughout our adult lives.
The 8 concepts are:
Triangles
Differentiation of Self
Nuclear Family Emotional System
Family Projection Process
Multigenerational Transmission Process
Emotional Cutoff
Sibling Position
Societal Emotional Process
Inner Child Work is a trauma-informed approach to working with people who have experienced various forms of trauma, abuse, and neglect (either within the family or outside the family) earlier on in life. If you clicked to read this article, chances are, there is a part of you that is yearning for some care.
Inner Child Work blends together frameworks of attachment theory, somatic (or body-based) therapies, Jungian Shadow work, Internal Family Systems, and psychodynamic theories. Many of these theories or types of therapy are rooted in the ideas that our past influences our present, our bodies and unconscious hold wisdom, and there is hope and potential for new connections to be made, within and without.
One of the main components of Inner Child Work is the idea that we all have younger parts within us with different ages, difference experiences, and different needs. As we grow up into bigger bodies and more logical, conscious brains, our younger selves don’t just disappear over time. When we get triggered and can’t understand why, it’s likely a younger part of us is online and very present, screaming for our attention. Oftentimes, as adults, we ignore these cries, we deny or dismiss, we freeze, we search for a solution to “fix it”. All of these can be trauma responses being replayed in adult life. We respond to our wounds in ways we learned as a kid and what helped keep us safe then.
It’s also important to note that if you’re currently working with a psychotherapist or other helpers in a healing setting, or if you’re even contemplating a healing journey, you have already begun Inner Child Work. You know something wasn’t right and you know it’s gotten you stuck in some ways. There isn’t necessarily a protocol or steps to take when doing this transformational work. Sometimes it takes a while and it’s usually an ongoing process. For some, it becomes a life-long practice. Inner Child Work is about safe relationships, emotional and physical safety, consent, respecting all parts of a person, developing a competent and compassionate inner parent(s), learning to set healthy boundaries, healthy entitlement, and assertiveness, grieving the loss of childhood you needed and didn’t get, understanding human blindspots and limitations, how parents can pass along generations’ worth of trauma and trauma responses, and making room for fun, joy, and growth in service of your authentic Self.
Inner Child Work also includes finding the glimmers. Learning to be more open and receptive to the joys, nourishment, and delight of just being. For many of us who had to grow up too quickly, who had to live in constant fear and need to protect ourselves or loved ones, who didn’t receive the warmth of a compassionate, competent adult, play, spontaneity, rest, and creativity may be harder to access. These aspects of a full life also become deadened when we live in societies or cultures that value hyper-independence, aggression against the feminine (relationships, feelings, embodiment), and over-working in order to make end’s meet or to keep up with the ideal lifestyle.
How can Inner Child Work help? This work focuses on helping you find new ways of being in the world, with yourself, and with others. It increases knowledge about family dynamics, roles, and survival responses. It helps establish a felt sense of safety within the body and nervous system. It explores different parts of the Self (which often contradict or oppose one another) and learning to make space for them all. It helps increase awareness of triggers and why the emotional flood or freeze is so strong. It can help decrease shame around not feeling good enough. Inner Child Work can help wake up the right brain, known for creativity, emotions, imagination, and support the left brain, responsible for logic, reason, language, and analytic thinking. It can also help create a more resilient bridge between the two brain hemispheres so that multiple functions can be accessed. It offers more choice to create the sorts of lives we actually want to be living. It can also help deepen understanding and compassion for ourselves and what we went through.
Who is Inner Child Work good for? Really… anyone! Most people I work with have experienced some sort of trauma, usually within their family-of-origin. Sometimes, very explicit traumas occurred within the family, like physical abuse and sexual abuse. Many times, more insidious, unconscious, and indirect sorts of neglect and abuse occurred. I hear this a lot: “My parents gave me everything I needed. They worked hard to give me a good life. I don’t know why I’m complaining.” That’s likely because there was emotional misattunement or neglect. Maybe your feelings, opinions, ideas, wants, and needs were dismissed or devalued. Maybe you were only given positive attention when you received good grades, were being a “good” kid by following the rules, excelled in sports, or staying quiet and out of the way. As a child, when our emotions are neglected enough of the time (even if physical needs are being met), our survival instincts kick on. We learn to people please, avoid conflict, rebel to receive some sort of attention (“bad attention is better than nothing!”), self harm because we are learning that we don’t matter (you DO matter, but this is an implicit or explicit message that gets told when our needs can’t be met in safe and contained ways). We learn to put others needs first, get lost in work, hobbies, or fantasy. Because emotional regulation wasn’t modeled (either a caregiver shut down and froze, blew up and lashed out, or got highly agitated and anxious), we don’t learn the most beneficial ways of regulating ourselves and we tend to recreate those patterns, or some version of them, later on in life.
Even if you had a good enough upbringing and you know your parents did the best they could, our younger selves still experience hurt at some point in life. Maybe it’s happened at school, with peers and friends, in relationships, or at work. As a collective in the Western world, we glorify being busy and working long hours, which leaves little time for rest, play, and connection. Inner Child Work can be for you, too.
Ideas for beginning or continuing your Inner Child Work:
– Schedule time for unstructured time (take a nap, wander around your neighborhood, work on a craft, read a favorite fairy tale/folk story).
– Check with your basic physiological needs (when was the last time you drank water, ate a snack or meal, went to the bathroom, or stretched? How was your sleep last night?).
– Dance and sing to songs you enjoyed as a pre-teen or teen.
– Find a piece of comfort (a soft blanket, cozy socks or PJs, a warm mug, a hug from a loved one, the warmth of the sun sitting on your car seat).
– Find old photos of you from different ages and keep them nearby; write a letter to them.
– Notice when and where your triggers show up (are they telling you something? What do you need in those moments? How old are you feeling?).
– Draw or write with your non-dominant hand (see if you can get in touch with a particular age, their wants, needs, and feelings. Ask them how, as the adult, you can help them today).
– Work with a trauma-informed therapist who specializes in complex trauma, attachment, developmental trauma, emotional or physical abuse and neglect. Slapping on some coping skills and changing some behaviors isn’t going to cut it here.
– Remind yourself that while your past has left some pain that still needs attention, you can be the caring, protective, loving adult you’ve always needed to help you work through the hurt, the grief, and to build a new foundation.
– You can love your parents and still be hurt by their actions, treatment, or lack of awareness. It’s okay to feel both – it’s normal.
