Treatment Methods
Comprehensive (holistic)--Focusing on healing and growth by recognizing
the relationship between your:
  • Mind, such as your cognitions or thoughts, including your conscious, the
    area below conscious thought, and the area out of awareness (by
    becoming aware of it),
  • Emotions or feelings,
  • Body, which can include sensations, felt sense, or sense of knowing,
  • Behavior (actions, doing),
  • Interpersonal relationships, one's connections to others, including a
    partner, spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, parents, children, family, friends,
    teachers, other students, co-workers, and
  • Larger environment (e.g., church, neighborhood, school, and
    community).  
  • Values or Spirituality

Experiencing, which . . .
  • Evolves in the present moment (starting before the first contact, in the
    therapy office and moving into one's daily environment),
  • Involves becoming aware,
    - validating or accepting,
    - learning skills,
    - making changes,
    - creating and recreating a life you want to live,
    - by experiencing small and large shifts
  • Learning how to interact more effectively with oneself and others (a
    frequent analogy includes learning how to move effectively on the dance
    floor, not being too passive so that you can "keep up" and not too willful
    so that others feel tension).

Intuition or perceptive insight can provide direction for treatment or assist
with issues.  

The following methods are utilized to assist you or your child to experience a
shift in the present moment so that you can make the changes in your life:

  • Behavioral Therapy -- Helping clients change behaviors by changing
    what happens before unwanted actions as well as the rewards and
    consequences after certain actions, which make unwanted behaviors
    less likely to happen and desired behaviors more likely.  Specializing
    in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (and using a modified form in private
    practice), including moving from feeling out of control to being in control;
    learning skills that help you control your attention so that you stop
    worrying about the future or obsessing about the past, increasing your
    awareness of the “present moment” so you learn more and more about
    what makes you feel good or feel bad; starting new relationships,
    improving current relationships, or ending bad ones; understanding
    what emotions are, how they function, and how to experience them in a
    way that is not overwhelming; and tolerating emotional pain without
    resorting to self-harm or self-destructive behaviors.  Help you
    experience feelings without having to shut down by numbing out,
    avoiding life, or having symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder
    (PTSD).  

  • Client-Centered Therapy -- Listening and validating, using
    unconditional positive acceptance and regard for the person (not
    always for behaviors), genuineness (congruency, being "real"), and  
    accurate empathic understanding.  Studies have indicated that these
    characteristics have accounted for 1/3 to 2/3 of the change a client
    experiences.   This includes using the genuine or compassionate
    communication approaches or materials developed by Marshall
    Rosenberg.

  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy -- This method seeks to help uncover
    your individual set of beliefs (attitudes, expectations and personal rules,
    automatic thoughts) that contribute to emotional distress; utilizes a
    variety of ways to help people reformulate their ineffective beliefs into
    more helpful ones by employing the "disputing" technique; and using
    other techniques such as imagery, assertiveness, modeling, self
    nuturing, risk-taking, behavioral homework assignments,
    communication skill training, and exercises to reduce upset feelings
    and increase personal effectiveness.  One method utilized for trauma
    treatment includes Seeking Safety, a  therapy to help people attain a
    sense safety, the first step in recovering from trauma/PTSD and covers
    issues, such as Safety, Taking Back Your Power, and Grounding or
    Centering techniques that help one focus on the present moment or
    pleasant imagery.

  • Education and Skill Building -- Helping the client learn about their
    particular concerns and providing skills (for example, anger
    management, communication, stress management, or relaxation        
    skills) that can help the client feel better and relate more effectively.

  • Focusing -- Focusing involves body wisdom, a mode of inward bodily
    attention that most people have not sensed yet, occurring at the
    interface of body and mind.  It involves getting a body sense of how you
    experience a particular life situation. While it is unclear and vague
    initially, it can evolve into words or images with a resulting felt shift in the
    body in the way that issue is experienced in the body.  This leads to
    living in a deeper place than thoughts or feelings and sensing new
    solutions.  

  • Specializing in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
    (EMDR) -- It is a psychotherapy used to treat bothersome symptoms,
    including anxiety, guilt, anger, depression, panic, sleep disturbance,
    and flashbacks, that are the result of traumatic events.  Not only has
    EMDR therapy been proven effective in reducing the chronic symptoms
    which follow trauma, the therapy benefits appear to be permanent.  The
    term "Eye Movement" refers to the alternating stimulation of the right
    and left hemispheres of the brain through the use of eye movements but
    can also be bilateral alternating taps or tones.  "Desensitization" refers
    to the removal of the emotional disturbance associated with a traumatic
    memory.  "Reprocessing" refers to the replacement of the unhealthy,
    negative beliefs associated with traumatic memories, with more
    healthy, positive beliefs.  

  • Emotion Focused Therapy -- Several authors (Greenberg, Elliott,
    Watson, and Goldman) in 2004 explain the importance of this
    approach. Exploring and expressing emotion is a key to helping you to
    change because they contain valuable information about what is going
    on in you and around you.  Rational thought usually ignores this
    information.  Working with emotions is hard work and often painful,
    because the emotions have to be felt in order to work on them: they don’
    t usually change just by talking about them, or by telling them to go away,
    or by explaining them.

  • Emotion Focused Therapy Couples Therapy - This highly effective
    approach tackles the frustrated emotional needs underlying relationship
    distress in an effort to assist a couple with injured or broken
    connections.  Most arguments, fights, or conflicts are really a protest
    over emotional disconnection.  Usually, under the disconnection, the
    partners what to know if the other partner is really there for them.  The
    goal is to help the partners communicate their needs to feel loved and
    important and to learn new ways of interacting or behaving toward one
    another.  

  • Motivational Enhancement Therapy -- An effective method designed
    to help individuals with their natural ambivalence that keeps them from
    making the desired change and by helping them build their commitment
    to change.  Includes such techniques as reflective listening, questions
    about pros and cons, and reframing.

  • Parenting Program - Combining practical and effective techniques
    and methods, such as Love and Logic, which is an approach to
    raising kids that provides loving support from parents while at the same
    time expecting kids to be respectful and responsible, on the book
    Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids, which has "an emphasis on
    creating respect and cooperation between parents and children," by
    focusing "on the 7 keys to unlock and inspire specific parenting
    capacities. These capacities include parenting with a purpose clearly in
    mind, looking beyond behavior to the needs that motivate it, and actively
    choosing structures and practices that fulfill one’s purposes and
    intentions."  For children and adolescents with oppositional, aggressive,
    and antisocial behavior, Parent Management Training is a
    behaviorally based approach to help parents with these difficult
    behaviors.   

  • Play Therapy -- Because of their stage of development, children
    communicate much more effectively through play than words.  They
    experience life primarily in their body and feelings rather than their
    thoughts.  In this form of play therapy, the counselor interacts with the
    child through play and words (e.g., validation) to help them resolve
    internal conflicts that contribute or create internalized (e.g., anxiety and
    depression) or externalized (e.g., acting out) problems.

  • Psychodynamic Therapy -- Helping clients gain insight into their
    problems and patterns of behavior, which increases their ability to make
    changes.
Max Stager
(719) 460-4185
Copyright © 2006 2011, 2012.  Max Stager.  All Rights Reserved.