Individual Therapy
THERAPIST'S APPROACH
Are you struggling with anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, managing perfectionism, or poor boundaries?
I CAN HELP.
I have extensive training in many different therapy modalities, though I gravitate largely towards Emotionally-Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) when working with individuals. Learn more about these approaches below.
Emotionally Focused iNDIVIDUAL Therapy (EFiT)
What Is It?
Emotionally Focused individual Therapy (EFIT) is an attachment science-based approach to individual therapy that offers an integration of humanistic experiential interventions focused on reshaping intrapsychic experience and systemic interventions focused on reshaping patterns of engagement in our interpersonal interactions. EFIT delves into past relationships all the way back to childhood in order to better understand the root cause of an individual’s mental and emotional struggles. It does this by pinpointing your specific needs and relationship patterns and then helping guide you in a new direction by teaching you everything to do with your emotions – your emotional needs, your emotional reactions, your emotional desires and how to satisfy and fulfill them.
Goals of EFIT:
- To offer corrective experiences that positively impact models of self and other and shape stable, lasting change.
- To offer transformative moments where vulnerability is encountered with balance.
- To enable clients to move into the accessibility/openness, responsiveness and full engagement that characterises secure attachment with others.
- To enable clients to shape a coherent sense of a competent self that can deal with existential life issues and become a fully alive human being.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
What Is It?
Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapeutic treatment that helps individuals to understand the thoughts and feelings that influence behaviors. CBT is commonly used to treat a wide range of disorders, including phobias, addiction, depression and anxiety. CBT is generally short-term and focused on helping individuals deal with a very specific problem. During the course of treatment, individuals learn how to identify and change destructive or disturbing thought patterns that have a negative influence on behavior.
The underlying concept behind CBT is that thoughts and feelings play a fundamental role in behavior. The goal of CBT is to teach individuals that while they cannot control every aspect of the world around them, they can take control of how they interpret and deal with things in their environment. CBT has become increasingly popular in recent years with both mental health consumers and treatment professionals. CBT is also empirically supported and has been shown to effectively help individuals overcome a wide variety of maladaptive behaviors.
CBT has been used to treat suffering from a wide range of disorders, including anxiety, depression, addiction, and a variety of maladaptive behaviors. CBT is one of the most researched types of therapy, in part because treatment is focused on a highly specific goal and results can be measured relatively easily.
CBT behavior therapy is often best suited for individual who are comfortable with introspection. In order for CBT to be effective, the individual must be ready and willing to spend time and effort analyzing his or her thoughts and feelings. Self-analysis can be difficult, but it is a great way to learn more about how internal states impact outward behavior.
“A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms” – Zen Shin
With the guidance of an experiential therapist, clients can begin to release and explore negative feelings of anger, hurt, or shame as they relate to and move forward from painful past experiences that may have been blocked or still linger.
