ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY (ACT) - Hayes & Harris

ACT is focused on helping individuals build enriched and meaningful lives by identifying personal values and choosing to take actions that are consistent with one's values. ACT uses several approaches including mindfulness to help to work with your suffering in new and more effective ways. It focuses on working with rather than fighting against painful feelings and thoughts, and views the struggle for control as a key barrier to moving forward in your life. 

​

LIBERATION PSYCHOLOGY - Martin-Baro, Comas-Diaz et al.

Liberation Psychology is an approach rather than a specific therapeutic modality which emphasizes decolonizing psychological approaches. It acknowledges that traditional white therapeutic approaches can be very limited in their applicability outside other groups of people. It involves flexibility - adaptation or abandonment of traditional white therapies when this does not suit the client. Liberation also adds important elements beyond traditional white therapies including but not limited to:  

1.  Critical reflection and accountability

2. Acknowledgment of oppressive environments and their origins

3. Focus on action and resistance tied to liberation (change) versus coping within the system/acceptance of status quo.

4. Challenge white patriarchal heterenormative frameworks and redirect towards healing that is rooted in local knowledge, cultures, and communities, or an integration of both.

​

RADICAL HEALING - Neville (2021)

Radial Healing is an element of Liberation Psychology that focuses on not just individual suffering and pain, but the context and root cause for the pain (systems of oppression currently and historically). It also focuses on the fundamental need for safe spaces, a sense of community, and collective healing. This includes but is not limited to:

​

1. Cultural Authenticity and Self Knowledge: Knowledge of your self and the lineage of your people, versus how it is defined and described by white power

2. Emotions and Support: focusing on interconnectedness with others, collective healing, shared stories and understanding, vs coping alone as in standard western therapies

3. Strength and Resistance: Using resources such as churches (institutional resource), family, friends, religious/spiritual traditions, cultural traditions, family traditions (cultural resources).

3. Radical Hope: "Involves the steadfast belief that the collective capacity contained within communities of color to heal and transform oppressive forces into better futures, despite the overwhelming odds" (Neville, 2021). Remembering historic instances of resistance, healing, community action.​

​

COMPASSION-FOCUSED THERAPY (CFT) - Gilbert

Did you know that your brain and body react to your own self-critical thoughts as strongly as someone else bullying you or being verbally abusive towards you? We end up housing so much stress and shame in our bodies, minds, and souls. Self-criticism makes us feel worse for having struggles and makes it even harder to find a healthy and helpful way forward. While self-compassion is often mistaken as self-indulgent or selfish, it is a highly effective approach to increasing resiliency, managing difficult emotions, and taking effective action. This work is not for the faint of heart - there is difficult courageous work involved in facing and work through immense feelings of shame and self-criticism. The rewards, however, can be even more immense, helping us reconnect with our own humanity and innate worth, and allowing us to feel more connected to the world and those around us. 

​

INTERNAL FAMILY SYSTEMS (IFS) - Schwartz

Internal Family Systems identifies and explores the way that certain key parts of self often develop at an early age to protect the individual from harm, and works with how to understand and integrate these parts. Building safety and understanding is the key focus, which then allows more freedom of responses and decisions and feelings.

​

1. The managers are often present and work overtime to try to manage the other parts, other people, and environments to try prevent the person from experiencing suffering. They can often be demanding, critical, and controlling. But they are trying to help.

2. The firefighters come in during an immediate crisis to protect the person from feeling overwhelmed. This can look like numbing, dissociating, anger and rage, withdrawal, using substances/food to cope, self-harming, suicidal thoughts and feelings. This part is also trying to protect

3. The exhiles are usually very young vulnerable parts that hold trauma, fear, and shame. They are shut away by the manager to keep the exhiles safe, but also out of fear the exhiles will overwhelm everyone with pain and trauma if they come out.

Therapy involves getting to know and befriend parts, to learn how they developed and how they work to keep you safe. Often the parts do not know about each other, and there is important work about helping them communicate with and understand each other, so that each part feels safe and understood by you, and by other parts. You use your whole adult self to help free them of their roles which often feel like an imprisonment, so they understand there is a whole adult self (you) in charge. 

​​​​

SOMATIC THERAPIES

SENSORIMOTOR PSYCHOTHERAPY (SP) - Ogden 

Some of us have learned to cope with difficult/traumatic situations by detaching from our emotions and bodies, instead living mostly in our heads. We might be very good at analyzing our problems and having insight, but we still don't feel better or create the changes we want. That’s often because real healing doesn’t happen through thinking alone. When we’re disconnected from our bodies and emotions, we can feel fragmented or stuck. Lasting change comes from bringing our whole selves — body, mind, and heart — back into connection.

​

Somatic therapies help us slowly, gently, and safely experience being in our bodies, be compassionately in tune with our emotions, and learn how use these as sources of information, wisdom, and guidance. As you build these connections, you begin to feel more grounded, more integrated, and more in charge of your life.

​

EYE MOVEMENT DESENSITIZATION AND REPROCESSING (EMDR) - Shapiro

EMDR  is a therapy that helps heal from trauma and other distressing experiences. In active processing sessions, you focus on one specific aspect of a difficult memory at a time while engaging in gentle back-and-forth pattern, like following your therapist’s hand, listening to alternating sounds, or feeling taps.

​

You don’t need to retell every detail or process every upsetting memory. EMDR often targets key memories connected to a larger network of experiences, so working on one can help ease others. It works at all levels — body, emotions, and thoughts — helping your brain and body recognize that the trauma is in the past and that you are safe in the present.

​

Bilateral stimulation may help because it activates and promotes communication between both sides of the brain (something often disrupted with trauma), supporting the natural processing of memories and making it easier for the brain to integrate thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations.You go at your own pace, developing coping skills and internal resources first, so memories feel less overwhelming and more manageable over time.​

​

MINDFULNESS - Kabat -Zinn, Segal

Mindfulness in psychotherapy is based upon the idea that our automatic responses to suffering often involve overthinking and feeling swallowed by distress - or alternatively, distracting and distancing ourselves from our thoughts and feelings. Practicing mindfulness (a skill and way of being that can be learned!) helps individuals to learn to become aware of these patterns, and enables us to find a way to be with our thoughts and feelings in more constructive and compassionate ways. It is arguably inherent in every therapeutic modality, but also stands on its own as an approach.

​

COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (CBT) - Beck

CBT starts with the premise that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all interconnected and so working on any area will help impact the others. CBT often focuses on the thinking patterns that shape our experience. It often involves identifying unhelpful or distorted ways of thinking that may be contributing to distress, and encourages the development of new perspectives. This isn’t about forced positivity, but about seeing situations more clearly and flexibly. CBT also commonly focuses on changing behaviors that are contributing to your distress and struggles as a way to address difficulties with  emotions and thoughts.

​

EXPOSURE & RESPONSE PREVENTION THERAPY (ERP) - Meyer 

Exposure Therapy helps people struggling with anxiety, panic, or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.  You remain in the driver's seat at all times as we work to help you slowly approach what is distressing or anxiety-provoking. We will discuss the ways your fears are getting in the way of leading the life you want and come up with strategies to help you move forward. Arguably, the philosophy of Exposure Therapy, that is, approaching what is uncomfortable, scary, and/or difficult, is in nearly every therapeutic approach. 

​

CBT approach to ERP: Through gradual exposure, ERP teaches your brain that the feared situation isn’t actually dangerous, so your anxiety goes down over time. You practice facing fears without doing your usual rituals and by challenging unhelpful ways of thinking, and eventually the anxiety fades and becomes easier to handle.

​

ACT approach to ERP: The goal isn’t to make the anxiety go away. Instead, it’s to help you get better at allowing uncomfortable thoughts and feelings to be there without fighting them, while still choosing actions that move you toward the life you want. The focus is on building flexibility — being able to feel anxious and still do what matters to you.

Paradoxically, when you stop trying so hard to control or eliminate anxiety, it often shrinks on its own over time. But even if it doesn’t fully go away, it no longer runs your life.

​​

DIALECTICAL BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (DBT) - Linehan

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) offers a wide array you clear, practical tools to handle really intense emotions. It helps in different situations — whether you need to calmly think through a problem or you’re in full crisis mode and can’t think or see straight. DBT also teaches practical and highly effective skills to improve your relationships, helping you communicate better and handle conflict more effectively at work and in your personal life.

​

​