By assisting you in developing more personal insight into you life experiences, together we can manage your painful and sometimes destructive reactions to life’s difficulties, challenges, and demands in the present. Focusing on your life experiences is the KEY to treating your symptoms, which can improve the quality of your life.
Our current feelings, beliefs, and behaviors are shaped by the demands, trauma, pain, and losses of our past. We get trapped in repetitive destructive behaviors and emotions around certain situations and people. Despite our best efforts, nothing seems to improve. Our current reactions are often related to how we adapted and survived in difficult situations earlier in life. These reactions result from memories stored in our bodies – It’s what we feel in our bodies that influence us the most. What causes our problematic behaviors is not merely psychological. It’s very physical! Our reactions are automatic. Before we know it, we act in destructive ways.
I will help you make the connections between your past life experiences and your current behaviors and symptoms. Understanding how the past is impacting the present is liberating.
Focusing on your life experiences is the KEY to treating your symptoms, which can improve the quality of your life.
Making these kinds of connections allows us to stop reacting to life’s stress and start responding in better ways. We generally minimize how our life’s traumas, hurts, and losses impacted us. You cannot change your past but I can help you change how you respond and feel in the present. Released from the controlling impact and subconscious influences of the past will allow you to feel better and gain greater control over yourself and your life. Start living the life you were meant to live.
Developed by Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt in 1980, Imago Relationship Therapy is a form of relationship and couples therapy that focuses on relational counseling to transform any conflict between couples into opportunities for healing and growth.
The Latin word “imago”—meaning “image”—refers to the “unconscious image of familiar love.” What we find is that there is frequently a connection between frustrations in adult relationships and early childhood experiences. As an example, individuals frequently criticized as a child will likely be highly sensitive to their partner’s criticism. Childhood feelings of abandonment, suppression or neglect will often arise in a marriage or committed relationship.
When such “core issues” repeatedly come up with a partner, they can overshadow all that is good in a relationship and leave one to wonder whether he or she has chosen the right mate.
Through Imago Relationship Therapy, couples can learn to understand each other’s feelings and “childhood wounds” more empathically, allowing them to heal themselves and their relationships so they can move toward a more “Conscious Relationship.”
As illustrated in Dr. Hendrix’s best-selling book, “Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples” (published in 1988), learning and teaching the “Imago Dialogue” allows couples to move from blame and reactivity, to understanding and empathy, so they can create a deeper and loving connection with each other.
Learn More: Imago Relationship Therapy
“What is Imago Relationship Therapy”, http://imagorelationships.org/pro/about/what-is-imago-relationship-therapy/. Imago Relationships. 26 Dec 2016.
Mindfulness training has had increasing research support and has been used for stress management and emotional regulation for over 2500 years. It is useful for treating concerns related to mood, anxiety/worry, attention/focus, impulsivity, and self-control, among other things.
One main advantage of mindfulness is to be more focused and grounded in the present moment. When you are more grounded in the present, you become less likely to worry about past or future experiences so you can be more effective in dealing with the present. Mindfulness also helps you feel calmer, stronger, more patient, and happier. It improves focus and attention span and reduces stress, worry, and self-criticism. With mindfulness, you will be able to more quickly recognize when you are about to lose your temper, if you have zoned out, and when to take action so that you do not get emotionally highjacked. Mindfulness can provide the skills to help you become calm again. With calm, we gain more clarity, confidence, and creativity. As a result, we are more productive and make fewer mistakes.
Developing Mindfulness is easier to learn and absorb than most people realize. A mindfulness exercise can only take 60 seconds to be effective. Such as noticing your breathing for 6 breaths. Try it. Notice how you feel before you track 6 breaths. Notice where in your body you feel tension, aggravation or if you feel hot, cold, or numb. Then track 6 breaths. Notice if the level of tension, aggravation, hotness, coolness comes down a little. There are numerous ways to develop mindfulness, which is just another way of staying aware. After learning a few strategies and practicing mindfulness, it is possible for everyone to feel calmer more often.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a proven and effective approach to treating trauma and related symptoms. EMDR is based on the premise that when we experience disturbing or traumatic events, the memories of those events are stored differently in the brain than typical memories. They are stored with all the intensity and emotion that was experienced when the event happened. Therefore, when you remember the event, it can be like re-experiencing the trauma all over again. These traumatic memories can be triggered by environmental factors such as smells or noises, and can manifest as intrusive thoughts, hyper-vigilance nightmares, phobias or irritability. The goal of EMDR is to reprocess these memories so they become less intense. You will still remember the event, but with successful reprocessing, you won’t feel the intense emotions surrounding the event just by thinking about it. The event also will no longer have so much power over your current thoughts, behaviors and relationships.
EMDR combines elements of many different therapeutic modalities, including cognitive behavioral, body-centered, and experiential therapies. Although EMDR is a relatively new psychological treatment method—it was developed in the late 1980s—it is considered highly effective. According to the American Psychiatric Association, this modality may be particularly effective for people who have trouble articulating their trauma because you don’t need to tell your therapist about the trauma to do EMDR Therapy if you don’t want to. Both the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs “strongly recommend” EMDR for the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
EMDR is also used to treat issues other than trauma. It has been proven to be highly effective in treating:
· Performance anxiety
· Depression
· Grief
· Phobias
· Affect tolerance
· Panic attacks
· Stress
How Does EMDR Work?
During an EMDR session, a skilled therapist uses bilateral stimulation (such as eye movements, hand tapping, or audio/tactile stimulation) to open up the brain’s natural pathways to healing. During reprocessing, this physical stimulation helps you stay grounded in the current moment versus going back as intensely into the memory of the traumatic experience. As treatment progresses, both the experience and the discomfort associated with its memories will begin to wane as you appropriately process the traumatic memories. Eventually, you become more and more desensitized to the trauma, and it can be finally be stored adaptively https://anchor.fm/zolotapodkova/episodes/ep-ej66qa by the brain.
Effects of EMDR
People who have used EMDR report a sense of freedom from obsession, anxiety, depressing thoughts, and the “heaviness” that is associated with being stuck in trauma. Trauma can cause you to avoid an abundance of human interactions because they may stimulate the bad memories. With EMDR, you can finally be free of your trauma, find a clear path forward and beginning to live the life you were meant to live.
IFS is an integrative approach. The approach combines useful elements from different schools of psychology and presents a case for our psyches being made up of different parts sometimes called sub-personalities. You can think of the sub-personalities as little people inside of us. Each has its own perspective, feelings, memories, sensations, goals, and motivations.
IFS states that within all of us is a wise compassionate Core Self that needs to lead the multiple parts within us, and not be highjacked by the extreme parts. Due to life’s difficult demands, trauma, and neglect, some parts get very extreme in their behavior while other parts attempt to protect us. Although our sub-personality’s or part’s intentions are always good and positive, the outcomes they cause are not.
IFS’s effectiveness is in strengthening the Core Self and helping us to better understand our inner world. The goal is for Self-leadership to help the often-polarized extreme parts to connect, understand, integrate and work in harmony. A good analogy is when a group of very talented football players have lost faith in the coach and are underperforming. Given support, the coach can now be open to new insights and with time, can connect and understand his players better. As a result, the team starts to work together and performs at much higher levels of success.
For additional information please go to the IFS Website the “Center for Self-Leadership” or do a web search on Internal Family Systems.
Brainspotting is a powerful, focused treatment method that works by identifying, processing and releasing the painful and controlling physical sensations of emotional/body pain, trauma, dissociation, and a variety of other challenging symptoms. Brainspotting is a simultaneous form of diagnosis and treatment, enhanced with Bio lateral sound and is very effective in reducing suffering. Brainspotting is deep, direct, and powerful yet focused and containing. Since Brainspotting focuses on the physical sensation of experience, it is a deeper therapy and therefore the changes Brainspotting facilitates are generally more comprehensive and permanent.
The use of this therapeutic approach with performance issues from Athletics to the Performing Arts is truly amazing. Brainspotting works extremely well for the Artist or Athelete, by removing the blocks they may feel, releasing their creativity and openness, and realizing more of their potential. If you’re a serious athlete or artist, you owe it to yourself to at least explore what Brainspotting can do for you; Also known as the “Grand Approach,” see what Brainspotting has to offer you.
For more information regarding Brainspotting visit the website www.brainspotting.com and view the videos on Brainspotting in this section.
Every counselor has a different way of looking at things. I focus on the what a person has experienced rather than their symptoms and diagnoses. Life experiences such as childhood abuse and neglect, assaults, accidents, illness, war, addictions, and even intense medical treatments can leave a lasting negative impact on the nervous system and our behavior. This impact of past challenges is not just psychological it’s physical. I use a range of therapeutic approaches, to accommodate your unique personality, needs, and history rather than having you conform to any one approach.
Unfortunately, negative experience as well as trauma is a part of everyone’s life. Often negative life experiences are resolved by the psyche’s own natural healing abilities. But, over time, these problems which were originally caused by negative experiences don’t resolve, and you have two choices: You can continue to suffer and tough it out, or you can call someone who is trained to help the psyche heal. I believe in tapping into the body’s own implicit memory system of physical sensations and felt experiences to identify, learn from, and change how things affect us. The psyche, given the right kind of support, can heal by discharging the emotions and sensations haunting us from past negative emotional experiences or neglect. We can remobilize our inner resources of self-regulation and this jump starts or reawakens the psyche’s natural wisdom, strength, and ability. This is the approach I have found to be the most effective, efficient, and permanent.
In addition, less obvious experiences can have a similar impact. Utilizing different body-based therapies, I assist people with life’s common challenges as well as the life’s more severe traumas. Interestingly, but maybe not surprisingly these same body-based therapies are also very effective in improving sports and performance blocks caused by the frequent traumas, humiliations, and failures inherent in those public endeavors.
I understand that paying for therapy may seem like one more thing to stress about. However, I encourage you to think about the expense as a long-term commitment to you, your family, and the long-term quality of your life. Also, you may want to think of the expense of not getting some help. Unsolved issues have a way of haunting us and can impact every area of your life: work, school, family and interpersonal relationships, and the your ability to enjoy your life.
[Art] absolutely helped me. I believe in the Brainspotting process, Brainspotting has helped me on the baseball field to overcome some issues and I have pitched much better. And I’m having have more fun both on and off the field.”
127 W. Chester Pike
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610-649-9799
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