Psychotherapy Approaches
I use many approaches in psychotherapy, including psychodynamic, gestalt, cognitive-behavioral, solution-focused and family systems. This is because they each have useful principles and tools. If you are curious about these approaches, then you can read my brief effort at describing them below.
Psychodynamic Perspective helps me invite individuals to experience how they feel about something and then track the possible anxiety or defenses that can arise to try to prevent them from sensing their feelings.
Gestalt Psychotherapy is useful to explore one’s sensory awareness of a problem, or one’s difficulties in mobilizing one’s energy to achieve an action, and also working experientially in exploring one’s ability to feel satisfaction from one’s achievements. The goal in Gestalt is to learn to become aware of disowned parts of one’s self and then work to re-integrate them back into your life. For example, you may be good at kindness, but lack the capacity for self-assertion or expressing healthy and appropriate anger for good boundaries and/or getting your wants and needs met.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has lots of excellent, concrete tools. It’s advantages involve discovering new behaviors that will help you solve your problems. For example, if you are shy, then you would learn new behaviors to speak up, while keeping your anxiety low. Giving individuals homework is another good tool. Finally, it is useful to examine beliefs that are unhelpful in your current life and find new ones that fit with behaviors that work.
Solution-Focused Therapy is a perspective that believes that individuals are already in possession of many of the skills they need to solve their problems. Here the goal is to name a strength an individual has in one area of their life, and then use this strength to help solve a problem the individual is struggling with in a different area of their life.
Family Systems Therapy looks at how the rules and expectations in families interact with the temperments and unique aspects of ourselves that we are born with (genetics) to produce our personalities, and character. The complication is personalities we evolve to survive and thrive in our families can have both very lovely dimensions as well as unhelpful aspects, like anxieties or depressive symptoms. So, examining the family rules and expectations can be very useful for healing your painful troubles.