Modern Psychotherapy Techniques

The goal of this therapy is to increase emotional awareness, and to become a more mindful person. It shares the premise that behavior is disturbed in some manner because of inadequate awareness of feelings, beliefs, motivations, and desires. This approach to therapy also assumes some of these problems are due to faulty assumptions, and thoughts, due to less conscious, or unconscious past life experiences.

This therapy identifies distorted ways we interpret events, and helps to diminish negative attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, memories, and sensations. The goal is to help recognize, and change negative thinking styles, and wrongful conclusion making that triggers negative emotions.

This therapy addresses relationship problems in life. Problem areas may be classified as role transitions (associated with stressful life events, and changes in status), grief (working through grief, letting go, learning to move on), role conflict (e.g., in a marriage, as a stepparent), or interpersonal deficits (inadequate social connections to help cope with stressful life events).

Instead of trying to control, and quickly eliminate upsetting attitudes, beliefs, feelings, thoughts, memories, sensations or other private events, this therapy encourages you to just notice, experience, and ultimately accept unwanted moments, as part of life. The goal is not to overly analyze your experiences, allow thoughts to come, and go without struggling with them, and to appreciate the here, and now.

This therapy focuses on strengthening coping skills that already exist, but may have been forgotten. The objective of this therapy is to remember, remind oneself of, and once again embrace learned problem solving strategies that worked in the past.

Positive psychotherapy embodies the idea that people are more often, drawn to thinking about future potentials, rather than the past experiences. This therapy is focused on working with positive experiences, positive psychological traits, positive relationships, and positive institutions. Important strategies include, achieving states of pleasure or flow, identifying, and focusing on your strengths, virtues, talents, and remaining true to your values.

This therapy motivates people to take meaningful action, and talk less about plans. Experiments are created in the therapy for the patient to carry out. The focus then becomes, what is actually happening, what is being talked about, and what is being done at that moment, rather than on what was, might be, could be, should have been. These active behavioral experiments lead patients to greater awareness, and a fuller experience of their possibilities.

This is a philosophical method of therapy, that deals with inner conflicts associated with the “givens”, like the inevitability of death, isolation in life, the increased responsibilities that come with freedom, and the ongoing challenge to keep meaning and purpose in life. These “givens”, also referred to as our “ultimate concerns”, affect all of us, and predictably create tension in life.

In this treatment, the therapist attempts to create a comfortable, non-judgmental environment, while demonstrating genuineness, empathy, and positive regard towards their patient. As a consequence patients often do not have to be directed where to go, and often find their own solutions to problems.

Mindfulness based stress reduction therapy is sustained moment-to-moment awareness of emotional states, thoughts, perception, images, and physical sensations. Mindfulness practices encourage paying attention to current mental, and physical experiences without over thinking, comparing, or evaluating them. It is the practice of just the careful, relaxed, natural observation of things that come into conscious awareness.

This approach to wellness involves learning to lower mental and physical activation by reducing stress triggered muscle tensing. This is typically accomplished by purposely tensing, then relaxing muscle groups from head downward to toe.