Everyone goes through rough patches and experiences problems that are difficult to navigate. Therapy provides a safe space to process, heal and gain skills to better navigate challenges that arise. Sometimes people attend therapy just because they feel stuck and don’t know how to move forward. Therapy can be a great support while experiencing mental health struggles, addiction, relationship struggles, and basic life change.

A Counselor and Social Worker that provides counseling services have undergone a graduate program where they will receive a Masters of Arts or Masters of Science in Mental Health Counseling and/or Social Work. A Counseling Intern is currently in their graduate studies. A Provisionally Licensed Professional Counselor (PLPC) has graduated with their masters and able to provide counseling services with a licensed counseling supervisor which takes a minimum of 2 years. A Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) has completed their supervision and counseling hours to provide counseling services as a fully licensed counselor.

Counselors are trained in different therapeutic modalities to help clients navigate life changes and difficult experiences. Counselors believe that each client is the expert of their own life and cannot provide advice but can provide good questions and tools to help each person achieve his or her goals.

Our mind and body are so connected that changes in one of them will lead to changes in another. Our mind controls our bodies in every moment, from how we react to something to taking a breath. Without a healthy and productive mind, our bodies will suffer and tell us something needs to change and vice versa.

The fight, flight, or freeze response are protective responses when we feel triggered by our experiences. The fight response can present in yelling, hitting, anger outbursts, and aggression. The flight response presents in overthinking, workaholism, anxiety, avoiding, and running away. The freeze response presents itself in dissociation, the body collapsing, feeling numb, and feeling the loss for words.

A symptom is a message from our body saying something isn’t right and needs to change. Examples of symptoms include: anxiety, sadness, physical pain, lack of motivation, sleep changes, appetite changes, mood swings, fatigue, irritability, etc.

Trauma is a stuck or frozen survival response that is trapped in the body. It can be a condition that results due to too much, too soon, too fast, or not enough. If the nervous system does not have the ability to discharge the survival energy, it can become stuck in the body and cause a variety of ailments ranging from depression, anxiety, PTSD, chronic pain, illness, dissociation, and disconnection from oneself.

Why would the nervous system not be able to discharge this stuck energy? Perhaps it wasn’t safe to. We live in a world where it’s not socially acceptable to discharge trauma- stigma, narratives around being weak, belief systems that teach us to suppress, and as a result of living in a fast-paced society focused on consumerism, avoidance, and distraction.

Perhaps we didn’t have enough support or acceptance. Being able to experience safety allows us to have a place to begin to discharge trauma, which can look like crying, shaking, tingling, twitching, yelling, breathing, or moving our bodies. This is why the presence of an attuned, caring person or therapist is crucial to emotional healing and trauma processing- to allow for the body to move the charge of the survival energy in the way that it needs to so it can return to balance. The therapist acts as a secure attachment to reconnect with that sense of safety that wasn’t present prior.

What is CBT? CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This type of therapy connects the way we think and act to feel better. Sometimes we feel disconnected from our thoughts, actions, and bodies and aren’t aware of why we feel so off. This therapy helps us to reconnect these things and grow to move past symptoms that get in our way.

What happens in a CBT session? We will explore thoughts, behaviors, and emotions and how they are influencing one another. Sometimes our emotions, behaviors, and thoughts are keeping us from progressing forwards in life. CBT Therapy is very logical and concrete by using Socratic questions and finding evidence to reframe distorted thinking.

What does CBT help with? CBT helps with anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, communication struggles, OCD, and PTSD recovery.

How does CBT work? Through CBT we can change our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions so we feel better and can move forward. Thoughts, behaviors, and emotions are so connected that thought changing one of them we can change the others.

What is DBT? DBT stands for Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Sometimes with extreme emotions it is important to balance the mind with the behaviors. Dialectical has a double meaning; firstly, it means a dialogue and conversation. Secondly, it means there is opposition. Therefore, dialectical means to use conversation to come to a balance between opposing forces. These forces can be emotions, thoughts, or opinions. A conversation can be inner dialogue (the conversation with yourself within your mind) or outer dialogue (like with a therapist). Behavior is where we look at our actions and determine if we can behave in a more productive healthy way. Therapy means a therapist is involved.

What happens in a DBT session? DBT has four main components utilizing distress tolerance, mindfulness, relationship skills, and emotional regulation. Within a DBT session, a counselor and client will collaboratively discern which area needs focus to begin strengthening these skills within these four principles.

What does DBT help with? DBT has been shown to be helpful in treating many different mental health diagnoses such as Bipolar Disorder and Personality Disorders. However, DBT can be helpful for all people wanting to grow in mindfulness, relationship skills, and emotion regulation during difficult times.

What is play therapy? Play therapy is a way of using play (toys and games, etc) to explore life problems and experiences.

Who is it for? It is mainly used with children since play is the language of a child. Children process and work through difficult times through play. However, play therapy is also effective for adults in bypassing the prefrontal cortex and helping work through childhood trauma stored in the sub cortex. Play Therapy believes for adults, we have to remember that if we experienced a trauma at 4 years old, then we will have to process it in a similar way a 4 year old would need to.

What is Sandtray Therapy? Sandtray Therapy is a type of Play Therapy specifically using miniatures and a sandtray. Within this therapy, the client will utilize miniatures to represent their world to help process through challenges.

Who is it for? Similar to play therapy it is utilized for all ages. It is a very effective therapy in bypassing the prefrontal cortex in helping clients process through trauma stored in the subcortex.

What is Art Therapy? Art Therapy is used for all ages where you use expressive means to process through difficult emotions and times using paint, colors, collages, etc. Similarly, it bypasses the prefrontal cortex which allows for deeper processing.

Talk Therapy is a top-down approach. Brainspotting, EMDR, Sandtray Therapy, Art Therapy, Somatic Experiencing, and Play Therapy use a bottom-up approach which accesses the somatic activation related to issues, which travel up from the peripheral nervous system (in the body) into the spine and then brain stem/midbrain. The midbrain houses the limbic system where our survival responses, traumas, emotions, memories, and motor coordination (in order to respond to threats and safety) are held. The midbrain processing of trauma is crucial as it is the site where traumas and a variety of emotional and physical conditions are held. The neocortex (frontal lobe), is the newest part of our brain and is the site of rational thought, linear processes, critical thinking, logic, sequencing, language, and judgment. The neocortex has little to do with regulating emotions while the limbic system and midbrain plays a crucial role in regulating emotions.

Talk therapies access the more neocortical areas of the brain and language. This is often times why talk therapy can take a long time to adjust behaviors and many clients find it challenging to change how they feel or experience the world when they are struggling. Talk therapy isn’t easily able to access the part of the brain (midbrain) that actually works with shifting emotional (and thereby their corresponding physiological states). It can sometimes feel like you are trying to shove interventions down the frontal lobe to reach the subcortex (i.e.- When a person is depressed and you try to give them directions to go for a walk, eat healthy, reach out to others, etc.) It can be difficult for the client to follow through on these directions depending on the severity of the emotional dysregulation in the midbrain, even if they want to follow your recommendations.

Ideally, the midbrain and frontal lobe are in bidirectional communication with one another, however, with trauma and other stressors, this communication can be disrupted, leading to a variety of mental health conditions and unwanted behaviors and ailments.

Brainspotting utilizes eye positions to locate, access, and discharge stuck material held in the brain and body.

The eyes are the extension of the brain, specifically the subcortical part of our brain where we store traumatic events.

A brainspot is an eye position that correlates to a subcortical area of relevance, which can be found in the brain, and is elicited by bringing up a topic and its correlating somatic activation (how one senses what they’re thinking/feeling/experiencing in their body).

Once a brainspot has been located using a variety of techniques by a trained Brainspotting practitioner, the client is guided to keep their gaze on the brainspot/eye position, so that the brain can begin a self-scanning process. Focusing on this eye position allows the brain’s self-scanning capacity to engage in accessing the neural networks that are holding the somatic material/information that the client is wanting to work on. Once found and held, the brain can basically say “oh hey, here’s the location of this issue we have been dealing with for so long! Here’s all that stuck survival energy that we’ve dissociated from or had to avoid!” It then can engage it’s homeostatic capacity to discharge the held survival energy.

At this point in a Brainspotting session, clients will sometimes experience strong waves of emotions or somatic sensations, memories, and thoughts (sympathetic arousal related to the event/trauma) followed by parasympathetic activation which is the process of homeostasis (feelings of calm, groundedness, or relaxation). These waves of processing continue as the therapist holds space for the client in a deeply relational way and gives the client space to allow their body to unfold and unload the trauma as it needs to.

Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) was discovered by Francine Shapiro, PhD in 1987. EMDR is an evidenced based, bottom-up type of therapy utilized for all forms of PTSD. it has also been shown to be effective for phobias, OCD, addiction, depression, anxiety, grief, and more.

EMDR is based off the theory of Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) which believes our body and brain intuitively knows how to heal itself. However, when someone experiences a traumatic event, it is as if the trauma gets stuck in our brain and nervous system where it repeats itself in the present as if the trauma is still present. EMDR utilizes bilateral stimulation to help dislodge the trauma for it to flow through Adaptive Information Processing.

Within an EMDR session, a client will pick an area of focus/ target to process. The client will identify an image, a negative cognitive belief, sensation and emotion connected within this target and measurehis/ her distress level. The EMDR trained clinician will then perform bilateral stimulation whether visually, auditorily or kinesthetically with tappers to activate the AIP processing. The client will then perform free association from the target such as watching the images pass by as you riding on a train. The brain will then instinctively work through the connected neural memories with that specific traumatic target.

An EMDR trained clinician has undergone 50 hours of training, practicum and consultation utilizing the EMDR model. The importance of an EMDR trained clinician is preparing a client for EMDR therapy, discerning the readiness of the client, as well as gently guiding a client through and out of the EMDR process.

A client has full control within EMDR and alongside. Alongside the standard EMDR protocol, there are many other protocols for different areas of distress and focus for a clinician to utilize.

Research has shown it to be one of the most effective trauma therapies of our day.

Learn more about EMDR at EMDRIA.org.

What is parts work? You are composed of parts of yourself. These parts can sometimes be in conflict. For example: Having an argument in your head. Parts work is designed to process these parts and find agreement and balance to reduce inner conflict.

Parts Work Therapies: Inner Child work; Developmental Needs Meeting Strategy, and Internal Family Systems. Each of these therapy models utilize identifying different parts of yourself and finding the allies, enemies, and ways to nurture and find balance within yourself.

A direct therapy approach is when a counselor will prompt you in a directive manner with questions and a structured session format. Examples of these therapies include Gottman Method, CBT, DBT, ERP, and Solution Focused Brief Therapy.

An indirect counseling session will consist of a counselor openly prompting you to process your thoughts in a non structured way. Examples of these therapies include play therapy, sandtray therapy, and art therapy.