Therapeutic Orientation
It is always important to understand a problem before proceeding to work together with a client to resolve it. This idea is at the heart of a book chapter I wrote on assessment in therapy, of which three important, briefly highlighted pages are included in the Handouts section on the Home page. Treatment goals based on an initial assessment are set collaboratively with clients.
In therapy, for individuals, strategies include cognitive-behavioural, experiential, mindfulness, interpersonal, schema-focused and dialectic behavioural interventions. For individuals who have experienced trauma, treatment includes Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET). For couples, therapy primarily employs an emotion-focused /attachment approach (which involves Well-Understood Assertiveness), and may include focused behavioural and/or cognitive interventions.
Both individual and couple therapies have important growth-focused orientations:
• an integrative approach that helps clients to identify and change key behaviours and
thoughts/schemas which, due to psychological interdependence, then reduces
emotionally painful experiences like depression and anxiety.
• working directly with emotions and, in particular, helping clients experience and express
a greater breadth of important underlying primary feelings. This is effective from a
mental health point of view because it increases balance on the EmotionReason
dialectic, and therefore facilitates better decision-making and quality of life.
• identifying and working with triggering events (present and past) that perpetuate
ongoing negative life patterns. This enables clients to experience fewer uncomfortable
symptoms, as well as resolve problematic behaviours and improve stressful relationships.
To increase the efficiency of therapy, growth -oriented activities are encouraged between sessions, and handouts are used effectively to facilitate this approach.