What is Behavior Activation?

Behavior Activation originates from the belief that when people become depressed, they tend to engage more in avoidance and isolation, which often maintains and/or worsens their symptoms. The work in therapy is to slowly decrease this avoidance and isolation and increase their involvement in activities that have been shown to improve mood. This includes activities they enjoyed before becoming depressed, activities related to their values, or even everyday pursuits that get pushed aside.

Learning about how a person’s activities affect his or her moods often entails completing daily activity monitoring and rating the mood accompanying each activity in which they take part. This helps both the person and the therapist identify patterns in behavior and find ways to increase those activities that heighten positive moods. Throughout treatment, increasingly challenging activities are assigned, each building on the individual’s improvements in mood when specific types of activities and undertaken.

What is CBT?

Cognitive Behavior Therapy approaches the way people perceive a situation as more closely connected to their reaction than to the situation itself. CBT helps people to change unhelpful thinking, worry thoughts, and their resulting behaviors. It uses a number of tools to bring about these changes. Much of the therapy work is focused on how the person misinterprets their actions and those of others and gives them tools to alter their way of thinking and problem solve more useful ways of looking at the situation. This often leads to improving their mood and ability to enjoy their lives and being in the world.

CBT is extremely useful in assisting people with anxiety, various mood disorders, phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

What is DBT?

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) focuses on the psychosocial aspects of people’s behavior. The theory behind the approach is that some people are prone to react in a more intense and out-of-the-ordinary manner toward certain emotional situations, primarily those found in relationships with people whom they are close to. It suggests that some people’s distress in such situations can increase far more quickly than the average person’s, attain a higher level of emotional stimulation, and take much more time to return to a calmer emotional state.

DBT helps the person identify their strengths and build on them while recognizing thoughts, beliefs and assumptions that make their life harder. It is a highly collaborative approach with close attention paid to the relationship between the therapist and the client. People in DBT treatment are encouraged to work out problems with their therapist that they have in their relationships

DBT includes four sets of behavioral skills.

·      Mindfulness: the practice of being fully aware and present in this one moment.

·      Distress Tolerance: how to tolerate pain in difficult situations, not change it.

·      Interpersonal Effectiveness: how to ask for what you want and say no while maintaining self-respect and relationships with others.

·      Emotion Regulation: how to change emotions that you want to change.

The term "dialectical" means to combine opposites. The primary dialectic within DBT is between the seemingly opposite strategies of acceptance and change. For example, DBT therapists accept clients as they are while also acknowledging that they need to change in order to reach their goals. For example, the four skills modules include two sets of acceptance-oriented skills (mindfulness and distress tolerance) and two sets of change-oriented skills (emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness).

What is Brief Solution Focused Therapy?

Brief solution focused therapy is targeted toward solutions, rather than problems. Even the most chronic problems have periods or times when the difficulties do not occur or are less intense. By identifying the times when problems are less severe or even absent, we can discover many positive activities that individuals are not fully aware of. By making people aware of these small successes and repeating the successful things they do when the problem is less severe, it helps them improve their lives and become more positive and hopeful. This in turn, assists individuals to become more interested in creating a better life for themselves.

Because these solutions appear occasionally and are already within the person, repeating successful behaviors is easier than learning an entirely new set of potential solutions. Since it takes less effort, people may become more eager to repeat the successful behaviors and make further changes.

What is Exposure Therapy?

Exposure therapy is designed to help people manage problematic fears. Through the use of various techniques, a person is gradually exposed to the situation that causes them distress. The goal of exposure therapy is to create a safe environment in which a person can reduce anxiety, decrease avoidance of dreaded situations, and improve one's quality of life.

When people experience anxiety due to a traumatic memory, fear, or phobia, they often avoid anything that reminds them of it. This avoidance provides temporary relief but ultimately maintains the fear and pattern of avoidance. In some cases, the avoidance can actually make things worse and give more power to what is feared.  Exposure therapy is designed to reduce the irrational feelings a person has assigned to an object or situation by safely exposing him or her to various aspects of that fear.

What is Self-Compassion Therapy?

Self-compassion therapy is extending compassion to one's self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering. Self-compassion requires taking a balanced approach to one's negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated. The three core components of self-compassion are self-kindness, recognition of our common humanity, and mindfulness. These components are all helpful for the emotionally sensitive person and especially those whom suffer from feelings of immense shame.

What is Accelerated Resolution Therapy?

Accelerated Resolution Therapy reprograms how the brain stores traumatic memories. This approach provides effective relief from these strong physical and emotional reactions associated with post-traumatic stress, trauma, anxiety, depression, and performance in as few as 1-5 sessions. The treatment program incorporates visualization techniques that are enhanced by the use of eye movements, similar to restorative eye movement and rapid eye movement of sleep (REM), as well as voluntary memory and image replacement.