Treatment Strategies
Our professionally experienced and skilled counselors use comprehensive approaches in dealing with their clients/patients following different schools of psychotherapies. These are:
- Client Centered Psychotherapy,
- Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)
- Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP),
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EDMR) level-1.
Client Centered Therapy
Client Centered therapy evolved predominantly out of Roger’s own experience as a practitioner. Rogerian psychotherapy, also known as person-centered psychotherapy, is a humanistic approach which began developing in the 1940s and extended into the 1980s. Person-centered therapy seeks to facilitate a client’s self-actualizing tendency via acceptance (unconditional positive regard), therapist congruence (genuineness), and empathic understanding.
The necessary and sufficient conditions
Rogers (1957; 1959) stated that there are six necessary and sufficient conditions required for therapeutic change:
1. Therapist–client psychological contact: A relationship between client and therapist must exist, and it must be a relationship in which each person’s perception of the other is important.
2. Client incongruence: That incongruence exists between the client’s experience and awareness.
3. Therapist congruence or genuineness: The therapist is congruent within the therapeutic relationship. The therapist is deeply involved and they can draw on their own experiences (self-disclosure) to facilitate the relationship.
4. Therapist unconditional positive regard (UPR): The therapist accepts the client unconditionally, without judgment, disapproval or approval. This facilitates increased self-regard in the client, as they can begin to become aware of experiences in which their view of self-worth was distorted by others.
5. Therapist empathic understanding: The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s internal frame of reference. Accurate empathy on the part of the therapist helps the client believe the therapist’s unconditional love for them.
6. Client perception: That the client perceives, to at least a minimal degree, the therapist’s unconditional positive regards and empathic understanding.
Three of these conditions have become known as the ‘Core Conditions’ 3, 4 and 5 (above).
Processes
Rogers believed that a therapist who embodies the three critical and reflexive attitudes (the three ‘Core Conditions: congruence, unconditional positive regards, and empathy’) will help liberate their client to more confidently express their true feelings without fear of judgement. To achieve this, the client-centered therapist carefully avoids directly challenging their client’s way of communicating themselves in the session in order to enable a deeper exploration of the issues most intimate to them and free from external referencing.
Rogers was not prescriptive in telling his clients what to do but believed that the answers to the patients’ questions were within the patient and not the therapist. Accordingly, the therapist’s role was to create a facilitative, empathic environment wherein the patient could discover the answers for him or herself.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is a psychotherapeutic approach that was originally created as a relapse-prevention treatment for depression. It is a modified form of cognitive therapy that incorporates mindfulness practices such as meditation and breathing exercises. Using these tools, MBCT therapists teach clients how to break negative thought patterns that can cause a downward spiral into a depressed state so that they will be able to fight off depression before it takes hold.
It has been proven effective in patients with major depressive disorder who have experienced at least three episodes of depression. Mindfulness-based relapse prevention may also be helpful for treating generalized anxiety disorders and addictions. MBCT has also been shown to improve symptoms of depression in some people with physical health conditions, such as vascular disease and traumatic brain injury.
Sometimes normal sadness is a powerful trigger for someone who has recovered from a depressive state to relapse into another bout of depression. Rather than try to avoid or eliminate sadness or other negative emotions, one learns to change their relationship with these emotions by practicing meditation and other mindfulness exercises. These activities rebalance neural networks, allowing the client to move away from automatic negative responses toward an understanding that there are other ways to respond to situations. By developing a routine meditation practice, clients can use the technique whenever they start to feel overwhelmed by negative emotions. When sadness occurs and starts to bring up the usual negative associations that trigger relapse of depression, the client is equipped with tools that will help them replace negative thought patterns with a positive one.
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, United States in the 1970s. NLP’s creators claim there is a connection between neurological processes (neuro), language (linguistic) and behavioral patterns learned through experience (programming), and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life. Bandler and Grinder also claim that NLP methodology can “model” the skills of exceptional people, allowing anyone to acquire those skills.
In other words, learning NLP is like learning the language of your own mind!
Neuro-Linguistic Programming is like a user’s manual for the brain and taking an NLP training is like learning how to become fluent in the language of your mind so that the ever-so-helpful “server” that is in your unconscious stage will finally understand what you actually want out of life.
They claim as well that, often in a single session, NLP can treat problems such as phobias, depression, tic disorders, psychosomatic illness, near-sightedness, allergy, common cold, and learning disorders
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of psychotherapy developed by Francine Shapiro which uses eye movements or other forms of bilateral stimulation to assist trauma victims in processing distressing memories and beliefs. EMDR is a psychotherapy treatment that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories (Shapiro, 1989a, 1989b). Shapiro’s (2001) Adaptive Information Processing model posits that EMDR therapy facilitates the accessing and processing of traumatic memories and other adverse life experience to bring these to an adaptive resolution. After successful treatment with EMDR therapy, affective distress is relieved, negative beliefs are reformulated, and physiological arousal is reduced. During EMDR therapy the client attends to emotionally disturbing material in brief sequential doses while simultaneously focusing on an external stimulus. Therapist directed lateral eye movements are the most commonly used external stimulus but a variety of other stimuli including hand-tapping and audio stimulation are often used (Shapiro, 1991). Shapiro (1995, 2001) hypothesizes that EMDR therapy facilitates the accessing of the traumatic memory network, so that information processing is enhanced, with new associations forged between the traumatic memory and more adaptive memories or information. These new associations are thought to result in complete information processing, new learning, elimination of emotional distress, and development of cognitive insights scientific research has established EMDR as effective for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). However, clinicians also have reported success using EMDR in treatment of the following conditions: Panic Attacks, Complicated Grief, Dissociative Disorders, Disturbing Memories, Phobias, Pain Disorders, Performance Anxiety, Stress Reduction, Addictions, Sexual or Physical Abuse, Body Dysmorphic Disorders, Personality Disorders etc.