Our Counselling Approach
The essence of transformation and change starts with awareness. An awareness of how we are experiencing something leads to more long-lasting change. This involves more aspects of ourselves than an intellectual insight. For this reason our work centers on this experiential focus.
From this perspective, the focus is on the present moment, mindfulness, and a holistic experience (mind, body, and spirit). Our past experiences are alive in the present moment so that we can access our emotions, sensations, movement, reactions, and behaviour that are part of the memories we hold. Neuroscience research also informs us that emotions are key to integrating new information and therefore key to any transformational experience.
Our Values
Internal Family Systems
Internal Family Systems is a comprehensive approach that views the human psyche from a multiplicity perspective. What this means is that we develop our personality as parts of us rather than a unified whole. Even though in each moment we experience ourselves as a unified self (this is me right now) we have many different aspects and reactions that are expressed over and over as a way of managing the world. For example, I keep reacting with anger whenever I think someone is lying to me. This reaction contains emotions, sensations, memories, thoughts, and meaning. IFS conceptualizes this cluster of experience as a part of you. So experiencing ourselves as many parts is a natural way of relating to ourselves and our identity is made up of the various parts of us.
The IFS Model views these parts as developing within us from birth in response to having to manage conflicts externally and in our internal world as our environment is unable to support our needs. This lack of response and support for who we are and what we need causes an emotional wound (pain) that we have to do something with. So we develop these parts to manage the pain by minimizing, forgetting, distracting, etc. Throughout our lives, these parts become more and more extreme through repetitive use.
Internal Family Systems work experientially by accessing these parts in the moment where we notice how they sit and live in our mind and body. To bring an internal experiential focus to resolve the original wound they carry. As we work in this way we can develop a relationship to ourselves that releases us from the outdated ways of managing the world based on the past and brings compassion and acceptance to all parts of us.
Your IFS Therapists
Mindfulness
Main elements of mindfulness.
In The Mindful Brain (2007), Daniel Siegal proposed that mindfulness is a form of a healthy relationship or attunement to oneself. In many ways, mindfulness is less about being a complete therapy method but more a practice that affects the ability of the therapist to be present and attuned to the client.
Mindfulness can be taught and practiced within therapy to help process psychological material and increase self-awareness. In some ways, mindfulness is the present-day term for awareness.
Nonconceptual. Mindfulness is awareness without absorption in our thought processes.
Present-centered. Mindfulness is always in the present moment. Thoughts about our experience are one step removed from the present moment.
Nonjudgemental. Awareness cannot occur freely if we would like our experience to be other than it is.
Intentional. Mindfulness always includes an intention to direct attention somewhere. Returning attention to the present moment gives mindfulness continuity over time.
Participant observation. Mindfulness is our detached witnessing. It is experiencing the mind and body more intimately
All Turning Point Therapists Practice Mindfulness
Focusing
Focusing is a practice and approach to therapy that arose out of research done by Eugene Gendlin and Carl Rogers in the 1960s. They noticed that some therapy clients got better as a result of therapy, and others continued to struggle and feel stuck. When they looked closely, they noticed that the clients who got better all had a particular skill, a way of listening inside to what things were like for them. Gendlin studied these clients and discovered that this skill could be clearly defined and taught to those who didn’t do it naturally, improving therapy outcomes for more people.
The skill and practice of focusing is similar to mindfulness practice and the somatic awareness that is used in other types of therapy, but it’s also unique in some ways. Focusing helps us get in touch with the way something feels, which may include images, memories, emotions or body sensations, and may also be something more vague or unclear that exists underneath all that. Focusing also helps us to learn how to relate to that feeling with an attitude of friendly curiosity. When these two ingredients come together, there is very often a shift in the way things feel, which usually brings more clarity, lightness, relief, or a feeling of rightness
Relational Life Therapy
Relational Life Therapy (RLT) was developed by Terry Real and is one of our main approaches to couples counselling. The principles and methods are also applicable in individual therapy. RLT helps us understand our relationship dynamics and how our reactivity is affecting our responses to the people in our lives. It gives a clear roadmap to develop healthy boundaries and self-esteem. Two essential skills in healthy relationships. RLT also incorporates how the impact of our family of origin affects our relationship interactions.
You will learn:
How to discuss difficult topics without escalating.
How to change the common losing strategies into winning strategies in expressing your needs.
How to make effective repairs to relational breaches.
Heal childhood relational trauma and interact with your wise self rather than your wounded child.
Most of our therapists have at least a level 1 training in RLT.
Your RLT Therapists
Somatic Psychotherapy
There are a number of trainings that come under Somatic Psychotherapy such as somatic experiencing, sensorimotor, and somatic transformation that overlap in what they are focused on. Essentially they use interventions that focus on the release of trauma in the body. This focus is rooted in the present moment awareness of somatic experiences It highlights the importance of a regulated nervous system to enable a working through of the somatic experience. We draw on research from neurobiology and psychology in our understanding of how trauma and developmental trauma are responded to and held within the body and mind.
From this perspective, the therapist will be paying attention to the specific language of your body and what you may be expressing through posture, movement, sensations, tension, and gestures. Regulation is when our body and nervous system can tolerate our experience. When we are regulated our emotions, sensation, and autonomic systems are energetic and flow smoothly without being stressed. Our inbuilt relational systems (bonding, attachment, social engagement) provide the mechanisms to create a secure attachment. Experiences of safety and security are developed through the therapeutic relationship.
Some clinicians work solely from a somatic perspective. We tend to integrate somatic interventions within a therapeutic process that includes cognitive reflections and other approaches identified here.
Your Somatic Oriented Therapists
AEDP
AEDP heals trauma and helps to undo aloneness by championing our innate healing capacity in a safe, attached therapeutic relationship.
Through moment-to-moment, in-depth processing of difficult emotional and relational experiences, AEDP clinicians help clients recover their sense of core self and experience increased resilience and a renewed zest for life.
The AEDP model of psychotherapy:
- Is applicable across many human struggels such as; trauma, depression, emotion dysregulation, negative thoughts, experiential avoidance and interpersonal problems
- Establishes a therapeutic relationship of safety and trust
- Enhances positive functioning such as self-compassion, well-being, and self-esteem in both therapist and client
