Internal Family Systems, Somatic, Mindfulness, Expressive Arts & Attachment Based Therapies
I practice in an integrated and holistic manner, finding the best approaches to help each unique client. Below you can read more about some of the methods that I commonly use.
Internal Family Systems Therapy
One way to think about the human mind is to see it as naturally consisting of many interacting “parts,” which together form an internal system or “family” inside of every person. It can actually be helpful to think of parts as little people or sub personalities inside of you. Each part has its own perspectives, feelings, memories, goals, motivations, gifts and styles of behaving. Some parts bare the scars of emotional, relational and physical wounds. Some parts protect against external threats or internal pain. Some are locked in polarized battles with each other, while others function in a more collaborative way. Some are flexible, while others are rigid and dogmatic.
Most of us can relate to having parts that help us manage everyday life like: the People Pleaser, the Perfectionist, the Inner Critic, the Class Clown, the Care-Taker or the Task Master, as well as parts that are simply concerned with making us feel better no matter the cost, like: the Overeater Eater, the Addict, the Rager, the Dissociating part or the Suicidal part. And, we all have tender parts that hold vulnerable feelings like shame, fear, loneliness and grief.
Often we find ourselves “blended” with our parts - meaning we are fully identified with and flooded by their thoughts, feelings, needs and actions. A primary goal of IFS therapy is to help clients “unbend” and reconnect with their larger Self - the you that naturally embodies the “8 C’s” - curiosity, compassion, calm, clarity, courage, confidence, creativity, and connectedness. The larger Self is able to be with parts vs just being in parts.
Self is not just an idea, but a physical, emotional, relational and even spiritual state of being. When you are in “Self” your nervous system is regulated and you are capable of feeling deeply connected to your parts, others and the world around you. Sometimes it can seem like you don’t have a Self or can’t find it when you need it most. The good news is - Self exits in everyone! It cannot be destroyed or taken from you, but hurt, wounded, and protective parts can eclipse it, leaving you stuck in “blended” states.
Healing happens when your parts begin to build trust in your larger Self and allow your Self to assist them in working through the traumas and wounds they carry and react to. The more compassionate, open and calm the communication between Self and parts is, the more healing happens. Self is the you who can welcome, understand and support every single part in their unique healing journey and the you who can come to lead your entire inner family in a harmonious, collaborative and purposefully way!
Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapy offers a variety of benefits including:
Decreases in physical pain, mental stress, depression, anxiety, and dissociation.
Increases in confidence, resilience, focus, spontaneity, creativity, passion and vitality.
Being out of touch with our bodies is kind of like trying to drive a stick shift without any knowledge of how to shift the gears! If you are lucky, you might be able to get the car moving, but the ride will surely be full of grinding, lurching, and stalling. And, there is a good chance that you will experience feelings such as frustration, irritation, anxiety, embarrassment, powerlessness or even hopelessness.
Somatic therapy recognizes that the body is tremendous sources of information and wisdom, as well as the primary vehicle through which we experience our emotions and sense of aliveness. The body holds many clues to unfinished business from our past. Implicit memories (many from infancy and childhood before we developed language) are stored neurologically in our bodies and expressed through patterns of breathing, physical tension, physical sensations (or numbness), facial expressions, posture, movements, and gestures. By learning to pay attention to what's happening in one’s body, somatic therapy enables clients to observe these patterns in action and creates an opportunity for new understanding, choice, and holistic change, rather than simply repeating the same patterns over and over in an unconscious and automatic manner.
Too often, however, we don’t know how to, are afraid to, or don’t know why it is valuable to pay attention to our bodies. There are many factors that fuel this disconnection, including cultural norms and values, as well as our own efforts to avoid uncomfortable, frightening, or overwhelming emotions which are actually experienced in our bodies. Unfortunately, when we disconnect from our bodies in this way, we also inadvertently limit our natural ability to heal and understand ourselves, as well as feel emotions such as joy, passion and pleasure. Somatic therapy helps clients to become more comfortable being in their own bodies, so that they can safely experience, learn from, and appreciate the full depth of their lives.
Some techniques used in somatic therapy include:
Safely learning to track and make sense of physical sensations and spontaneous gestures and movements
Gently “completing” physical impulses your body wants to make
Helping your body discharge survival energy that may be contributing to chronic tension, stress, anxiety, arousal, holding patterns and constriction
Learning grounding exercises to help your body feel safer, calmer and more empowered
Observing and working with your breath
Mindfulness
Have you ever stopped to notice how much of your life is spent caught up in thinking about the past or the future? Of course, learning from our personal and collective histories, enjoying memories of important and meaningful experiences, and planning for the future are all worthwhile activities. However, too often, these mental tasks take-over and leave us unaware of and unable to appreciate the present moment. We worry, strategize, review, judge, wonder, regret, plan, assume, and anticipate - sometimes at the expense of actually living our lives!
How we pay attention and respond to whatever is unfolding in each moment of our lives has an incredible impact on our sense of wellbeing. Mindfulness is the practice of purposely focusing your attention on the present moment with an attitude of curiosity, compassion, non-judgment and acceptance. People can practice mindfulness by engaging in activities such as meditation, yoga, Qigong, or guided visualizations, but mindfulness can also be practiced in a more informal manner by simply bringing a purposeful, curious, compassionate, non-judgmental and accepting awareness to whatever is happening in the moment. When mindfulness is taught and practiced in therapy, it can help clients discover a greater sense of calm, clarity, wellbeing and empowerment.
Mindfulness helps us to “befriend” the present moment, rather than fighting what is. Often, clients confuse mindful-acceptance with passivity or see mindfulness as incompatible with change. Paradoxically, the opposite is actually true - when we can learn to relax into what is happening right now in this moment (the good, the bad and the ugly), we free up a tremendous amount of energy, which was previously spent “arguing with what is.” This process allows us to see things more clearly and take action to create change with less effort, self-doubt, or self-criticism.
There is now a wealth of scientific research being done on the effects of mindfulness. Numerous research studies have demonstrated that mindfulness enhances both mental and physical wellbeing and reduces chronic pain. Below are some key research findings (see sources at bottom of the page):
Anxiety, stress, depression, exhaustion and irritability all decrease with regular sessions of meditation (1).
Mindfulness improves working memory, reaction times, creativity, attention span, and mental and physical stamina and resilience (2).
Regular meditators are happier and more contented, while being far less likely to suffer from psychological distress (3).
Mindfulness can dramatically reduce pain and the emotional reaction to it (4,5).
Meditation enhances brain function. It increases grey matter in areas associated with self-awareness, empathy, self-control and attention (6). It soothes the parts of the brain that produce stress hormones (7) and builds those areas that lift mood and promote learning (8). It even reduces some of the thinning of certain areas of the brain that naturally occurs with aging (9).
Meditation improves the immune system. Regular meditators are admitted to hospital far less often for cancer, heart disease and numerous infectious diseases (10).
Mindfulness may reduce aging at the cellular level by promoting chromosomal health and resilience (11).
Meditation improves heart and circulatory health by reducing blood pressure and lowering the risk of hypertension. Mindfulness reduces the risks of developing and dying from cardiovascular disease and lowers its severity should it arise (12).
Expressive Arts Therapy
Engaging in creative process can be a soothing, relaxing and playful experience. It can also help you access emotions, perspectives and solutions that might not be accessible through talk therapy alone. Rather than simply using the cognitive functions of logic and verbal language, creative expression allows us to tap into other parts of our mind and use other parts of our brain. Images and symbols can often help us articulate things that are confusing, overwhelming or just hard to put into words, as well as help us access unconscious thoughts, feelings and memories that we are not presently aware of (but may be exerting a powerful impact on our lives, nonetheless).
Expressive arts therapy doesn't require any particular artistic skill on the client's part; it’s simply another way to connect with, express, and understand yourself. It can often feel risky for clients to let themselves explore and express using creative modalities - bringing up fears of being critiqued by others, “doing it wrong”/self-judgment, encountering creative “blocks”/worrying nothing will come out, or worrying that something painful or scary will be revealed. Often clients tell themselves, “I’m not really a creative person.” Fortunately, creativity is a natural function of being human. Learning to understand and work through obstacles to creativity can have a profound impact on our lives.
Therapy provides a supportive environment and relationship, in which it is safe to be vulnerable, try out new things, make mistakes, and express yourself freely. This can be a liberating, healing and enlightening experience; one which generates new internal and relational patterns that can be transferred to other parts of your life.
Expressive arts therapy can include an infinite number activities using drawing, painting, collage, drama, music, poetry and writing, sandtray, dance/movement, guided imagery, sculpture…Here are some examples:
making a collage about something meaningful, such as hopes and dreams or fears and worries
picking from my collection of postcards, in order to find an image that represents how you are feeling
coloring a mandala in order to create a soothing, mindful experience
using role play to practice addressing an anxiety provoking experience or going back to work through a past experience
using paint, markers or pastels to create an image, shape or simply a color that represents your feelings
creating a visual timeline to help organize past experiences into a coherent narrative
writing a letter to parts of yourself, or to someone else, in order to express yourself authentically, knowing that you do not have to actually send it
creating a ritual for grief or healing past trauma
writing a poem or using song lyrics to describe an experience
using art or guided imagery to create protective figures that support a sense of safety
working on a creative medium outside of session and bringing it to share in your therapy.
Attachment Based/Relational Therapy
We are relational beings, born with an innate impulse to connect with others. Our life experiences, particularly our interactions with caregivers during our early childhood, as well as relationships with other family members, important people in our lives, and society at large, all create unconscious mental models that we use to make sense of and respond to the world. These models shape our sense of who we are, how we act, what we expect from the world, and how we connect with others. These models also inform how comfortable we are being in touch with our own emotions and how skilled we are at managing strong feelings when they arise.
Relational therapy helps people to become aware of these unconscious models by paying attention to what is happening in their current relationships, including the relationship between client and therapist. This increased consciousness allows for greater understanding, choice and change. Relational therapy also offers each client on opportunity to connect with an understanding, non-judgmental, and compassionate person, who is willing and able to stay with them trough whatever is unfolding in their lives. Many clients find that when they have someone who can go with them into their darkest places, suddenly those places don't seem so dark anymore.
References
1 Baer, R. A., Smith, G. T., Hopkins, J., Kreitemeyer, J. & Toney, L. (2006), ‘Using self-report assessment methods to explore facets of mindfulness’, Assessment, 13, pp. 27–45.
2 Jha, A., et al. (2007), ‘Mindfulness training modifies subsystems of attention’, Cognitive Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 7, pp. 109–19; Tang, Y. Y., Ma, Y., Wang, J., Fan, Y., Feng, S., Lu, Q., et al. (2007), ‘Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), 104(43), pp. 17152–6; McCracken, L. M. & Yang, S.-Y. (2008), ‘A contextual cognitive-behavioral analysis of rehabilitation workers’ health and well-being: Influences of acceptance, mindful- ness and values-based action’, Rehabilitation Psychology, 53, pp.479–85; Ortner, C. N. M., Kilner, S. J. & Zelazo, P. D. (2007), ‘Mindfulness meditation and reduced emotional interference on a cognitive task’, Motivation and Emotion, 31, pp. 271–83; Brefczynski-Lewis, J. A., Lutz, A., Schaefer, H. S., Levinson, D. B. & Davidson, R. J. (2007), ‘Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), 104(27), pp. 11483–8.
3. Ivanowski, B. & Malhi, G. S. (2007), ‘The psychological and neuro-physiological concomitants of mindfulness forms of meditation’, Acta Neuropsychiatrica, 19, pp. 76–91; Shapiro, S. L., Oman, D., Thoresen, C. E., Plante, T. G. & Flinders, T. (2008), ‘Cultivating mindfulness: effects on well-being’, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 64(7), pp. 840–62; Shapiro, S. L., Schwartz, G. E. & Bonner, G. (1998), ‘Effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction on medical and pre- medical students’, Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 21, pp. 581–99.
4. Kabat-Zinn, J., Lipworth, L., Burncy, R. & Sellers, W. (1986), ‘Four- year follow-up of a meditation-based program for the self- regulation of chronic pain: Treatment outcomes and compliance’, Clinical Journal of Pain, 2, p. 159; Morone, N. E., Greco, C. M. & Weiner, D. K. (2008), ‘Mindfulness meditation for the treatment of chronic low back pain in older adults: A randomized controlled pilot study’, Pain, 134(3), pp. 310–19; Grant, J. A. & Rainville, P. (2009), ‘Pain sensitivity and analgesic effects of mindful states in zen meditators: A cross-sectional study’, Psychosomatic Medicine, 71(1), pp. 106–14.
5. Brown, Christopher A., Jones, Anthony K. P. 2013, MD, ‘Psycho- biological Correlates of Improved Mental Health in Patients With Musculoskeletal Pain After a Mindfulness-based Pain Management Program’, Clinical Journal of Pain, 29(3), pp. 233–44.
6. Hölzel, B. K., Ott, U., Gard, T., Hempel, H., Weygandt, M., Morgen, K. & Vaitl, D. (2008), ‘Investigation of mindfulness meditation practitioners with voxel-based morphometry’, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 3, pp 55–61; Lazar, S., Kerr, C., Wasserman, R., Gray, J., Greve, D., Treadway, M., McGarvey, M., Quinn, B., Dusek, J., Benson, H., Rauch, S., Moore, C. & Fischl, B. (2005), ‘Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness’, NeuroReport, 16, pp. 1893–7; Luders, Eileen, Toga, Arthur W., Lepore, Natasha & Gaser, Christian (2009), ‘The underlying anatomical correlates of long-term meditation: Larger hippocampal and frontal volumes of gray matter’, Neuroimage, 45, pp. 672–8.
7. Tang, Y., Ma, Y., Wang, J., Fan, Y., Feg, S., Lu, Q., Yu, Q., Sui, D., Rothbart, M., Fan, M. & Posner, M. (2007), ‘Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, pp. 17152–6.
8. Davidson, R. J. (2004), ‘Well-being and affective style: Neural substrates and biobehavioural correlates’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 359, pp. 1395–1411.
9. Lazar, S., Kerr, C., Wasserman, R., Gray, J., Greve, D., Treadway, M., McGarvey, M., Quinn, B., Dusek, J., Benson, J., Rauch, S., Moore, C. & Fischl, B. (2005), ‘Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness’, NeuroReport, 16, pp 1893–7.
10. Davidson, R. J., Kabat-Zinn, J. Schumacher, J., Rosenkranz, M., Muller, D., Santorelli, S.F., Urbanowski, F., Harrington, A., Bonus, K. & Sheridan, J. F. (2003) ‘Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation’, Psychosomatic Medicine, 65, pp. 564–70; Tang, Y., Ma, Y., Wang, J., Fan, Y., Feg, S., Lu, Q., Yu, Q., Sui, D., Rothbart, M., Fan, M. & Posner, M. (2007), ‘Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, pp. 17152–6.
11. Epel, Elissa, Daubenmier, Jennifer, Tedlie Moskowitz, Judith, Folkman, Susan & Blackburn, Elizabeth (2009), ‘Can Meditation Slow Rate of Cellular Aging? Cognitive Stress, Mindfulness, and Telomeres’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1172; Longevity, Regeneration, and Optimal Health Integrating Eastern and Western Perspectives, pp. 34–53.
12. Ibid. 26. Kabat-Zinn, J., Lipworth, L., Burncy, R. & Sellers, W. (1986), ‘Four-year follow-up of a meditation-based program for the self- regulation of chronic pain: Treatment outcomes and compliance’, Clinical Journal of Pain, 2, p. 159; Brown, Christopher A., Jones, Anthony K. P. (2013), ‘Psychobiological Correlates of Improved Mental Health in Patients With Musculoskeletal Pain After a Mindfulness-based Pain Management Program’, Clinical Journal of Pain, 29(3), pp. 233–44; Lutz, Antoine, McFarlin, Daniel R., Perlman, David M., Salomons, Tim V. & Davidson, Richard J. (2013), ‘Altered anterior insula activation during anticipation and experience of painful stimuli in expert meditators’, Journal NeuroImage, 64, pp. 538–46.