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What is individual therapy?
Individual therapy provides treatment and support for people experiencing difficulty with their mood, thoughts, perceptions, relationships, academics/jobs, trauma, and more. Therapy provides a safe space and supportive relationship to process any areas of distress and collaboratively work toward changing any impairments impacting daily life.
How can individual therapy help?
Individual therapy gives you access to process your innermost thoughts and emotions in a safe environment. Therapy can help you improve your relationships with others, enhance your ability to function in work/school/day to day activities, regulate your emotions, teach you healthy coping techniques to manage stress, alter any unhealthy or maladaptive behavior, organize and modify your thought patterns, process and recover from past traumas, and ultimately connect deeper with your body and mind.


What to expect in therapy?
Therapy will look different depending on your therapist’s style and modality. However, therapy will always consist of building and maintaining a strong relationship with your therapist. Therapy will also include collaboratively setting goals with your therapist and identifying areas of concern or problems you’d like to focus on during treatment. Throughout the course of your treatment, you will likely be processing issues that come up and learning different ways to manage and interact with your thoughts, emotions, and body. Sometimes you may be encouraged to do things outside of the therapy room to practice and further engrain the skills you are learning in therapy.
Here are some common treatment modalities:
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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) - Focuses on our thoughts and how they impact our feelings and behaviors. Therapist typically takes a more directive approach by teaching you about the role of your thoughts and how to identify and change them. Often includes engaging in homework outside of session.
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Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) - Focuses on regulating intense emotions through building distress tolerance skills and incorporating mindfulness. A semi-structured modality that frequently incorporates the use of worksheets and practicing skills in session.
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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) - Focuses on overcoming distress by accepting our thoughts and feelings rather than attempting to change them. Incorporates use of mindfulness strategies and leads you toward engaging in more value-driven behaviors.
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Client-Centered Therapy - Focuses on viewing the client as the expert of their own life. Therapist takes a non-directive approach, allowing the client to take the lead, as the clinician encourages and supports the client throughout their process.
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Mindfulness-Based Therapy - Focuses on the use of mindfulness and meditation to promote connection between mind and body. Utilizes mindfulness exercises to reduce distress and lead to a more fulfilling life.
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Psychodynamic - Focuses on developing insight and bringing unconscious thoughts to consciousness to resolve life’s conflicts. Often focuses on our early childhood experiences and attachments to caregivers; utilizes the therapeutic relationship as an agent for change.
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Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT) - Focuses on the way emotions impact our thoughts and behaviors. Explores and processes emotions to lead to better understanding of ways in which feelings impact day to day life.
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Somatic Therapy - Focuses on the way in which emotions and traumas are manifested through the body. Uses a bottom-up approach which highlights physical symptoms and works through the body to facilitate emotional processing and healing.
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EMDR - Trauma modality that focuses on processing past traumatic memories through bilateral stimulation. Allows a person to fully process and integrate memory networks, which in turn reduces present-day symptoms and emotional distress that occur due to past trauma.
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Brain Spotting - Trauma modality that focuses on talk therapy through fixed eye positions to aid in revealing and processing past trauma. Fixed eye positions represent areas of the brain in which memory or emotion is stored, therefore this modality allows for direct access in processing these traumas.
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Internal Family Systems (IFS) - Focuses on viewing a person as made up of multiple parts, and views all symptoms and behaviors as adaptive in some way. Uses meditative approaches to identify, access, interact with, and heal our different parts and wounds with the ultimate goal of integrating ourselves and leading more from the true self. Effective trauma modality.
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Play Therapy - Child therapy that uses play to understand and treat children’s emotional and/or behavioral issues. Believes play is a child’s most natural form of language and works through this activity to facilitate change.
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