Our Approach
What would you do for your family, for your child, for your loved one? How would you do it?
Fiercely, with compassion, support, know how, and a combination of wisdom, strength, and big beliefs. We treat those that come to us like we would family. Having the vault be at the foundation of what our practice is built on is also representative of our stance and approach in therapy. The vault represents how we treat you, your information, and your emotional pain. We look beyond the individuals global distress and develop an understanding of why issues have bubbled to the surface. We use the Circle of Security’s “Bigger, Stronger, Wiser and Kinder” stance when walking along side our clients as they process their distress and work towards understanding their unmet needs to promote change.
Our goal is to always lead with compassion and prioritize the therapeutic relationship. Research shows that the therapeutic alliance is the most important predictor of success in therapy. We focus initially on the formation of the therapeutic relationship in which it is safe for clients to access their own awareness, powers of self-regulation, growth and self-healing potentials. For many clients the psychotherapy relationship might be the first time in their lives when they have been truly listened to deeply by a non-judgmental caring person.
What & who informs our work . . .
Our Theoretical Framework.
A humanistic-experiential and client centered approach. The main characteristics of this approach is its promotion of an empathically attuned relationship, in-therapy experiencing, a belief in human capacity for reflection, a belief in the goodness of all people and emphasis on supporting a person’s self-growth and self-actualization (Greenberg et al., 2003). Humanistic psychology rejects the medical sickness model and embraces a growth model of healing. Client-centered therapy, focuses on the belief that clients control their own destinies. For Rogers, empathy is the goal because it will lead to therapeutic change. He believes that we must go through empathy to get to change because a direct route will not work. This is the basis for his famous non-directive approach to therapy (Rogers, 1951). In client-centered therapy, the role of the therapist is to create an environment that stimulates personal growth and introspection. This environment is developed under three conditions that are necessary and sufficient for therapeutic change: congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding (Rogers, 1957).
A humanistic-experiential therapy is based on the importance of the therapeutic relationship as a stubborn attempt by two human beings(therapist and client) to meet each other in a genuine manner and to promote the deepening of the client's experience. This is seen as leading to integrative self-reorganization. The therapist’s aim is to create a relationship based on understanding, acceptance, warmth, and authenticity. The idea is that the client would over time assume this attitude in relation to one’s own self by reciprocity. According to Carl Rogers (1961), when “the individual is understood and accepted, the more he tends to drop the false fronts with which he has been meeting life, and the more he tends to move in a direction which is forward” (p. 27). Since, the most common root cause of psychotherapy problems is that our psychological defence mechanisms make us blind to the causes of our stresses, a positive therapeutic relationship allows the individual to open up to their own problems and defences, and start working on solving them. This leads to an increase in awareness of ones own needs and can lead their actions to be more congruent with their wants, goals and desires.
. . .
Greenberg, L., Elliott, R., & Lietaer, G. (2003). Humanistic-experiential psychotherapy. In G. Stricker, T. A. Widiger, & I. B. Weiner (Eds.), Handbook of psychology: Clinical psychology, Vol. 8, pp. 301–325). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Rogers, Carl. 1951. Client-Centered Therapy Its Current Practice, Implication, and Therapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Rogers, Carl. 1957. “The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 21: 95-103.
Rogers, C.R. (1961). On becoming a person. Houghton Mifflin.
“In my early professional years I was asking the questions, How can I treat or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
— Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person