ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY (ACT) - Hayes & Harris

ACT is focused on helping individuals build enriched and meaningful lives by identifying personal values and choosing to take actions that are consistent with one's values. ACT uses several approaches including mindfulness to help to work with your suffering in new and more effective ways. It focuses on working with rather than fighting against painful feelings and thoughts, and views the struggle for control as a key barrier to moving forward in your life. 

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LIBERATION PSYCHOLOGY - Martin-Baro, Comas-Diaz et al.

Liberation Psychology is an approach rather than a specific therapeutic modality which emphasizes decolonizing psychological approaches. It acknowledges that traditional white therapeutic approaches can be very limited in their applicability outside other groups of people. It involves flexibility - adaptation or abandonment of traditional white therapies when this does not suit the client. Liberation also adds important elements beyond traditional white therapies including but not limited to:  

1.  Critical reflection and accountability

2. Acknowledgment of oppressive environments and their origins

3. Focus on action and resistance tied to liberation (change) versus coping within the system/acceptance of status quo.

4. Challenge white patriarchal heterenormative frameworks and redirect towards healing that is rooted in local knowledge, cultures, and communities, or an integration of both.

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RADICAL HEALING - Helen Neville (2021)

Radial Healing is an element of Liberation Psychology that focuses on not just individual suffering and pain, but the context and root cause for the pain (systems of oppression currently and historically). It also focuses on the fundamental need for safe spaces, a sense of community, and collective healing. This includes but is not limited to:

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1. Cultural Authenticity and Self Knowledge: Knowledge of your self and the lineage of your people, versus how it is defined and described by white power

2. Emotions and Support: focusing on interconnectedness with others, collective healing, shared stories and understanding, vs coping alone as in standard western therapies

3. Strength and Resistance: Using resources such as churches (institutional resource), family, friends, religious/spiritual traditions, cultural traditions, family traditions (cultural resources).

3. Radical Hope: "Involves the steadfast belief that the collective capacity contained within communities of color to heal and transform oppressive forces into better futures, despite the overwhelming odds" (Neville, 2021). Remembering historic instances of resistance, healing, community action.​

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COMPASSION-FOCUSED THERAPY (CFT) - Paul Gilbert

Did you know that your brain and body react to your own self-critical thoughts as strongly as someone else bullying you or being verbally abusive towards you? We end up housing so much stress and shame in our bodies, minds, and souls. Self-criticism makes us feel worse for having struggles and makes it even harder to find a healthy and helpful way forward. While self-compassion is often mistaken as self-indulgent or selfish, it is a highly effective approach to increasing resiliency, managing difficult emotions, and taking effective action. This work is not for the faint of heart - there is difficult courageous work involved in facing and work through immense feelings of shame and self-criticism. The rewards, however, can be even more immense, helping us reconnect with our own humanity and innate worth, and allowing us to feel more connected to the world and those around us. 

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INTERNAL FAMILY SYSTEMS - Schwartz

Internal Family Systems identifies and explores the way that certain key parts of self often develop at an early age to protect the individual from harm, and works with how to understand and integrate these parts. Building safety and understanding is the key focus, which then allows more freedom of responses and decisions and feelings.

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1. The managers are often present and work overtime to try to manage the other parts, other people, and environments to try prevent the person from experiencing suffering. They can often be demanding, critical, and controlling. But they are trying to help.

2. The firefighters come in during an immediate crisis to protect the person from feeling overwhelmed. This can look like numbing, dissociating, anger and rage, withdrawal, using substances/food to cope, self-harming, suicidal thoughts and feelings. This part is also trying to protect

3. The exhiles are usually very young vulnerable parts that hold trauma, fear, and shame. They are shut away by the manager to keep the exhiles safe, but also out of fear the exhiles will overwhelm everyone with pain and trauma if they come out.

Therapy involves getting to know and befriend parts, to learn how they developed and how they work to keep you safe. Often the parts do not know about each other, and there is important work about helping them communicate with and understand each other, so that each part feels safe and understood by you, and by other parts. You use your whole adult self to help free them of their roles which often feel like an imprisonment, so they understand there is a whole adult self (you) in charge. 

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SOMATIC THERAPIES

Some of us have learned to cope with difficult situations by detaching from our emotions and bodies, instead living mostly in our minds. We may have a tendency to intellectualize our problems and feelings, but the insight we gain doesn't feel like it's enough to feel better.  That's because we have pieces that aren't integrated and whole. True change and healing comes from working to fully integrated the body, mind, and heart/soul. These forms of therapies help us learn how to safely experience being in our bodies, safely experience sitting with our emotions and use them as sources of information, wisdom, and guidance, and integrating these with our knowledge.

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MINDFULNESS - Kabat -Zinn, Segal

Mindfulness in psychotherapy is based upon the idea that our automatic responses to suffering often involve overthinking and feeling swallowed by distress - or alternatively, distracting and distancing ourselves from our thoughts and feelings. Practicing mindfulness (a skill and way of being that can be learned!) helps individuals to learn to become aware of these patterns, and enables us to find a way to be with our thoughts and feelings in more constructive and compassionate ways. It is arguably inherent in every therapeutic modality, but also stands on its own as an approach.

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COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (CBT) - Beck

CBT starts with the premise that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all interconnected and influence each other. CBT generally involves identifying and changing unhelpful ways of thinking, gaining new perspectives or ways of looking at struggles, and/or changing behaviors that are contributing to your distress and struggles. 

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EXPOSURE & RESPONSE PREVENTION THERAPY (ERP) - Meyer 

Exposure Therapy in its purest form helps people struggling with anxiety, panic, or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.  You remain in the driver's seat at all times as we work to help you slowly approach what is distressing or anxiety-provoking. We will discuss the ways your fears are getting in the way of leading the life you want and come up with strategies to help you move forward. Arguably, the philosophy of Exposure Therapy, that is, approaching what is uncomfortable, scary, and/or difficult, is in nearly every therapeutic approach. 

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DIALECTICAL BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (DBT) - Linehan

DBT offers concrete, practical coping tools to help you manage when pain feels intense and overwhelming. DBT also has a wonderful set of tools dedicated to increasing your effectiveness in relationships in both personal and professional realms. 

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