Experiential therapies are a type of therapy that allows patients to use expressive tools, activities, and other methods to reenact or recreate specific situations from past and present situations in their lives.  Experiential therapies offer patients the opportunity to gain a greater understanding of their authentic selves while promoting a greater sense of self-esteem and an ability to fine tune emotional regulation skills.  Some types of experiential experiences that are offered include:

• Effective communication skills which are taught through a variety of hands-on step-by-step practical exercises. 
• Exercises for increasing emotional intimacy in relationships
• Gestalt psychotherapy techniques used to assist the client with finding ways to express thoughts and feelings that were previously too difficult to say
• Virtual reality techniques to assist a patient with simulating real-world circumstances that the patient is attempting to master while techniques for mastering these situations are simultaneously presented
• Therapeutic games developed by Dr. Braun that facilitate greater emotional expression and communication
• Role playing exercises meant to facilitate healing
• Music and art therapy exercises that are therapeutically guided by Dr. Braun can be used to facilitate deeper understanding of unconscious conflicts that are creating a barrier for healing
• The Master Resource technique to assist the patient with learning how to quickly change a negative mood to an emotional state in which the person feels powerful, in control and in which the person has high self-esteem

Do you have a hard time having control over your emotions? Do you find yourself feeling dysregulated and unable to stop feeling sad, anxious, irritable, or angry? Does your inability to control your emotions cause problems in significant relationships?

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) offers people help with learning to manage painful emotions and memories.  It also helps people decrease the conflicts in their relationships. This modality focuses on the development of 4 types of skills. These are:

• Mindfulness – assists people with being present in the current moment.
• Distress tolerance – assists people with learning increase one’s tolerance for negative emotions while learning to not catastrophize about the presence of these emotions.
• Emotion regulation – assists people with learning strategies for regulating intense emotions which makes them less likely to live their lives alternating from one emotional extreme to the other.
• Interpersonal effectiveness – assists people with learning effective communication skills in order to respond assertively to others while also communicating care and respect for others in order to improve relationships.

How Does DBT Work?

Time is spent in therapy helping the client to understand how to actually practically use the 4 key skills of DBT while learning to manage negative emotions so that they can interact with others in their lives in a self-controlled and respectful manner.  

Results That Typically Occur With DBT:

With consistent use of the skills taught in DBT, clients learn to regulate their emotions while also learning to cope with the inevitable ups and downs that happen to all of us in our lives.  The client learns to accept other people and become nonjudgmental while also learning to radically accept themselves and things that have happened to them in the past.  Clients learn to discern when they are and when they are not reacting in social situations a manner that is overly sensitive.  They learn to regulate emotions so that they are not so intense when the intensity of their emotions is not helpful to them. They also learn to decrease their overall level of arousal physiologically when this level of arousal is counterproductive.  The outcome of this treatment is that people will often state that they feel more in control of themselves and that their relationships are far more successful and emotionally close than they had ever been before.

Finding a DBT Therapist

If you are interested in exploring DBT therapy, Dr. Jane Braun, Ph.D., CSAT has over twenty years of experience utilizing DBT skills to treat people with addiction, depression, and anxiety.

If you or someone you know may benefits from dialectic behavioral therapy, please get in touch with me. I would be happy to discuss how I may be able to help. Call my office at (708) DR-BRAUN or (708) 372-7286 and ask for a FREE 15-minute consultation.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychological treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective for a range of problems including depression, anxiety disorders, addiction, and trauma. Numerous research studies suggest that CBT leads to significant improvement in functioning and quality of life.  In many studies, CBT has been demonstrated to be as effective as, or more effective than, other forms of psychological therapy or psychiatric medications.

CBT places an emphasis on helping individuals learn to change their unhelpful ways of thinking. Through exercises in the session as well as “homework” exercises outside of sessions, patients are helped to develop coping skills as well as learn to change their own thinking, problematic emotions, and behavior.

CPT is a therapy procedure that is specifically used for treating trauma.

Step 1 is psychoeducation – The initial sessions will deal with providing education about trauma and the CPT approach. You will be asked about your symptoms and talk about your goals for treatment. Time will be spent reviewing the ways in which your thoughts about your trauma impact your emotions and daily experience.

Step 2: Understanding your thoughts and feelings- Next, you'll learn to become more aware of what you think and feel about your trauma and how you may be stuck in beliefs that are hurting you. You'll work with Dr. Braun to identify and analyze your stuck points as well as develop a plan for helping you to be able to move forward and recover.

Step 3: Learning New Skills: In this phase, you'll learn how to question and challenge your thoughts and feelings and explore how you would prefer to think about the trauma. Dr. Braun will go over common thought patterns that people with trauma experience and will teach you cognitive coping skills.

Step 4: Changing your beliefs- Finally, you'll learn about how it's common for a person's thoughts and beliefs about the world to change after a trauma, and you'll learn how to balance the way you saw the world before and the way you see it now. Your therapy will focus on helping you in five areas in your life where people with trauma commonly encounter issues:

• Esteem
• Intimacy
• Power or control
• Safety
• Trust

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) is a therapy that allows people to heal from the distress that results from distressing life events. Extensive research has shown that EMDR can help people to heal far more quickly from painful life experiences than traditional psychotherapy methods.

Our brain naturally and normally moves toward good mental health. However, our brain can be blocked from processing difficult life experiences by the impact of a disturbing event.  EMDR assists with removing the block which helps our brains to activate their natural healing processes.

There has been so much research on EMDR therapy that it is now recognized as an effective form of treatment for trauma and addiction by organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, and the Department of Defense.  Given the worldwide recognition as an effective treatment of trauma and addiction, it is easy to see how EMDR therapy would also be effective in treating negative memories of life events contributing to low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depression, and anxiety.  More than 100,000 clinicians throughout the world use EMDR as a part of the work they do.  In addition, millions of people have been treated successfully over many years.

When EMDR therapy occurs, the meaning of traumatic memories or negative life events is frequently transformed for clients emotionally.  For example, a victim of rape shifts from feeling horror and self-disgust to holding the powerful belief that, “I survived the experience, and I am strong.”  Unlike talk therapy, the insights clients gain in EMDR therapy result not so much from clinician interpretation, but from the client’s own emotional and intellectual processes that have been facilitated by EMDR. 

The final result is that clients frequently conclude EMDR therapy feeling empowered by the very experiences that once debased them.  Their emotional wounds have not just healed, they have transformed. As a natural outcome of the EMDR therapeutic process, clients’ thoughts, feelings and behavior are frequently changed all without speaking in detail or doing homework used in other therapies.

Insight-oriented individual therapy is used when it is believed that clients are not fully aware of the emotional reasons why internal barriers are present that limit client’s abilities to function in a healthy way.  Negative assumptions about ourselves and our relations to others, expectations about how the world works, and memories of the past can cause destructive patterns of thinking, emotion, and behavior.  From the insight-oriented theoretical perspective, our prior experiences have caused us to have feelings (many of which are outside of our awareness) that have become so entrenched that they prevent us from having new, change-inducing experiences.

You might wonder how this could happen. 

This typically occurs by these past experiences preventing us from being influenced by new experiences. The main goal of insight-oriented therapy is to bring to light and then change these entrenched feelings because they are seen as the main causal agents in our psychological lives. Insight-oriented counseling, therefore, is an emotion-focused form of treatment that explores the ways in which past painful experiences and the emotional expectations developed during our younger years and how these experiences actively contribute to current difficulties in our functioning.  Traumatic experiences and the absence of affirming responses from significant others when we were younger are the two most important kinds of events that shape and define our current expectations. These expectations can cause us to make negative judgments about ourselves and the world around us.

When Dr. Braun provides insight oriented individual therapy, she strives to create an atmosphere of safety, while also encouraging the client to be emotionally honest.  Depending on the client and their needs, Dr. Braun may take on several roles in psychotherapy, including that of emotional supporter, interpreter and clarifier of feelings, educator, facilitator of emotional honesty, and confidant.  All of these roles serve to aid in the achievement of a more effective and healthy self.  Each session provides the opportunity to become more knowledgeable about and comfortable with yourself and your ways of being, while feeling supported and emboldened to feel and behave differently in everyday life.  This non-judgmental process becomes integrated into your internal experience and will last long after the journey of therapy has concluded.