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Psychotherapy Are you experiencing one or more of these problems?
These states are a part of human life, and we all experience them. Sometimes, though, they take on a life of their own, overwhelming our best attempts to manage them and interfering with our well-being, our relationships, and our activities. Feelings of distress, sadness, anxiety, tension, grief, or shame may become prominent. Behaviors may be affected: caring for others at the expense of oneself; excessive self-criticism; eating or sleeping too much or too little; poor concentration; social avoidance or withdrawal; difficulty with work or daily activities; avoiding one’s own experience; using or abusing drugs or alcohol. Relationships with partners, children, parents, family, or colleagues may become more difficult than satisfying. It is actually inner strength combined with good judgment to recognize when help is needed. Psychotherapy is a partnership in which client and therapist work together to: 1. Identify and understand the problem 2. Review the client’s current ways of coping with the problem 3. Develop new strategies and try them out 4. Assess how well the strategies are working and make adjustments as necessary. An old saying goes, “A problem shared is a problem halved.” Psychotherapy helps lift the burden of distress, offers the possibility of change, and opens a door to greater ease and well-being. Practitioners: Michael Jaro, Laura Fasano
Heart-centered psychotherapy.
In working with couples, heart-centered therapy supports each person to be in touch with and express feelings and wants in a clear and loving way. We explore how we may lose ourselves in relationship and how we return to both our individuality and our love with more passion and truthfulness. We work with issues around communication, sexuality, parenting, anger and blame, money and conflict resolution.
Practitioners:
Coming Home To Ourselves: Mindfulness and Psychotherapy by Laura Fasano, MA , LMHC Mindfulness is simply being aware of where your attention is from one moment to the next, with gentle acceptance. Nothing is rejected. Mindfulness is mostly experiential and nonverbal ( i.e., sensory, somatic, intuitive, emotional) and is developed through practice. Psychotherapy informed by mindfulness uses present moment awareness as the primary vehicle to investigate into the source of one’s suffering. In this therapeutic approach, a basic assumption is that we are fundamentally whole. Dis-ease is seen as a separation from this wholeness. Tensions created by this internal split may manifest as disease in one or more realms of our being: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. People often come to my office with a simple wish to feel better. In this desire to feel better, our inclination is to push our difficult experience away. Isn’t this seen as normal? Indeed, we all want to avoid pain. Yet this very act of unwittingly cutting parts of ourselves off is what exacerbates the problem. We split off from our original wholeness because, in our innocence, we don’t know any other way. Using mindfulness as a “solution” to our perceived problems, then, is to stop running and to look directly into the heart of the matter. Through quieting the mind and feeling into the body we can begin to discover those split off places and therefore, quite naturally, begin to heal them. Psychotherapy informed by mindfulness is a process of letting go with awareness into the yet revealed truth of one’s experience. This may sound simple, but it is not necessarily easy. Letting go into the unfamiliar can be difficult. What we encounter on the journey inward is the fear, rage, grief, etc., that was too much to feel when it happened. The journey of coming home to ourselves necessitates becoming intimate with these unfelt emotions. So, why would we go here, to the places we’d rather not face? What usually happens is that the opportunity catches up with us! Life becomes unbearably difficult, painful, or simply unsatisfying. When this happens, we have two options: to either wake up or go to sleep. To take the inner journey, or numb out. If we choose to take this inner journey and explore our repressed feelings within the safety of the therapeutic connection, all the way back to the source of our pain and fear, we can heal. Our sense of who we are expands, and we feel more alive and engaged with the world. Learning from all experience, life becomes the great adventure.
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