Psychotherapy in San Luis Obispo
Integrative Therapy Offerings
Your therapist offers psychotherapy in San Luis Obispo, or by telehealth in CA. Depending on your presenting issues, preferences, and needs, therapy will draw on the following approaches.
Coherence Therapy
Coherence therapy is a method that is weaved into all psychotherapy sessions. In this approach, problematic symptoms are seen as adaptive strategies that are fully coherent according to your life context. Unless there is an underlying disease or other organic, biological issue present, the symptoms can be understood as protective or adaptive attempts to solve a greater problem. However, these strategies are not always healthy, and they usually end up causing more long-term distress. This is why most people come to therapy.
Coherence therapy targets unwanted symptoms through a guided, experiential exploration of the issues. It aims to transform deeply rooted, core learnings that are underlying problematic patterns. This method works by harnessing the brain’s natural capacity for change through an innate neurological process known as memory reconsolidation. It has the potential to facilitate lasting shifts towards healthier, more fulfilling ways of being.
Emotion Focused Therapy
Emotions are not pathologies to be minimized, ignored or conquered. They are a form of crucial information and communication. Our brain interprets the world around us and then conveys messages about what we implicitly know. Emotions are signals that point us towards what we need, along with the actions that will help us get our needs met. They are like an internal guidance system, informing you deeply about both problems and potential solutions in your life. If we ignore emotions, this suppresses self-knowledge and leads to frustration, stress, and overwhelm. It can even contribute to hopelessness, withdraw, and depression.
When emotions are attended to, they can teach you how to reduce stress, improve communication, reclaim a sense of wholeness, and move towards living a more satisfying life. Emotion focused therapy respects all feelings as wise, intelligent information. Adaptive emotions are harnessed towards solutions, and maladaptive emotions are addressed as old wounds that are in need of healing. Your therapist will help you sort through and make sense of your emotional landscape.
Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapy is helpful whenever psychotherapy becomes overly stuck in intellectual processes. It involves tracking sensations in the body during talk therapy. The body holds untapped information about us, and it can be a powerful point of entry to bring the implicit learnings of the subcortical brain into the therapy process. By working this way, we can access this information in the form of feelings, emotions, images, sensory fragments, and memories. This is therapeutic gold that can help unwind problematic issues from the level in which they live. Somatic therapy is also helpful for reshaping a nervous system that is chronically stuck in cycles of fight, flight, or freeze. It increases self-awareness and improves psychological wellness.
Parts Therapy
Parts therapy centers on the idea that every person’s psyche is comprised of different “parts.” In reality, these parts are just different neural networks in the brain. Our neural networks can hold different emotional learnings that feel at odds with other learnings. This is experienced as internal dichotomies, and this is perfectly normal. To give a simplified example, one part of us may feel or know one thing, and another part of us feels or knows something very different. When different parts become more intensified and polarized, it can have a complex effect in how symptoms of distress become locked into place.
These neural networks (or parts of self) operate both consciously and unconsciously to either help or impede us in some way. Parts therapy uses imagination and metaphor to investigate and explore the different, emotional learnings of neural networks. The process of exploring our internal landscape this way in “parts language” is a powerful method to gain self-awareness. It can increase capacity for problem solving, help reclaim personal strengths, bring a renewed sense of wholeness, and gain more self-agency.
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy
Mindfulness based cognitive therapy is another tool that enhances all other psychotherapy approaches. It helps to develop meta-cognition or witnessing mind, which is key to building greater awareness of self and others. This approach incorporates mindful awareness practices and cognitive therapy. The aim is to help you break free of negative patterns by changing your relationship to difficult thoughts and emotions.
MBCT strengthens your ability to move towards uncomfortable feelings with curiosity, flexibility, and observation, rather than being stuck in emotional activation, overwhelm, or avoidance. It can help you to tap into your inner stillness and cultivate a sense of choice and internal freedom. Research shows that it can be as effective for depression as taking antidepressants. It is also proven to be helpful for anxiety disorders, mood disorders, chronic pain, and overall unhappiness.
