Psychotherapy in San Luis Obispo
Experiential Techniques
Angela utilizes EMDR and Brainspotting as foundational techniques for therapy. This helps go beyond the limitations of pure talk therapy. Your story is important, and you will be invited to share it. When you do this with internal focus and within a facilitated structure, the potential for progress intensifies. Depending on your needs, your therapist may also incorporate a blend of any of the following approaches:
Coherence Therapy
In this approach, problematic symptoms are seen as adaptive strategies that one uses in an attempt to solve a greater life 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 and aims to transform the deeply rooted, core emotional 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. This 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, as well as what actions will help us get our needs met. They are an internal guidance system, informing us deeply about problems and solutions in our life. If we ignore emotions, this suppresses self-knowledge, which can contribute to hopelessness, withdraw, and depression.
When emotions are attended to, they can teach us 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 involves mindful tracking of what is happening in the body during talk therapy. The physical 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 crucial information in the form of feelings, emotions, images, sensory fragments, behavior, thoughts, and memories. This is therapeutic gold that can help unwind problematic issues from the level in which they live. Somatic therapy is also helpful whenever therapy becomes overly stuck in intellectual processes. It increases self-awareness and improves psychological wellness.
IFS / Parts Therapy
IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy centers on the idea that every person’s psyche is comprised of different “parts.” These parts are actually just different neural networks in the brain that have organized around various life experiences. Our neural networks can hold polarized emotional learnings that feel at odds with each other. For example, one part of us may feel or know one thing, and another part of us feels or knows something very different. When parts become more intensified and polarized, it can have a complex effect in how our symptoms of distress manifest.
These neural networks (or parts of self) operate both consciously and unconsciously to either help us or impede us. Parts therapy uses imagination and metaphor to investigate and explore the various emotional learnings held in the neural networks. The process of exploring our internal landscape in “parts language” is a powerful method to gain self-awareness and stimulate long-lasting change through new learning and integration of parts. It can increase capacity for problem solving, help reclaim personal strengths, bring a renewed sense of wholeness and self-agency.
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy
Mindfulness based cognitive therapy is a tool that 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 unwanted 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.
