RELATIONSHIP & ATTACHMENT THERAPY MODALITIES
Being updated
Therapy Approaches For Relationship & Attachment Issues
There is no such thing as a certified attachment or relational therapist.
There are continuing education training in treating attachment issues, trauma, family of origin issues, anxiety, depression, etc.
Premarital Therapy
Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts (SYMBIS) is a comprehensive marriage program designed specifically for today's couples by a couple.
First published in 1995, and continually revised and updated, SYMBIS has become the gold standard in marriage preparation.
More than 5,000,000 couples have prepared for marriage or enriched their relationship through taking the Prepare/Enrich assessment and working with a Certified Facilitator.
The assessment itself has been proven to improve relationship satisfaction; however there is something extraordinary about the relationship a Facilitator develops with a couple that truly helps the couple grow more than they would on their own.
Couples/Dyad Therapy
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a humanistic, evidence-based approach to psychotherapy, drawing primarily from attachment theory to facilitate the creation of secure, vibrant connection with self and others.
Rooted in the science of emotions and attachment, EFT helps clients identify and transform the negative processing and interaction patterns that create distress.
It’s effective in treating individuals (EFIT), couples (EFCT), and families (EFFT), addressing a wide range of issues from marital distress to individual anxiety and trauma.
Emotion Focused Couples Therapy
Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) approaches healing from the belief that emotions are strongly linked to identity.
Emotions guide us in defining preferences and making decisions on a daily basis.
EFT assumes that: Lack of emotional awareness is harmful. Avoiding your emotions can lead to negative outcomes in your life.
Behavioral Couples Therapy For Alcohol Use Disorders
Behavioral Couples Therapy (BCT) is designed for married or cohabiting individuals seeking help for alcoholism or drug abuse.
BCT sees the substance abusing patient together with the spouse or live-in partner. Its purposes are to build support for abstinence and to improve relationship functioning.
BCT promotes abstinence with a “recovery contract” that involves both members of the couple in a daily ritual to reward abstinence. BCT improves the relationship with techniques for increasing positive activities and improving communication.
BCT also fits well with 12-step or other self-help groups, individual or group substance abuse counseling, and recovery medications.
Research shows that BCT produces greater abstinence and better relationship functioning than typical individual-based treatment and reduces social costs, domestic violence, and emotional problems of the couple’s children.
Gottman Method Couples Therapy
For therapists, life coaches, counselors, educators, clergy, trainers, and other mental health and well-being professionals, the Gottman Method is an approach to couples therapy that includes a thorough assessment of the couple’s relationship, and integrates research-based interventions based on the Sound Relationship House Theory.
The goals of Gottman Method Couples Therapy are to disarm conflicting verbal communication; increase intimacy, respect, and affection; remove barriers that create a feeling of stagnancy; and create a heightened sense of empathy and understanding within the context of the relationship.
Imago Relationship Therapy, developed by Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt in 1980, is a form of relationship and couples therapy that focuses on transforming conflict into healing and growth through relational connection.
Through Imago Relationship Therapy, couples can understand each other’s feelings and “childhood wounds” more empathically, allowing them to heal themselves and their relationships and move toward a more “Conscious Relationship.”
Created by leading couples therapist Terry Real, RLT is renowned for sparking profound and lasting transformation in clients by helping them heal their relational trauma and forge fiercely intimate connections with others. RLT educates as much as it heals to equip people with the lifelong tools to live fully-connected, fearlessly authentic lives.
RLT breaks many of the rules of traditional therapy to go deep quickly and help clients make rapid and significant changes. RLT therapists and coaches are real, open, and honest. We set the bar high for our clients. We expect rapid, dramatic change, and to a remarkable degree, we get it.
Intimacy From The Inside Out (IFIO)
Intimacy from the Inside Out© is a model of couples therapy that draws primarily from the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of psychotherapy, but also includes aspects of psychodynamic theory, systems thinking and neuroscience.
It is an experiential model born out of a desire to carry the concepts of IFS into a relational setting and to use the intimate relationship itself as a vehicle for growth and healing of the individual, as well as the couple.
This work assumes that each us has access to an inward spiritual presence that supports the notion that human beings are resilient and have inner resources of self -love and self-regulation. It is a non-pathologizing approach that helps people make sense of their life experience in a safe and collaborative way.
If one spouse is not sure they want to stay married AND doubts that couples therapy can help, then Discernment Counseling is exactly where the couple belongs.
The leaning-out partner is supported where they are emotionally, and the leaning-in spouse is equally supported in their own emotional state.
Discernment Counseling avoids starting half-hearted couples therapy with these mixed-agenda couples. It accepts ambivalence rather than trying to work around it or overcome it.
Developmental Model of Couples
The Couples Institute®, founded by thought-leaders Dr. Ellyn Bader and Dr. Peter Pearson, offers exceptional, in-depth training to psychotherapists who work with couples and individuals with relationship problems.
The duo is recognized as being among the founders of couples therapy, inventing “The Developmental Model,” a revolutionary approach that is highly adaptable to the complex needs of two people growing, changing, and staying connected in a relationship.
The model has deeply influenced the therapeutic world since its introduction in 1984 and is currently used by therapists in over 60 countries. It is taught in many graduate programs worldwide, using Bader and Pearson’s award-winning textbook In Quest of the Mythical Mate, which has been reprinted over 20 times.
Family Therapy
Attachment-Based Family Therapy
Attachment-based family therapy is an empirically supported treatment designed to capitalize on the innate, biologically based, caregiving instinct and adolescent need for attachment security.
This therapy is grounded in attachment and emotional processing theory and provides an interpersonal, process-oriented, trauma-informed approach to treating adolescents struggling with suicide and associated problems such as depression and trauma.
Individual Therapy
Psychodynamic therapy focuses on unconscious processes as they are manifested in the client's present behavior.
The goals of psychodynamic therapy are client self-awareness and understanding of the influence of the past on present behavior. In its brief form, a psychodynamic approach enables the client to examine unresolved conflicts and symptoms that arise from past dysfunctional relationships and manifest themselves in the need and desire to abuse substances.
Several different approaches to brief psychodynamic psychotherapy have evolved from psychoanalytic theory and have been clinically applied to a wide range of psychological disorders. A growing body of research supports the efficacy of these approaches.
British Object Relations is a theory of psychoanalytic thinking that originated in the United Kingdom in the early 1900s, that has the understanding that the development of the human mind is strongly influenced by the complexities of interaction between infants and their early experience of the world, particularly their relationship with their caregivers.
In a simplified version, the theory of object relations understands that infants are born with a “primitive” way of organizing their mind, and that is through the relationship with “objects”, mainly their mother and the mother’s breast, that they begin to form their mind in a way that is able to tolerate the outside world, and subsequently grow.
Schema-Focused Therapy For Borderline Personality Disorder
Schema Focused-Therapy (SFT) is an integrative approach founded on the principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy and then expanded to include techniques and concepts from other psychotherapies.
Schema therapists help patients to change their entrenched, self-defeating life patterns - or schemas - using cognitive, behavioral, and emotion-focused techniques.
The treatment focuses on the relationship with the therapist, daily life outside of therapy, and the traumatic childhood experiences that are common in borderline personality disorder.
Emotion Focused Individual Therapy
Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) approaches healing from the belief that emotions are strongly linked to identity.
Emotions guide us in defining preferences and making decisions on a daily basis.
EFT assumes that: Lack of emotional awareness is harmful. Avoiding your emotions can lead to negative outcomes in your life.
Interpersonal Therapy
Interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on relieving symptoms by improving interpersonal functioning.
A central idea in IPT is that psychological symptoms can be understood as a response to current difficulties in everyday relationships with other people.
Gestalt therapy is a form of psychotherapy that is centered on increasing a person's awareness, freedom, and self-direction.
It's a form of therapy that focuses on the present moment rather than past experiences. Gestalt therapy is based on the idea that people are influenced by their present environment.
Relational cultural theory posits that resilience and psychological growth are rooted in relational connections and are facilitated through growth-fostering relationships.
Growth-fostering relationships are high-quality interpersonal connections that are characterized by empathy, mutuality, and empowerment.
The humanistic perspective views human nature as basically good, with an inherent potential to maintain healthy, meaningful relationships and to make choices that are in the interest of oneself and others.
The humanistic therapist focuses on helping people free themselves from disabling assumptions and attitudes so they can live fuller lives. The therapist emphasizes growth and self-actualization rather than curing diseases or alleviating disorders.
This perspective targets present conscious processes rather than unconscious processes and past causes, but like the existential approach, it holds that people have an inherent capacity for responsible self-direction. For the humanistic therapist, not being one's true self is the source of problems.
The therapeutic relationship serves as a vehicle or context in which the process of psychological growth is fostered. The humanistic therapist tries to create a therapeutic relationship that is warm and accepting and that trusts that the client's inner drive is to actualize in a healthy direction.
Existential therapy posits the central problems people face are embedded in anxiety over loneliness, isolation, despair, and, ultimately, death. Creativity, love, authenticity, and free will are recognized as potential avenues toward transformation, enabling people to live meaningful lives in the face of uncertainty and suffering.
Everyone suffers losses (e.g., friends die, relationships end), and these losses cause anxiety because they are reminders of human limitations and inevitable death.
The existential therapist recognizes that human influence is shaped by biology, culture, and luck.
Existential therapy assumes the belief that people's problems come from not exercising choice and judgment enough--or well enough--to forge meaning in their lives, and that each individual is responsible for making meaning out of life. Outside forces, however, may contribute to the individual's limited ability to exercise choice and live a meaningful life.
For the existential therapist, life is much more of a confrontation with negative internal forces than it is for the humanistic therapist.
Person-centered therapy, also referred to as non-directive, client-centered, or Rogerian therapy, was pioneered by Carl Rogers in the early 1940s.
This form of psychotherapy is grounded in the idea that people are inherently motivated toward achieving positive psychological functioning.
The client is believed to be the expert in their life and leads the general direction of therapy, while the therapist takes a non-directive role.
The Internal Family Systems Model is an integrative approach to individual psychotherapy developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s.
It combines systems thinking with the view that the mind is made up of relatively discrete subpersonalities, each with its own unique viewpoint and qualities.
Listen to an informal IFS session here.
Transference-Focused Therapy For Borderline Personality Disorder
Transference-Focused Therapy (TFP) focuses on revealing the underlying causes of a patient's borderline condition and working to build new, healthier ways for the patient to think and behave.
From the perspective of TFP, the borderline patient's perceptions of self and of others are split into unrealistic extremes of bad and good. These conflicting dyads are thought to be expressed through the specific self-destructive symptoms of BPD.
The term “transference” refers to the patent’s experience of his or her moment-to-moment relationship with the therapist.
The treatment focuses on transference, because it is believed that patients will display their unhealthy dyadic perceptions not only in day-to-day life, but also in the interactions they have with their therapist.
TFP focuses on using patient-therapist communications to help the patient integrate these different representations of self and, in the process, develop better methods of self-control.
Trauma Therapy
Somatic experiencing is a form of alternative therapy aimed at treating trauma and stressor-related disorders like PTSD.
The primary goal of SE is to modify the trauma-related stress response through bottom-up processing.
Sensorimotor psychotherapy is body-based talk therapy, integrating current findings from neuroscience to transform traumatic memories into strengths and resources for the client.
It works with developmental trauma, such as maternal lack of attunement, as well as acute or gross trauma like sexual abuse, violence, or verbal abuse.
Sensorimotor therapists work on mindfulness and collaboration with the client, repeatedly asking permission to do each experiment or process along the way.
The NeuroAffective Relational Model(NARM) is an advanced clinical training for mental health professionals who work with complex trauma.
NARM is a cutting-edge model for addressing attachment, relational and developmental trauma, by working with the attachment patterns that cause life-long psychobiological symptoms and interpersonal difficulties.
These early, unconscious patterns of disconnection deeply affect our identity, emotions, physiology, behavior and relationships. Learning how to work simultaneously with these diverse elements is a radical shift that has profound clinical implications for healing complex trauma. As such, NARM is positioned to become an invaluable treatment option for the Trauma-Informed Care movement as we gain greater understanding of the nature of adverse childhood experience (ACEs).
Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP)
Accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) is a form of talk therapy that aims to help people overcome trauma, loss, or other serious emotional challenges.
Drawing on attachment theory, body-focused approaches, and other related disciplines, AEDP posits that humans are wired for resilience and have an inborn ability to cope with emotional pain; however, many people who have undergone trauma are unable to access the skills that would allow them to navigate these emotional challenges.
AEDP aims to help clients uncover and draw on these innate coping mechanisms to manage their trauma and move toward flourishing.
Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART)
Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) is a unique approach to psychotherapy. ART is unique because the ART Therapist guides the client to replace the negative images in the mind that cause the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress with positive images of the client’s choosing. And this is done quickly, most often within one session! Once the negative images have been replaced by positive ones, the triggers will be gone. Nightmares and repeated intrusive thoughts will stop.
Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM)
The Comprehensive Resource Model™ (CRM) is a neuro-biologically based, affect-focused trauma treatment model which facilitates targeting of traumatic experiences by bridging the most primitive aspects of the person and their brain (midbrain/brainstem), to their purest, healthiest parts of the self. This bridge catalyzes the mind and body to access all forms of emotional trauma and stress by utilizing layers of internal resources such as attachment neurobiology, beneficial affiliation neurochemistry, breathwork skills, brain neuroplasticity, our deep connection to the natural world for survival, toning and sacred geometry, and one’s relationship with self, our intuition, and higher consciousness.
The sequencing and combination of these resources, and the eye positions that anchor them, provide the opportunity for unbearable emotions and pain to be stepped into and felt fully while the client is fully present and aware moment to moment which changes how the memories affect the person.
Brainspotting locates points in the client’s visual field that help to access unprocessed trauma in the subcortical brain.
Brainspotting (BSP) was discovered in 2003 by David Grand, Ph.D. Over 13,000 therapists have been trained in BSP (52 internationally), in the United States, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and Africa. Dr. Grand discovered that "Where you look affects how you feel." It is the brain activity, especially in the subcortical brain that organizes itself around that eye position.
New To Therapy?
Click on the links below to learn more about therapy, what to expect, and more.
If you are not ready or unsure about therapy, you can read the pages below: