Whether you are seeking help with anxiety, depression, compulsive relationships with food or other substances, unhealthy interpersonal relationship patterns, or bad habits you can’t seem to break, our proprietary process that leads you to self-healing can help.
We believe that a successful therapeutic relationship makes you feel safe. But we don’t think an empathetic ear within a safe environment is enough. We want you to take possession of every tool we have to offer. Our goal is to get to know you as you introduce us to your struggles. Then, we will help you customize the following systems to your personal situation:
➤ Empathetic Self-Reflection TM
Is our exclusive process that will help you develop a habit of holding your perceptions with gentle self-respect rather than continuing a loop of self-criticism and self-doubt. When you understand how to value and trust your experience and your intuition, you will hold the key to the self-healing process. This essential element serves as the umbrella principle for the remaining systems we employ during our work with you.
➤ Stress Management
Although “stress management” is often given lip service, we believe that it is the key to balance between the mind, emotions, body and behavior that is often overlooked. As such, we will take a detailed look at what you are doing well and where you need improvement. We do this using a specific, concrete self-diagnostic tool for on-the-spot evaluation of your stress levels. Once you have a clear understanding of how effective stress management supports your ongoing growth and well-being, you’ll be ready to personalize your plan to get the most out of your therapy as you progress toward your goals. In addition, our “secret sauce” is an amazingly simple, easy to employ strategy for calming yourself down at any time. We’ll help you put this strategy in your pocket for on-the-spot zen whenever you need it.
➤ Triggering Events and Your Fight/Flight Response
When you have had a specific trauma, recognizing triggers is easy. However, when your relationship with yourself and with others includes some of your own behaviors that you aren’t happy with and that you don’t understand, there is likely a trigger to the past acting without your awareness. We will guide you to uncover trigger and fight/flight response insights about yourself that will empower you to neutralize the emotional reactivity you experience when you are in situations that have been difficult for you. You will become empowered to separate past (triggering) events from your current reality. You will be empowered to choose your actions in the moment with increasing confidence and a stronger sense of personal well-being.
➤ Identify and Replace Unhelpful Thought Patterns
Related to understanding your fight/flight response is the ability to inspect old beliefs and evaluate their value to your current situation. Life experience often provides the challenge of imposing “shoulds” on us in a way that creates stress and fear. Especially fear of “breaking the rules.” It is often these very rules that keep us in fear, keep us feeling stuck and prevent us from developing ourselves in satisfying ways. We stand ready to support you as you uncover the thought patterns that no longer serve you. Once uncovered, we will show you how to effectively drain the life-sapping power of unhelpful patterns of belief. Your next step is choosing what to believe and how to behave based on your current understanding of what is right for you.
➤ Understand the Purpose of Feelings
Many of our clients come to us feeling confused about their feelings and even being afraid to feel. This is because most of us haven’t been taught why we feel as we do and how our feelings are helpful. Even the uncomfortable feelings. When you clearly understand the purpose of your feelings, they become a tool to your personal growth and increasing sense of personal power. You no longer need to fear your feelings. We will show you how to create a friendship with your feelings and how to use them as your guide as you continue to nurture and heal yourself.
➤ Customize Your Self-Soothing Language
Most people look for therapy because their internal dialogue is critical, which leads to developing relationships with people who “match” that internal dialogue. When a “match” is found in a negative co-worker, a critical boss or instructor, a pessimistic partner or discouraging friends, the sense of confidence and personal growth we may have developed seems to disappear.
When we find someone who speaks a nurturing language to us, a disconnect between that nurturing and our internal not-so-supportive dialogue creates a tension within which causes discomfort. In this situation, we may find ourselves “sabotaging” a relationship that feels “too good” for us, passing up opportunities to thrive or constantly waiting for a loving relationship to take a negative turn.
We are naturally drawn to messages that match the unconscious communication which we have with ourselves. When we don’t find those negative messages in our external environment, our unconscious focus becomes looking for those negative messages in a way that will cause our internal and external worlds to match. Even if that means “finding” problems where none exist.
At The Center for Healthy Relationships, we will help you identify exactly how this works for you. We will help you map it out in a way that will allow you to predictably identify when old, negative, out-of-context thought patterns are pushing into your present situation and exactly what to do so that you can create a self-soothing language that will always work for you, supporting your ongoing growth.
➤ Make Good Decisions
When you have learned the system we teach at The Center for Healthy Relationships, you will be empowered to increase the time between events surrounding you and your responses to those events. When unconscious patterns of thought and past hurts go unexamined, we inevitably fall into unhealthy knee-jerk reactions rather than taking time to make healthy choices. When you have a context that allows you to understand yourself using our systems, you will have all of the tools you need to move forward without ongoing therapeutic support. We are in the business of putting you in control of your life, not of keeping lifetime clients.
Once we’ve worked with you through this process with the initial difficulty you brought to therapy, we’ll support you in the next problem that concerns you. Along the way, we will be constantly watching for opportunities to strengthen your ability to use the process with more and more independence. Our ultimate goal is to walk you through the same process with each new situation that arises until you are able to use the system without therapeutic support.
The Center for Healthy Relationships
Online Therapy Services to Residents of CA, USA
