Salmon Arm and Williams Lake, British Columbia, Canada
Approach to psychotherapy
Personal Experience
I am a Masters of Applied Counselling Psychology student through Athabasca University, in my third-year and preparing for my practicum. The following information outlines my theoretical orientations, but at this time, I am not a practicing therapist, but working as a EAL coach and facilitator.
I consider wellness through balancing the four quadrants of health: mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. While we all have different meanings for what wellness in each quadrant looks like, when one is out of balance the whole always suffers. This is how I view holistic health and healing.
Both personally and professionally I have found that one of the greatest proponents of promoting balanced wellness, especially for trauma survivors and high-risk youth, is the horse. As a youth engaged in high-risk behaviours myself, I found equines to help redefine all the deficiencies I found within myself: self-esteem and self-efficacy, learning and testing boundaries, and connections and relationship building, to name just a few.
Horses won’t be the catalyst for everyone that they were for me. But I work to incorporate the lessons I’ve learned about self-regulation, attachment, and developing one’s sense of self inter and intra - personally, into an integrative and dynamic approach to counselling.
Safety and Diversity
I incorporate elements of humanistic theory including person-centred therapy (PCT) and narrative therapy (NT), cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), and emotion-focused therapy (EFT) into my practice. The integration of individual, systemic, and empiricist values allows me to meet my client’s exactly where they’re at, and together we can develop a process to suit your unique and evolving needs.
Humanistic therapies are well-suited to diverse populations, as it honours the subjective reality of the individual. The implication of subjective reality is that your experiences and beliefs are accepted as true for you, regardless of culture or context.
Human Nature, Development of Suffering, and Theory of Change
Human Nature
Human beings have the innate proclivity to strive towards wellness, personal growth, and connection. I believe that experiences are subjective, which means that I accept the personal truth of each individual, and believe that they are doing the best that they can with the tools that they have.
The way that you experience events indicate your internal processes, or working models. Individual working models, or the beliefs, thoughts and reactions to experiences, determine your feelings and behaviours. These cognitive processes become habitual and are developed over time. One of the biggest influencers to this working model is the attachments, or relationships, that we develop over time, and especially in our early caregiver relationships.
Suffering Development
The messages we receive as we grow and develop come to inform our sense of self. If we receive messages that we are unworthy of love and care we will internalize those ideas and conduct ourselves according to our perceived defects.
When our sense of self is inconsistent with what we expect, or what we feel other’s expect of us, we feel inadequate, ineffective, and unworthy. This develops feelings of shame and fear, promotes disconnection, and leads to toxic stress over time. If our internal working models support these negative emotions, our thoughts and behaviours will be self-destructive and will put strain on our relationships. Emotional disregulation is one such process of suffering. A core objective of maturity is developing the ability to self-regulate, but this process is determined by attuned relationships and co-regulation early in life. If a child does not learn to self-regulate, they are likely to grow into adults that are often victim to their out-of-control emotional natures.
If these habits persist unchallenged, we will negatively spiral, exacerbating our symptoms of metal health disturbances such as anxiety and depression.
Theory of Change
Issues arise from both historical experiences such as trauma, and current suffering such as within unhealthy relationship or self-talk patterns. In order to address this, we must work both in the here and now, which will help to address present dysfunctional processes, and work with past experiences, to address the root cause of pervasive issues.
Developing emotional intelligence can act as means to address emotional disregulation. CBT and AAT can be effective means to promote mindfulness, increasing emotional intelligence and regulation. If appropriate, equine assisted therapy is well suited to this goal, as equines live as herd animals, developing social and emotional intelligence as means of survival.
By fostering healthy attachments, you will be able to re-wire your attachment styles, and create safe, secure, and supportive relationships. If you can develop these types of relationships with others, you can also foster empathy, esteem, and efficacy within yourself, or vice-versa, depending on your unique process.
Evidence Based Practice
It is extremely important to me that I operate from an evidence-based and empirically supported position. The approaches outlined above are supported by evidence through research and scholarly dialogue, as is the application of one theory, such as attachment, to another model, such as CBT. Both AAT and attachment-theory are supported by literature as effective means in which to enhance more traditional models of therapy, such as PCT and CBT.
I draw from empirically supported treatments in order to address specific symptoms, but do not rely on these exclusively, as there is evidence to support alternative process outcomes as well. Psychology research struggles to identify preference for any one model over another.
A common thread throughout my practice is the utilization of common factors shown to improve the outcome of therapy. These factors include: empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard; client motivation and autonomy; and a strong therapeutic relationship which relies on collaboration and feedback. While it is difficult to prove one model’s effectiveness over another, the research supports the development of these common factors to increase effectiveness in therapy.
Integration
Integration is key to my practice. Because I work both in the past and present, I need to incorporate models that value both tenses of work. I want to address both past trauma and current symptoms so I need to be flexible with my ability to draw from various models and processes. Because each person is unique and ever-evolving, we need to be able to work together to set goals and determine the type of process that is going to best serve you, and be ready to adapt that plan as things change.
There are many models of psychotherapy, and many correct ways to do any one thing. While it is my job to understand theories and be able to apply specific processes from each, I do not cling too tightly to any one model, an approach known as technical eclecticism. I work to stay up to date on current-best-practices, incorporate appropriate models of therapy in congruence with my client’s identified goals for therapy, and operate from an evidence-based approach through promoting common factors.
