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Combined Individual/Marital Therapy: A Conflict Resolution Framework and Ethical Considerations

This article addresses the need for therapists to see the forest as well as the trees.  It proposes that the core overall project of therapy is to help people to resolve their conflicts, bringing new and more gratifying solutions to difficult dilemmas.

Conflict resolution theory enables individual and couple components of treatment to feel unified under the central project of resolving conflicts.

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Conflict Resolution: A Framework for Integration

This article addresses the need for therapists to see the forest as well as the trees.  It proposes that the core overall project of therapy is to help people to resolve their conflicts, bringing new and more gratifying solutions to difficult dilemmas.

Conflict resolution theory enables individual and couple components of treatment to feel unified under the central project of resolving conflicts.

Click to Download

Energy Therapies: The New Frontier of Psychotherapy

Energy Therapies: An Exciting New Psychological Frontier

Susan Heitler, Ph.D., www.TherapyHelp.com and PowerofTwoMarriage.com

Published initially in The Colorado Psychologist, June, 2012

 Energy therapy refers to interventions that address the body’s negative and positive energy flows to enable healthier physical and emotional functioning.  Having worked for the past year and a half with a highly-skilled energy therapist, I have crossed from skepticism to intrigue with the potential of these new psychotherapy assessment and healing techniques. 

When Dale Petterson, a down-to-earth ex-Navy man and retired energy therapist, first contacted me, I invited him to my office to demo his work.  I was impressed, so much so that I invited Dale to set up an independent therapy professional practice in my office suite.  I wanted further opportunities to learn from him. 

I now routinely incorporate Dale’s interventions into my own treatment offerings.  As somewhat of an old dog when it comes to learning new tricks, when I say “incorporate” I refer to working jointly on cases with Dale.  We work together on specific aspects of both my individual and my couple therapy cases, and then I continue to work on my own with the clients for the majority of sessions. 

I rely on conventional treatments for processing life dilemmas, healing after couple’s upsets, facilitating habit changes, and coaching cognitive or couple skills.  For defusing earlier life memories and reducing present anxiety, depression, anger and distress I use a combination of my and Dale’s methods.  Dale also carries his own caseload.

What phenomena signal to me to add Dale’s interventions to my own?

  1. Psychological reversal
  2. Intense emotional states
  3. Persistent distressing underlying concerns
  4. Insufficient resilience
  5. Physical manifestations of emotional issues in stomach pain, neck pain, etc.
  6. Excessive emotional reactivity suggesting a hyperactive amygdale characteristic of borderline clients
  7. Anger eruptions
  8. Persistent anxiety, including PTSD
  9. Depression
  10. Blockages to sexual functioning
  11. Negative beliefs about the self such as a sense of inadequacy or belief that one is unlovable.
  12. Denial, repression or suppression of data that would be helpful to access for treatment to succeed.

 What are some of the energy treatment techniques that Dale utilizes?

Dale’s repertoire includes a wide diversity of energy interventions.  The ones that he most often uses however are:

1. Muscle kinesiology gives a voice to the subconscious. 

Dale uses muscle kinesiology to:

  1. Verify which target symptom we need to focus on at any given time
  2. Pinpoint the sources of trapped negative emotions in earlier life experiences
  3. Verify which treatment method to use on the target symptom
  4. Assess progress by verifying if we have completely alleviated a given target symptom or if we need to do additional interventions.

 2. Removal of psychological reversal.  Psychological reversal orients people to doing things that make them miserable rather than happy.  People who are “reversed” tend to self-sabotage, undermining their successes. 

The undertow toward unhappiness can undermine successful medical and psychological treatment outcomes, so testing for reversal at the outset of treatment is vital.  Correcting the reversal generally takes 15 minutes or less using Emotion Code interventions (see below).  This interventin increases the likelihood that subsequent psychological interventions will hold.

3. Emotion Code, created by Bradley Nelson, is a method for identifying and releasing emotions from prior negative life experiences that have formed the templates for current problematic habits, beliefs, and emotional reactions.

Exploration of the earlier life experiences influencing present dysfunction is  a conventional psychotherapeutic strategy. 

The advantages of Emotion Code techniques over conventional methods for accessing and releasing the hold of early experiences on later functioning include:

     1) the rapidity with which it pinpoints the key earlier experiences

     2) ability to access preverbal, prenatal, and even inherited and past-life negative emotions

     3) comprehensiveness of the release of the negative trapped emotion

     4) ability to verify if there are further trapped emotions impacting the problematic target symptom that should also be released.

4. EFT is a simplified variant of the tapping techniques created several decades ago by psychologist Roger Callahan.  Tapping on acupuncture points calms excessive emotional reactions.   PTSD is especially responsive to this well-researched technique. 

For summaries of EFT research see http://www.tapintofreedom.com/research.

5. Dale’s unique contributions such as using the Emotion Code to remediate psychological reversal, treating depression by shifting energies from the right to the left prefrontal lobe, decreasing hyperactivity of the amygdale to reduce excessive emotional reactivity, and use of cold laser for strengthening emotional resilience. 

To learn more about these techniques, please contact me via www.TherapyHelp.com. 

Susan Heitler, Ph.D. a graduate of Harvard and NYU, specializes in couples therapy in her private practice at Rose Medical Center and blogs for PsychologyToday.com.  Her multiple publications include From Conflict to Resolution and The Angry Couple video which emphasize the role of conflict resolution in treatment and Power of Two, now the basis for the online marriage skills training program, PowerOFTwoMarriage.com.

Reference Links:

Treatment of Chronic Pain: http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201205/i-hurt-all-over/two-examples-how-energy-psychology-treatment-can-end-chronic-phys

Treating PTSD: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/resolution-not-conflict/201110/energy-psychology-new-options-understanding-and-treating-emotion

The Emotion Code: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/resolution-not-conflict/201202/your-mind-has-extraordinary-powers

Psychological reversal: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/resolution-not-conflict/201202/bad-luck-bad-choices-or-psychological-reversal 

Depression treatment: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/resolution-not-conflict/201202/quick-and-quirky-addition-depression-treatment-options

UNDOING DEPRESSION: A Visualization Alternative to Anti-Depressant Medications

 by Susan Heitler, Ph.D.

www.therapyhelp.com and www.poweroftwomarriage.com

Depression produces feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. Depressed feelings are triggered by a situation in which a person gives up on getting something of felt importance.

The following visualization, illustrated on the audiotape Depression: A Disorder of Power, can powerfully combat depressed moods. Designed for therapists to use with patients, the visualization may also be used as a self-help technique.

The depressed person closes his/her eyes, and the therapist asks the following questions, leading the depressed person through six re-empowering steps. To use the technique as self-help, ask a friend to read you the questions aloud. Alternatively, open your eyes to read each question, and then close them again to observe the images that come up on your visual screen.

  • Identify the conflict. “If you were going to be mad at someone, or at something, not yourself, notice what image comes up of who you could be mad at.”
  • Fill in the details. “In that scene, what do you see him (her) doing? How do you respond? What do you want? What do you feel, and think?”
  • Check relative sizes. “Who appears bigger, you or the other? By a little, or by a lot.” Note: if there are no size discrepancies, you are not dealing with depression, or have not yet identified the depressogenic situation.
  • Alter the sizes, increasing the patient’s sense of power. “Picture yourself suddenly growing very tall, like Alice in Wonderland, shooting way up tall.”
  • Broaden the database.“From this new height, from this perspective, what can you see now that you may not have noticed before when you were small?”
  • Find new solutions. “Knowing what you now know, from this bigger size, what are some new ways you might handle the problem to be more effective in getting what you want?”

Note: This protocol can reestablish normal power, eliminate the negative thinking of depression, and reestablish a sense of positive humor and well-being. For well-being to be sustained, however, the pattern of depressogenic interactions needs to be changed. For this reason, when depressogenic conflicts occur with a spouse, both partners need to be included in the therapy process so that both make the changes necessary for cooperative, rather than dominant-submissive, interacting.

Thoughts on the New “Energy Therapies”

In my posting today I am sharing a question and answer from a recent story on depression that  posted on my blog at PsychologyToday.com.   The question sent to me was an excellent one.  I’ve tried to answer it with full candor.

Just wondering what you mean

Submitted by Anonymous on October 19, 2011 – 9:16am.

Just wondering what you mean by “energy therapies”.

What exactly are you referring to? I’ve seen lots of claims by alternative therapies (and for that matter acupuncture as well) but haven’t really seen any full scale scientific studies that have proven the efficacy of such approaches.

I’m all for getting people off medication and believe that many people become too dependent on their therapists during talk therapy. However, there are a lot of psuedoscience spouting quacks out there and was intrigued by the fact that you believe that some of these approaches might work.

Here’s the answer to the question from Anonymous: 

On energy therapies

Submitted by Susan Heitler, Ph.D. on October 19, 2011 – 5:24pm.

I list the emergy therapy options, with links to websites explaing them, I’ve seen produce quite amazing results in my PsychologyToday.com post  called A New World of Options for Soldiers and Other Traumatized Folks. It’s at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/resolution-not-conflict/201110/new-w….

Like you, I also have not seen scientific studies on the energy therapies. I think that’s in part because the established and conventional places that do studies have not yet taken these alternative options seriously. Or maybe I just don’t know where to look.

What I have seen though is a year’s worth several sessions a week of co-therapy with Dale Petterson, the energy therapist who works in my office suite. The results have totally convinced me that these therapy methods are the way of the future.

There are some things that conventional treatment does better. For sorting through what’s going on in someone’s current life for instance, talk therapy is the treatment of choice. At the same time, for someone with recurrent depression, energy therapy using Nelson Bradley’s The Body Code has accomplished with my patients astounding results.

As an example, Dale and I worked today with a college student giving him relief from inherited emotions like sorrow that originated in grandparents, and equalized the energy in his left and right frontal lobes. Now those interventions are really weird to think about. Want to hear something even weirder? My client is in college on the East Coast, and Dale and I work with him over Skype from Denver.

Yet the bottom line is that at the end of the session the young man felt great, and thanked us profoundly for how radically better he’s been feeling since we began the energy treatments about five sessions ago.

This is a young man I’ve worked with to combat depression on and off since he was in early high school. My interventions have always alleviated the current depressive episode, but until now with the energy treatments I had not been able to clean out the whole propensity to depression. The The Body Code, Emotion Code and EFT treatments Dale has done with him go way beyond anything that I can explain scientifically, but they sure are effective, fast, fun, relatively inexpensive, and with no downsides that I’ve come across.

For couples, therapy has to include a component of communication and conflict resolution skill training.   Energy therapies don’t touch skill training at all.

I write about the three levels of couple treatment interventions in my first posting on my PT blog, in an article called From Thin-Skinned to Win-Win.

The third and deepest intervention level of couples therapy is where I use energy therapy.  Energy therapy in couples work goes down deeper and can clean up the sub-sub-conscious material with astounding thoroughness and rapidity, way beyond what other methods I use like Gestalt and family therapy and the “depth dive” that I advocate in my book for therapists, From Conflict to Resolution.

In sum, I truly do believe that energy therapies definitely merit serious psychological study, serious attention from folks who need help, and need to be taught in psychology graduate school training programs.

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