Therapeutic Modalities

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is the treatment most closely associated with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Therapists practice DBT in both individual and group sessions. The therapy combines elements of CBT to help with regulating emotion through distress tolerance and mindfulness. The goal of Dialectical Behavior Therapy is to alleviate the intense emotional pain associated with BPD.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy stresses the role of thinking in how we feel and what we do. It is based on the belief that thoughts, rather than people or events, cause our negative feelings. The therapist assists the client in identifying, testing the reality of, and correcting dysfunctional beliefs underlying his or her thinking. The therapist then helps the client modify those thoughts and the behaviors that flow from them. CBT is a structured collaboration between therapist and client and often calls for homework assignments. CBT has been clinically proven to help clients in a relatively short amount of time with a wide range of disorders, including depression and anxiety.

“ There is a voice that doesn't use words, listen..."
— Rumi

Our autonomic nervous system is all about safety.  Polyvagal Theory offers precise science to understanding how the vagus nerve, one part of this system, which connects the brain, to the heart, to the viscera (the organs of the belly), relates to our human ability to connect and communicate with each other.  Learning about the vagus nerve allows us to understand our coherent human nervous system and how it predictably relates to stimuli it encounters as varying degrees of safety and danger. Through the lens of Polyvagal Theory, we see the role of the autonomic nervous system as it shapes human’s experiences of safety and affects their ability for connection.

Trauma interrupts the process of building the autonomic circuitry of safe connection and sidetracks the development of regulation and resilience. People with trauma histories often experience more intense, extreme autonomic responses, which affects their ability to regulate and feel safe in relationships. The extreme behaviours are autonomic actions in service of survival—adaptive responses ingrained in a survival story that is entered into automatically. Trauma compromises our ability to engage with others by replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection. If unresolved, these early adaptive survival responses become habitual autonomic patterns.

Therapy through a Polyvagal lens, supports clients in re-patterning the ways their autonomic nervous systems operate when the drive to survive competes with the longing to connect with others.

At its core, interpersonal neurobiology holds that we are ultimately who we are because of our relationships. Further, because the mind is defined as a relational process that regulates energy flow, our brains are constantly rewiring themselves. All relationships change the brain, particularly the most intimate ones, like the ones with our primary caregivers or romantic partners.1 While it was once thought that our early experiences defined who we are, interpersonal neurobiology holds that our brains are constantly being reshaped by new relationships.
Social pain is coded similarly in the brain to physical pain. Both forms of pain signal danger to our survival. Interpersonal neurobiology adds to the growing body of research that demonstrates just how social we are. Because interpersonal neurobiology stresses the importance of healthy relationships for a healthy mind, it also stresses the importance of taking good care of the connections you have and had with others.

EFT’s goal is to help you work on your emotions and ability to emotionally regulate to improve your relationships. This is based on attachment theory. Attachment theory proposes that the bond you established with your primary caregivers as a child impacts how you interact and bond with others as an adult. But this attachment style you developed from your early experiences can change. Working on regulating your reactions to intense emotions is one way to do so. 

Emotionally focused therapy could help you move from insecure attachments to more secure ones. It integrates experiential and systemic theories, offering a unique combination of empirically supported change processes and techniques informed by an explicit theory of adult love.

Strength-based therapy is a type of positive psychotherapy and counselling that focuses more on your internal strengths and resourcefulness, and less on weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings. This focus sets up a positive mindset that helps you build on you best qualities, find your strengths, improve resilience and change worldview to one that is more positive. A positive attitude, in turn, can help your expectations of yourself and others become more reasonable.

Feminist therapy is an integrative approach to psychotherapy that focuses on gender and the particular challenges and stressors that women face as a result of bias, stereotyping, oppression, discrimination, and other factors that threaten their mental health. The therapeutic relationship, based on an authentic connection and equality between the therapist and the client, helps empower clients understand the social factors that contribute to their issues, discover and claim their unique identity, and build on personal strengths to better their own lives and that of others.