Approach
We bring our authentic selves to therapy and take a collaborative approach. In the initial stages, we work with you to create a realistic plan that will support and enhance your life. That plan is never static — as your life changes and your needs shift, we grow and adapt with you.
Our integrative therapeutic style pulls from the approaches below, but our four cornerstones are to always be person-centered, trauma-informed, feminist, and culturally curious.
Person-Centered
The humanistic concept that you are a unique individual, deserving of respect, dignity, and personalized care, who has the capacity to grow and evolve. We meet you where you are and attend to your needs, working with you rather than force-fitting you into a particular prescribed model.
Trauma-Informed
The recognition that all types of trauma carry lasting effects that can lead to re-traumatization, and the expertise to create a safe haven for traumatized individuals. We maintain constant awareness of the impact of trauma and build trauma-informed practices into each step of the therapy process.
Feminist
A feminist approach to therapy faces the systemic cultural oppression of women and other marginalized groups, including the widespread and often very individualized harm caused by inequality. We believe in forming egalitarian client/therapist relationships, understanding societal pressures on the individual, and being a force for social change as a practice.
Culturally Curious
Traditionally referred to as “cultural competence,” we feel that the ability to remain culturally curious is the most important factor. We always seek to be open and inquisitive, learning from our clients and also helping them to understand their mental wellbeing within their various cultural frameworks.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT focuses on accepting oneself fully, including undesirable or uncomfortable thoughts and emotions, rather than denying or altering reality to align with one’s self-perception. ACT is useful as an action-oriented therapeutic intervention that encourages insight, acceptance, and committed action to live in alignment with one’s value system.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT examines how thoughts and perceptions influence behaviors. While we don’t typically employ highly-structured CBT practices, it can be useful to identify and challenge unhelpful thought patterns and take a solutions-oriented approach to enacting behavior change.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)
DBT acknowledges the complexity and contradiction that’s present in life and within each individual. With a focus on emotion regulation and interpersonal challenges, DBT therapy includes skill-building, emotion identification, and distress tolerance.
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)
In EFT, emotions are seen as central to a person’s experience, identity, and needs. A common refrain at Moment Counseling Center is to “feel your feelings” — it might sound simple, but acknowledgement and activation of deep-set emotions can bring you closer to yourself and can be a catalyst for change.
Existential
Existential therapy focuses on authenticity, meaning, personal responsibility, and the free will to enact change. Sometimes existential therapy rises to the surface due to underlying anxiety about one’s purpose, the state of the world, or the nature of life and death, but the core of this therapeutic approach comes back to the strength and power of the individual despite external circumstances.
Family Systems
A family systems approach often applies to individual therapy, as people are generally embedded in and/or formed by complex family dynamics that affect their relationships, value systems, behaviors, identities, etc. Unspoken “rules of the family” and intergenerational factors can have lifelong impacts on an individual, and processing past or current family relationships can open up new levels of self-understanding and self-compassion.
Humanistic
Humanistic therapy focuses on one’s individual nature and unique perspective, with an optimistic view of the power inherent in each person to grow and overcome challenges. This empowering approach often goes hand-in-hand with person-centered therapy, and is particularly conducive to increasing self-esteem, identity formation, and navigating life transitions.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS takes a systems approach to the inner workings of an individual’s personality, identifying sub-personalities that carry different wounds and emotions and are often in conflict with each other. IFS can be a powerful tool toward examining oneself with compassion and ultimately bringing harmony to the internal mental system.
Interpersonal Therapy (IPT)
Human beings are by nature social creatures, and IPT specifically looks at an individual’s relationships and social functioning. IPT can be useful when life events shift the nature of social dynamics, such as a break-up or divorce, a significant move, or a social conflict. This approach can also help with processing grief or addressing isolation and depression.
Jungian
Carl Jung, a prominent psychiatrist in the early 20th century, explored the nature of the personality and the mind’s conscious and unconscious workings. Jungian therapy can be especially useful for those who seek to uncover the internal sources of their challenges rather than alleviating their symptoms as the primary goal.
Mindfulness
A mindful approach to therapy involves embracing the present moment and increasing awareness of one’s environment, body, senses, thoughts, and feelings. Mindfulness can disrupt negative automatic thought patterns and emotions, reduce stress, calm the nervous system, and open up new levels of awareness.
Narrative
In narrative therapy, people are considered the experts of their own lives and are thought of as separate from their behaviors and problems. Narrative therapy can be useful for reestablishing one’s identity as distinct from painful life events and for rewriting the personal stories that are developed throughout life.
Psychodynamic
Psychodynamic therapy seeks to increase self-awareness and improve quality of life by shining a light on unconscious patterns and linking past experiences with present thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. A psychodynamic approach is useful for individuals who want to get to the roots of their problems in order to better understand themselves and break recurrent, painful life patterns.
Solution-Focused Therapy
A solutions-focused approach provides actionable problem solving to create positive change. A future-oriented technique, this approach can be incorporated when there are tangible, solvable issues that require decisions and action, rather than focusing on the impacts of the past or self-exploration.