My Approach To Psychotherapy: Five essential elements
There are five elements that shape my approach to psychotherapy: relationship,  education and trainings, embodied experiential psychotherapy,  my own psychotherapy and life experience.

Relationship: All therapies assume a good working relationship with the client, but that is often where the similarities end. Not all therapies see the therapeutic relationship itself as having growth potential for the client. The therapeutic relationship is a fertile ground for change, and often the first place that growth appears! Your growth will emerge through the context of our relationship, and we will both feel it directly! 

Education and further Training:
My formal education as a psychologist and psychotherapist began with my training as a dance movement therapist. This initial education has been invaluable, as it brings the rich world of the nonverbal and the aesthetic right into our sessions. My training has included the best researched CBT for anxiety,  trauma therapies and the current embodied psychotherapies - emotion-focused, somatic experiencing and AEDP, accelerated experiential developmental psychotherapy, as well as motivational interviewing and seminars in EMDR.  My work is informed by relational principles of contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapy.  We can discuss further trainings when we speak in a consultation.
Check my additional recent trainings under the Specialties Section of this website.
 
The next ingredient is the Experiential,  hardest to describe yet most precious. 

In the 1960s Carl Rogers, considered the most beloved of American psychotherapists collaborated with a philosopher named Eugene Gendlin; together, they discovered that patients who showed no progress in therapy didn’t seem to have a capacity to “refer inward” in a particular way. Gendlin designed a way to capture and teach this process to his clients, as well as anyone interested in working with their inner experiencing. Over the last twenty years, Experiential Focusing and Felt Sensing has been cited as an excellent example of a micro unit of naturally occurring human change process that can be accessed and worked with across most approaches to psychotherapy, http://focusing.org

When psychotherapy includes felt sensing level, it gives you immediate access to your own palpable progress, as it occurs, moment by moment. I have never found anything quite like it and my clients feel the same way. You can read much more about Experiential Focusing on my "Focusing” page.  Experiential Focusing is an embodied psychotherapy process.


Finally, my personal life experience and own therapy have given me compassion re the twists and turns of life, and respect for the uniqueness of the individual. I have seen firsthand how a steady psychotherapy relationship can make all the difference.

drjlavender@gmail.com
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