First used around the year 1890, the word “psychotherapy” comes from the ancient Greek words psychē, meaning breath, spirit, or soul and therapeia or therapeuein, to heal or cure.  Thus, psychotherapy literally is about “healing the soul.” 

Individually meeting with a psychotherapist is an extremely gratifying, and potentially life-changing, experience.  Let’s face it.  How often are you able to express all your dreams, all your fears, and all your hopes to another person, assured that you will receive total acceptance and non-judgment in return?  How often do we get to visit with a mature professional and brainstorm ideas for problem-solving personal, relationship or even career concerns, and receive active feedback in return?  Unfortunately for many of us, the answer may be, “Not that often…”

At Wisdom, the counselors combine years of experience (decades actually, but we don’t like to admit it) with personalities that are easy-going and well-grounded.  Both Michael and Sharon are long-time Alaskans who are intimately familiar with the concerns and trends of life in the Last Frontier. 

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

CBT?  What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
To explain let me ask you a question:  When you are upset, do you usually think your way into a new way of feeling, or do you feel your way into a new way of thinking? 

Can we successfully think our way into new ways of feeling? Yes.

Pioneered in the 1950’s and 1960’s by Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck and others, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT for short, is a scientifically tested and verified method of overcoming common emotional patterns.

 It helps you identify your problems and set specific goals for how you would rather be living your life.  In CBT, the counselor gives you techniques to identify thinking patterns that may not be giving you what you want, and empower you to adopt more helpful thoughts, attitudes, philosophies and beliefs. 

CBT also helps us focus on emotions.  We were created to have a very wide range of feelings.  The ability to explore and name thoughts and feelings is the first step to managing them, and ultimately lead us to new ways of acting and behaving.

CBT is also an educational process that can help you to understand, normalize and address some common human problems.  The following are some of the humorous ways we can identify common problems in thinking that get us into trouble.  As you can see, by defining the problem, we are more easily led into the solution!

Catastrophizing: Making “mountains out of molehills”
Solution?  Learn to put your thoughts into perspective.

All-or-Nothing thinking:  Either it’s “black or white”, either “you’re with me or against me”
Solution?  Start to develop “Both…And…” thinking

Fortune Telling / Crystal Ball Reading:  If you start your sentences with “I know what you’re going to think about this….”  You may want to stop and reconsider. 
Solution?  Start asking questions first.  Test out your predictions.  Understand the past doesn’t predict your future.

Personalizing:  Interpreting events as if they are related to you personally.  Often times this leads to hurt feelings that were actually quite avoidable.
Solution?  Consider alternative explanations.  What else might have contributed to this problem?

Over-generalizing:  Drawing global conclusions from one or more events.  If you find yourself saying “always”, “”never”, “everyone”, “no one”, “everything”, “nothing”, then you might be over-generalizing.  Solution?  Suspend judgment and get more specific.  Is what you’re saying really always, at all times and in all places true like that?

OK, there are lots more where those came from, but you get the idea.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

DBT was developed by Marsha Linehan of Seattle, WA in the early 1990’s.  Research indicates it is highly effective in helping people who experience a variety of symptoms and behaviors associated with depression and other mood disorders such as Bipolar Disorder, among others.  As a type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, DBT emphasizes Dialectics and Mindfulness, DBT's central component.

There are two essential parts of the treatment:
1)  An individual therapy component in which the therapist and client discuss issues relating to daily life that come up during the week.  During the individual therapy, the therapist and client work towards improving personal interaction skill use. Often, skills group is discussed and obstacles to acting skillfully are addressed.

2)  In skills-based group therapy, which meets once a week for two hours, one learns to use specific skills that are broken down into four modules: core mindfulness skills, emotion regulation skills, interpersonal effectiveness skills and distress tolerance skills.

Mindfulness
The essential part of all skills taught in skills group are the core Mindfulness skills.  Mindfulness is awareness of one's thoughts, actions or motivations. Mindfulness is held to engender insight and Wisdom.

Interpersonal Effectiveness
Interpersonal response patterns taught in DBT skills training are very similar to those taught in many assertiveness and interpersonal problem-solving classes.
They include effective strategies for:
1) asking for what you need, 2) saying “no”, and 3) coping with interpersonal conflict.

Distress Tolerance
Distress tolerance skills constitute a natural development from mindfulness skills. Many current approaches to mental health treatment focus on changing distressing events and circumstances. They have paid little attention to accepting, finding meaning for, and tolerating distress. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy emphasizes learning to bear pain skillfully.
Skills have to do with the ability to accept, in a non-evaluative and nonjudgmental fashion, both oneself and the current situation. Although the stance advocated here is a nonjudgmental one, this does not mean that it is one of approval: acceptance of reality is not approval of reality.

Emotion Regulation
Dialectical behavioral therapy skills for emotion regulation include:

• Identifying and labeling emotions
• Identifying obstacles to changing emotions
• Reducing vulnerability to emotion mind
• Increasing positive emotional events
• Increasing mindfulness to current emotions
• Taking opposite action
• Applying distress tolerance techniques

Michael DeMolina, LPC shares an entertaining story, from when he personally trained with Marsha Linehan, the founder of DBT:

 “Marsha was lecturing about distress tolerance, and she asked if there were any martial artists in the audience who would be willing to demonstrate a teaching point at the front of the room.  There were none, so my friend sitting next to me, knowing I taught Tai Chi, raised my hand for me.  I begrudgingly agreed to demonstrate. 
When I arrived at the front of the room, Marsha asked me to throw a punch at her.  I immediately thought of everything that could go wrong if I actually injured the creator of DBT (with a room full of witnesses no less!).  So I hesitated.  However, she insisted and so I took a stance and threw a Tai Chi-type punch, stopping before I hit her.  She gracefully and gently met my force and then we floated there for a moment together with neither of us moving. 
She was obviously expecting something else.  She then asked, “What martial art do you practice?” 
“Tai Chi!” Michael responded.
“Oh.  That’s why it didn’t work.”  she said.  “Go ahead and punch like you practice one of those other hard style martial arts.” 
Michael, feeling flustered responded, “But I would be over-extended and losing my balance if I did that!”  She said, “Yes, that’s the point of the demonstration.”  Michael laughed and threw a wildly unfocused punch at her and sure enough, she deflected it down and to her side effortlessly. 
As it turns out, Marsha is a black belt in the martial art of Aikido, which emphasizes many of the same principles as Tai Chi.  Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is based greatly on the principles found in these martial arts such as deflection, awareness and mindfulness while being strong in one’s stance to life.