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Psychotherapeutic Services



The Performance Enhancement Institute combines goal oriented coaching and collaborative psychotherapy with other evidence based interventions that help our clients engage life with purpose and intention. Our therapy and consultation plans are individually tailored and designed to be responsive to the needs of our clients who often have considerable demands placed on them.

The Institute provides a full range of psychological services for health, wellness, behavioral medicine and for victims of trauma.

  • Find courage and compassion to make major life changes.
  • Invest in yourself to be an effective participant in life.



Theraputic Interventions (Partial)

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

img Acceptance and Commitment Therapy seeks to help people develop psychological flexibility. It is an eclectic therapy that lies in the intersection of mindfulness and cognitive and behavioral therapy. Among its core principles are (1) cognitive defusion where clients learn to separate thoughts, actions, emotions, memories and images; (2) acceptance where clients learn to let thoughts be just thoughts and to accept them without struggling; (3) maintain contact with the present moment; (4) be an observing, not just an experiencing self; (5) discovering values and strengths; and (6) commit to action based on courage and values.

Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)

img Solution focused brief therapy (SFBT) targets the desired outcome of therapy as a solution rather than focusing on the symptoms, problems or issues that brought someone to therapy. This technique pays primary attention to the present and the future desires of the client, rather than focusing on the past experiences. Clients are encouraged to imagine their future as they want it to be and then the therapist and client collaborate as thought partners on a series of steps to achieve the desired goals. Solution focused brief therapy involves explicating and concretizing the client's vision and dreams, and determining what strengths, skills, resources, and abilities the client will develop and use to move the client forward toward the desired outcome.

Motivational Interviewing

img Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a goal-oriented, client-centered style for eliciting behavior change. Clients explore and resolve ambivalence based on their own intrinsic motivation. Therapists are empathic, help to discover and develop discrepancy, roll with resistance from the client, support the client's self-efficacy and foster a deep respect for facilitating and engaging the client's intrinsic motivation. Change talk is elicited from the client about their desire, ability, needs, commitment, or reasons to change and for any next steps toward change that the client may be willing to express. Therapists using a motivational interviewing approach are active and reflective listeners, summarize the conversation frequently, affirm the client for progress on change and ask open-ended questions.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

img 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 distorted or 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.

Biofeedback

img Biofeedback is the use of information from your own body to improve your health. If you've stepped on a scale or taken your temperature, for example, you've received "feed back" information that you then perhaps acted on. A therapist may use more advanced biofeedback techniques to help clients suffering from anxiety, stress, or tension headaches. For example, a therapist may use a veery sensitive machine that measures electrical activity in the muscles. As the client tries to relax their muscles, they can get an immediate progress report by watching the speed of the signals, usually on a computer monitor, and thus learn how to better control their mind to affect changes in their body. Common elements that are measured and are used for biofeedback are muscle tension, sweat production, skin temperature, heart rate, heart rate variabity, breathing rate, oxygen utilization, blood pressure, and electrical activity in localized areas of the brain.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Preprocessing (EMDR)

img Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)is an information processing therapy that helps clients cope with trauma, addictions, and phobias. During this treatment, the patient focuses on a specific thought, image, emotion, or sensation while simultaneously watching the therapist's finger, lights or baton move in front of his or her eyes. The client is told to recognize what comes up for him/her when thinking of an image while doing bilateral stimulation; then the client is told to let it go. It's like being on a train; an emotion or a thought may come up and the client lets it pass as though they were looking out the window of the moving train.

Positive Psychology

img Positive Psychology focuses on mental health rather than mental illness. The time horizon is now and the future, rather than the past. Conversations are oriented toward the trail of dreams rather than the trail of tears. The content is often about finding and exploiting strengths, enhancing optimism and increasing resilience and psychological hardiness. Skills include developing gratefulness and gratitude and savoring yourself when you are at your best.

Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy

img Hypnotherapy focuses on hypnosis, the Greek term for sleep. The practice uses exercises that relax people, bringing them to an altered state of consciousness. This process focuses on mastering self-awareness. Through trance-like analysis, hypnosis decreases blood pressure and heart rate, putting one's physical body at ease. Working with memories, hypnotherapy helps a person to reframe, relax, absorb, dissociate, respond, and reflect. The process reconstructs healthier associations with a person's past events. Dealing with a wide range of conditions, such as anxiety and depression, people become responsive to new solutions that can lead to personal development through hypnotherapy.

Stress Management

img Stress is the mobilization of the body’s physiology to cope with a perceived dangerous situation. This has often been referred to as the fight or flight response. Chronic stress may cause disease, may interfere with recovery from disease, or make a disease situation worse. Stress management may be used to invoke a relaxation response that turns off the stress response. Stress management may involve medications, relaxation, appropriate nutrition and exercise. Creating personality hardiness may also be a useful tool for stress management where people are taught to identify how they can control things around them, frame stressors as challenges rather than threats, and being personally committed to a course of action rather than alienated by it. Establishing an active social support network may be helpful, creating remembered wellness, engaging in time management strategies involving prioritization, learning assertiveness, and working toward strengths and away from weakness.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Skills

img Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) lies at the intersection of mindfulness and cognitive therapy. DBT focuses on four major areas. First is the acquisition of skills in being in the moment, observing, describing, taking a non-judgmental stance and focusing on one thing at a time. The second focus is to learn distress tolerance skills including distraction, self-soothing, improving the moment, radical acceptance and being wilful not just willing. Emotional regulation skills involve labeling of emotions, mastery of emotional hygiene incuding competence and control, problem solving and letting go of emotional suffering. The last skill set surrounds interpersonal effectiveness based on assertive communication and honoring values.

Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP)

img Exposure and response prevention (ERP) is a behavioral treatment useful for a variety of anxiety disorders, especially phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The person being treated is exposed to the fear provoking stimulus and refrains from engaging in their superstitious responses to create safety. The limbic system in the brain, specifically the amygdala, learns by classical Pavlovian conditioning that the person has other responses to cope with the situation. Thus, the old phobic emotions, obsessive thoughts or compulsive behaviors are extinguished. Old responses are replaced by new fear-incompatible responses. Anxiety usually increases initially and then decreases over the long term.

Coaching

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Pain Management

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Sleep Management

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Meditation and Relaxation

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Some Common Stressors (Partial List)

img Grief, depression, panic, excessive anger, anxiety and trauma.





imgMental and physical overload due to medical diagnosis, treatment and prognosis, pain management, sleep difficulties.





imgInitiating, maintaining or ending relationships, communication difficulties with significant people in your life.





img Feelings of insecurity, worthlessness, unhappiness with physical presence.





img Parenting difficulties, aging parents, difficult children, difficult childhood.





img Personal and spiritual growth, career development, retirement, financial management, death and dying





img Master assertiveness skills, enhance communication skills, fair fighting, self-regulation.





img Public speaking fears, fear of performing in front of others, difficulty in ordinary social relationships, inability to use public bathroom.



img Hyper focus on work, inability to relax and let go, ambition disappointment, bullying, trouble finishing work, over commitment, under commitment, conflict, interruption, personal life entangled with business challenges, workaholism, impaired job performance.