- Individual, Couple, or Intergenerational Therapy
- Specific interest in the ups and downs of long-term intimate relationships
- Stress, trauma, anxiety, and depression, including major life transitions from birth to death
- Nuclear & intergenerational family therapy
- Optional sandtray therapy available and EMDR and Focusing—powerful modalities—especially helpful for trauma
Adults come to the Center for help with depression, anxiety, relationship and communication problems, effects of trauma and loss, addictive behavior, social dysfunctions, and other difficulties in constructive living. Work with adults at the family center is grounded in Contextual Family Therapy, which was developed by Ivan Borzomenyi-Nagy. Through honest inquiry and communication, clients explore the connections between the emotional history of previous generations, their emotional legacies from their families of origin, their current relationships, and their own inner landscapes. Within these contexts, they can find healing in areas of trust, fairness, giving and receiving in relationships, parentification (over-responsibility), forgiveness and exoneration, etc.
Some of the optional modalities for therapy work with adults can include talk therapy, sandtray, focusing, or EMDR. Sandtray work can be a very deep and sacred experience. Using objects chosen spontaneously from a wide-ranging selection of miniatures, the client makes a picture like a little diorama in a tray of sand. This picture can vividly represent both the conscious and the unconscious state of the client's mind, and do so in ways that reveal inner realities of which he or she was not aware. The result can be similar to the effect of a transformative dream.
Focusing was developed by Eugene Gendlin. It is another form of very deep body-mind work, in which the client tracks "felt senses" that arise deep in the body, in response to life situations. Learning how to be with these "felt senses" allows the experiencing of what Gendlin called "shifts," which are deep changes within the person that generate healing and freedom. The research in Interpersonal Neurobiology is affirming the efficacy and power of these optional approaches as offering deeper healing than Talk Therapy alone.