Aliya Saulson, LCSW

ACT falls under the umbrella of CBT, but takes it a step further to not only examine your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but to also evaluate your relationship to your thoughts, to your feelings, and to your behaviors.

What’s your relationship with that heart-racing anxiety showing up? How do you feel about that depression bully kicking you around inside?

As such, we will often challenge the language you use to talk to yourself about these different pieces of your being. In this therapy, we take a look at the values that are important to you and consider ways you can move your life in the direction you want it to go.

ACT is about accepting the things you cannot change (psst, like your feelings) and making committed action to change the things you can, all in the name of living a more fulfilling life. This therapy is one where it’s easier to experience than it is for me to talk about, so sometimes you’ll hear me ask “Can we try an exercise together?”

CPT is a protocol-based, home-practice-heavy treatment used specifically to treat trauma. It is often considered the gold standard of treatment used in Veterans Administrations across the country and was originally developed to treat survivors of rape and sexual assault. CPT is both hard and worthy, mind-changing work.

The goals of CPT are to help you accept the reality of the traumatic event/experience, to feel your emotions about it, and to help you develop balanced and realistic beliefs about the trauma, yourself, and others. Just about every client I’ve used CPT with notices significant positive differences in the way they think after treatment.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a large umbrella, and the core tenets of the umbrella are that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors all connect and interact with one another.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the ability to just change our feelings at the drop of a hat. We can’t just say “I don’t want to feel sadness” and *poof*, it’s gone (if you figure out how to do that, please do let me know). Our feelings are our feelings and they are valid. Period.

However, where we do have more control is over our thoughts (hence, the cognitive) and our behaviors (hence, the behavioral). The good news is that our thoughts and behaviors connect to our feelings so sometimes when we change what we are saying to ourselves or how we behave, our feelings can shift as well.

In session, I will often be asking you to attend to your thoughts and feelings. Remember, if it can be used to describe pizza, it’s not a feeling (for example, fine, good, great, bad, so-so, shitty, pineapple, etc.).

Psychodynamic therapy brings the unconscious to the conscious realm. There are ways we all behave, respond, and react that may be totally unconscious and we do these things without real awareness.

Psychodynamic therapy ties those strings to our awareness–we can’t change a behavior without first becoming aware of it. This type of therapy also examines how your attachment patterns with your caregivers growing up impact your current relationships and experience of the world today.

Freud called our dreams “the road to the subconscious,” and because psychodynamic therapy conscious-fies the unconscious, we can always process any dreams in session to see what’s on the road.

In session, you might hear me say things like “How old do you feel when you say that?” or “What does this experience/pattern/feeling/thought remind you of, does it feel familiar in any way?”

Maybe you’ve heard a lot of people talk about this thing called mindfulness and its numerous benefits. Well, it sure does get a lot of hype.

Why is that? Because it actually works. Mindfulness practices can be super varied but ultimately all have a foundation of approaching ideas, experiences, body sensations, environments, and feelings, with curiosity, awareness, openness, and nonjudgmentalness.

The way we will practice mindfulness in session includes being mindful of the language we use to talk to ourselves, bringing awareness to body sensations, and learning coping skills focused on groundedness. All this effort in awareness is fundamental to creating a more intentional, values-aligned life.