CLINICAL PERSPECTIVE
PHILOSOPHY
& APPROACH

This means that all interactions and assessments lean on a knowledge and understanding of trauma and how it impacts people’s lives, including their interactions with content and services.

Attachment theory is the understanding that a person’s baseline of trust and satisfaction in relationships is impacted by the connection and reliability of their connections in relationships throughout life, especially in early life experiences with caregivers. Exploring this provides an understanding why you feel or act the way you do in relationships, and helps to clarify what you need to do in the present in order to increase your relationship satisfaction.

Psychodynamic theory is the understanding that many of the forces that drive our thoughts, feelings, and behavior patterns are unconscious to us, and shaped by our previous life experiences. In psychodynamic work, by recognizing and making conscious some of these unconscious patterns, you have a greater ability to make choices for meaningful pattern changes.

LGBTQIA+ Affirmative practice means you are invited to come as you are. It means that all gender identities and sexual orientations are considered valid. It also means that your experiences living in a homphobic / transphobic / biphobic world are valid, as well as the real and lasting impacts of those experiences.

Critical Race Theory refers to the understanding that in the US our systems, our laws, and our institutions are embedded with racism. This structural racism is inescapable, oppressive, and has an impact on outcomes for marginalized people across all areas of life.

Intersectionality emphasizes the importance of considering every marginalized identity that a single person holds (gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc), because each additional marginalized identity layers the trauma a person is likely to have experienced.

This refers to the idea that there is no single “correct” way for one’s brain to experience things. Where historically mental health diagnoses such as Autism and ADHD were seen as deficits and have been stigmatized, modern research is revealing that differences in brain function (in learning, social awareness, attention, mood, etc) are actually quite common and normal. The problem is more that the systems and institutions that we live in were designed for “neuro-typical” brains.

This consideration in therapy and content means that neuro-typical brains are de-centered (aka not the model of what’s best/right/ideal or the standard to aspire to).

This refers to how we view bodies, and the choice to de-center appearance related societal beauty standards and instead focus on individualized health of the whole person. It also means validating one’s experiences living in a fat-phobic, ableist world, and the lasting impact of those experiences. It means meeting people where they’re at in their relationships to their bodies, not where someone else says they should be.

This means recognizing the ways that society shames sex, sexuality, and sex work, and disrupting the stigma with sex education and by recognizing that all consensual sexual activity is healthy. In therapy and content this shows up as a nonjudgmental stance on one’s relationship to [consensual] sex, sexuality, and intimate relationships across the spectrum, no matter what that looks like.

Poly affirming refers to validating polyamorous and ethically non-monogamous relationships.

This refers to the belief that mutually satisfying relationships are an important part of one’s emotional wellbeing. In this style of therapy, a therapist will work to cultivate a strong and trusting relationship with you, and might share their observations in their relationship with you to help you understand and work through some of the patterns that may be showing up in your relationships outside of therapy.

This means that every behavior, no matter how small, or how problematic, has a valid and non-shameful reason motivating it to exist, that it seeks to meet some conscious or unconscious need, and that there is some kind of pay-off to doing it, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening. Getting a better understanding of the function of your behavior can help you to figure out other ways to go about meeting the same needs.

This refers to the belief that human bodies instinctively know how to heal from injuries and regulate their own healthy functioning. It also assumes that human beings are neither inherently good nor inherently bad, but that problems arise out of unmet needs.

Regulating is obvious in how humans sweat when hot, pant when needing more oxygen, and healing is obvious in the development of scabs and scar tissues to heal cuts. What’s less obvious is that the body actually knows how to release traumatic stress and heal too.

The problem is not that we cannot heal, it’s that our conditioned thought processes, actions, and environmental factors get in the way of a natural healing process.

A mind-body technique designed to provide relief from trauma by engaging the deeper subcortical brain, which can be hard to access with talk therapy alone.

Traumatic experiences cause lingering stress to store in various parts of the brain and body, and often times our own thought processes and actions can block the brain and body’s natural process of healing itself.

Brainspotting works through using a person’s fixed eye position while processing to release pent up traumatic stress and allow the body to use its natural capacity to heal.

Parts Work draws upon principles of IFS (Internal Family Systems) a technique created by Richard Schwartz, PhD. IFS holds that in response to adversity and trauma, parts of the self can be fractured, causing internal mixed feelings and conflict that can be the source of mental health issues and can cause reactions that may not align with one’s values. In this type of therapy we will get to know different parts of you and explore why they feel and react the way they do, and work to resolve internal conflict.

This modality is similar to another called Somatic Experiencing. It is used to provide a client with an understanding of how the mind, brain, and body respond to trauma so they don’t feel lost and confused about what’s happening to them. It’s also used to teach a set of simple skills to build awareness of how trauma impacts your mind, brain, and body, to cope with traumatic activation and develop a sense of safety and comfort in the body, and to heal through the release of traumatic stress by processing trauma.

CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, is an evidence-based therapy that is used to treat a wide range of diagnoses, starting by targeting cognitive (meaning thought-based) mental health symptoms.

An important concept in CBT is that your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all linked, and that if you make changes to one link of that chain, that can result in changes to the other links. This therapy will often focus on how your thoughts cause difficult emotions which perpetuate your mental health symptoms, or how your behaviors (or lack of behaviors) reinforce the ways you think and feel.

DBT, or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, is another type of therapy that targets the linkage of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, however this one provides more support in dealing with intense feelings that can be overwhelming and/or lead to reactive, impulsive, or destructive behavior.

There is a wide range of DBT skills that are taught so that they can be used step-by-step in the moment, to handle the overwhelming moments where it’s hard to think straight let alone make healthy decisions in tough situations and relationships. It’s also a type of therapy that can really help to provide a zoomed-out perspective - that no matter how bad or intense something feels, that there might be another way to look at it that can help you to calm and find the healthiest solution for you.

Both of these techniques are focused on navigating life in the present, and they don’t do as much exploration of the past, or trauma processing. The Find Flow approach almost always engages past experiences, so treatment usually involves elements of CBT and DBT that are integrated with other techniques to support your unique needs, rather than a strict CBT or DBT program.

TF-CBT is a variation off of CBT that focuses on how past traumatic experiences impact a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the present. The therapist works with the client to recognize these impacts, and to safely work towards taking power away from the memories of the trauma by helping the client to see and experience their memory of the trauma from different and more empowering perspectives. This type of therapy usually involves eventually expressing one’s trauma verbally or creatively, and creating cope ahead-plans to manage one’s trauma triggers differently whenever they come up going forward.

ACT is action-oriented, and bears some similarities to CBT and DBT. It acknowledges that all humans have negative emotional experiences, but rather than denying, fighting, or avoiding these negative emotional experiences, one instead accepts that they are happening. This acceptance allows a person to redirect their energy towards finding new responses to problems and ways of moving forward that improve their wellbeing. This work also focuses a lot on identifying and strengthening one’s individual values, and using these values like a compass to direct thoughts, beliefs, and actions towards a life of holistic alignment.