Our Approach to Healing:
We focus on providing effective, research-proven and evidence-based couples and family therapy in Solvang, California.
Our primary areas of expertise are the following:
What is Integrative Therapy?
Integrative therapy is an approach to healing by increasing one’s resilience and personal resources. It integrates the fundamental principles of traditional psychotherapy with holistic medicine.
In different contexts the term “integration” may denote different meanings.
What we mean by “integration” is creating a healthy alliance between the mind and the body and promoting healing on all levels: emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual.
How is Our Approach to Healing Unique?
Our approach to healing is unique because we don’t rely only on conventional “insight-oriented” counseling strategies. Instead, we take a holistic approach to therapy. We create a comprehensive treatment plan where we complement traditional cognitive “talk” therapy (engaging our intellect) with somatic therapy (engaging the body).
When providing couples counseling and family therapy in Solvang, California, we enhance the healing process and the outcome of therapy by integrating:
- The latest understanding and research in neuroscience
- Western insight-oriented methodology of counseling
- Eastern body-based (somatic) healing modalities
Combination of these three modalities creates a well-rounded therapeutic approach that effectively releases any challenging emotions from our bodies and frees us from behaviors that no longer suit us and are holding us back from achieving our potential and enjoying life.
We also acknowledge that as humans we are all organisms that adapt to our environment. We strive to understand the whole person, couple, or family, including biological, physiological, emotional, social, cultural, and environmental factors. We look at uniqueness of each individual and relationship, their particular values and beliefs, family system, health conditions, multi-generational history, attachment styles, and current circumstances.
We work on getting all these systems to work together to facilitate healing.
A growing body of neuroscience research is constantly improving our understanding of how to enhance our functioning and ensure reaching our full potential as individuals. We stay up-to date on the latest research in the fields of somatic therapy, EFT couples counseling, and child and family therapy. We attend conferences and trainings with the experts, and incorporate the knowledge into our work.
Why Emotionally-Focused Therapy?
Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT) model prioritizes emotion and emotional regulation as the key organizing agents in individual experience and key relationship interactions.
This structured and effective approach to couples counseling maps how distress arises and then navigates towards connection by promoting a supportive environment so healing can become possible over time.
EFT is excellent at helping couples understand the deeper needs and longings that often underlie hostile and/or disconnecting cycles. In turn couples create strong bonds of connection with each other and gain relational skills.
It is an an evidence-based counseling approach that has been validated in clinical trials as being highly effective for individuals as well as couples counseling. The research shows large treatment effect sizes and stable results over time.
This couples counseling approach has been used successfully with many different kinds of couples in private practice, university training centers and hospital clinics. Preliminary research exists for couples dealing with depression, with anxiety resulting from trauma, with medical illness and with forgiveness dilemmas.
The evidence for EFT couples counseling is based on couples of varied cultural groups and educational levels across North America, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Africa and Asia. It is used with traditional and non-traditional couples, including same-sex couples.
EFT for couples counseling is the gold standard for empirically validated therapeutic intervention in this field. Even though this approach has been developed specifically for couples, it is just as effective when working with families as well as in individual work.
Get in Touch with a Counselor:
Are you ready to reach out and get professional support from a counselor? Get in touch with us and a counselor will contact you. You are welcome to ask questions about couples and family therapy in California or to schedule a complementary 15-minute phone consultation.
We are physically located in Santa Barbara County (Santa Barbara and San Ynez), and are available virtually to help people residing anywhere in California.
Our counseling team looks forward to hearing from you.
- Write us an Email
- Call or text us at 805-245-3340