Integrative Therapy
The integrative approach I use aims to offer a safe and secure space where you can experience warm and reliable connection, build personal insights and understandings, and explore possibilities for taking action and building practices that may help create more freedom, greater strength and sense of self, and more capacity, flexibility, and creativity as you live, work, connect and play.
I draw from several approaches to tailor therapy to you as an individual. In addition to the modalities I name below, a few ideas shape a theoretical model of change in psychotherapy:
People in systems.We are born into a particular time and set of relationships, and we are shaped —and in turn, shape — the relationships, systems, and institutions we find ourselves navigating, whether we mean for that to happen or not. Sometimes broader historical or societal ideas, norms, pressures, expectations, resources, and consequences can have significant impacts not only on how we understand what it means to live a “good life” or be a “good person” but also how we think about ourselves in relation to those ideals as we’ve come to know, experience and internalize them. Where these cause distress or difficulty, it can be helpful to be curious about them in therapy as a path toward greater insight, healing, freedom, and personal agency.
Common factors.Meta-analyses have shown that there are some common factors that are effective across therapeutic approaches. They include a strong alliance in the therapeutic relationship; shared agreement about the aims of therapy; warmth, connection and empathy; engagement in the collaborative, purposeful work of therapy; and a hopeful and productive space to explore what matters most. For me, these form a basis for developing a working therapeutic relationship and creating a productive therapeutic environment.
Experience. Language and meaningful talk in the context of supportive relationship is central to productive therapy. So, too, is experience both in and out of the therapy room, and sometimes a person needs to take some action to create the possibility of a meaningful experience that will shift things. This need not be seismic in order to be enormously consequential. Often, it is the very smallest next thing we can imagine to try (and likely smaller still than that) that can create just enough wiggle room and just enough efficacy and just enough desire to help us to try the next thing. And the next thing comes into view as we tried —and experienced ourselves trying — the first thing.
Within this conceptual framework, I also draw on these therapeutic modalities:
Psychodynamic Therapy
Psychodynamic therapy is first of all relational and works to help you understand the story of your life, of your relationships, of your suffering — including how your past experiences, relationships, and unconscious patterns shape the ways you think, feel, and relate today. This often involves slowing things down and exploring ways of making meaning, of protecting, of avoiding that may be habitual and automatic but out of your current awareness.
Where there are patterns that make it difficult to live, work, connect, and play, we’ll work to create some visibility and develop some curiosity together about them. Of course, these patterns may show up in the therapy room, too, and as they do, this can open opportunities for the two of us to observe what’s happening between us and to consider not only what’s going on but also what might this mean and what might we try differently and what space might our relationship open up in you and in your other relationships.
Existential Therapy
Existential therapy creates space to explore questions about identity, purpose, freedom, choice, responsibility, loss, death, and what it means to live a meaningful life. Sometimes the anxieties people feel are connected to experiences that are baked into what it means to be human:
to bear the weight of the choices we make and how they land,
to live with constraints we did not choose and in systems we did not make,
to make meaning for ourselves that is not ready-made or apparent and also sufficient to our times and our sense of self, and
to know that pain, suffering, and death are ever-present parts of what it is to be alive
This work is especially helpful during times of transition, uncertainty, or when something feels “off” but hard to name.
Behavioral Therapies
Dialectical Behavior Therapy is oriented around being able to hold 2 seemingly opposing ideas, tensions, or feelings at the same time — the dialectic. DBT offers practical skills and strategies for emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and navigating intense internal experiences without turning to ineffective or harmful coping strategies.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy focuses on considering your relationship to your thoughts and changing your relationship to them — dropping the rope — rather than getting stuck continuing a tug of war with the thoughts and urges that come up for you. ACT emphasizes values-based action, helping you move toward a life you want, even in the presences of pain, discomfort, and ill-ease.
Getting started
Or you can call our office and schedule your first appointment:
Jen Clifton, LAC
Evolve Counseling & Behavioral Health Services
Phone: 480-590-3915
Office: 1206 E Warner Rd., Suite 115 | Gilbert, AZ 85296
If this approach sounds like it could be a good fit for you, reach out for a free consultation or call our office to schedule your first session.