What is Holistic Therapy?

 

If you have been following us on social media or checked out our website, you will know that Enlightenment Counseling is a holistic practice. We focus on holistic therapy and holistic trauma therapy as well. So, we thought why not provide an education post that explains what it is that we do with holistic therapy.

First, we have to understand what holistic therapy is. Holistic therapy addresses the mind and body to support your mental health and healing. It helps to bring in all the layers and aspects of yourself into therapy. At Enlightenment Counseling, we work to combine mental therapy, emotion therapy, and physical health into helping you heal. We

treat you as a whole person with mental, physical, emotional, spiritual needs that within social and cultural aspects.

These different aspects all intersect, interact, and affect each other and need to be treated as a whole rather than individually. We focus on finding your path to healing by helping one understand that trauma and or mental health illness doesn't define us. We have more to offer. We pull in all your strengths, abilities, and resources to help create a path to a place of enlightenment. Enlightenment, as we see it, means to find peace in all areas of your life. This is the overall goal of holistic therapy.

Next, we take a look at what holistic therapy can help with. Holistic therapy can help with many different mental illnesses. Specifically, we like to focus on treating the following mental illnesses,

• Trauma
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Emotional Difficulties
• Stress

Now let’s focus on the benefits of holistic therapy. There are many benefits to using holistic therapy. Holistic therapy promotes overall wellbeing. As we have mentioned, we are trying to get to that place of enlightenment which is finding peace in all areas of life so holistic therapy can help us to get there. Holistic therapy uses a whole-body approach that addresses mental, physical, and spiritual health. We love the whole-body approach because so often you see that people think you should only focus on the mental aspect of treating mental illness but the issue with that is there are so many other aspects going on in your life that contribute to how you are feeling mentally. If we treat all of those things, you have a better chance of healing as a whole. The final benefit that we see beneficial is that holistic therapy helps you to see different connections between aspects of your life and how it affects your health and wellness. This one is huge because we struggle at times to have that self-awareness that says hey this is happening because of x,y, and z. If we see the connections that everything has in our lives, then we can take steps to make changes and heal.

Finally, lets look at the different therapies that we offer at Enlightenment Counseling that are Holistic focused and help to understand how each therapy can help you overall. These therapies are broken down into different categories based on what they help. The categories are integrative therapy, mind-body therapy, and somatic therapy.

1. Integrative Therapy is an individualized, holistic approach to therapy that combines ideas and techniques from different therapeutic techniques of thought depending on the unique needs of a client. The main integrative therapies we focus on are as follows,

 

Holistic Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is first. This therapy has many different aspects that we use to provide Holistic focused CBT. The following are all the techniques that make up holistic focused CBT,

• Strengths based: This approach focuses on your internal strengths and resourcefulness, rather than on your weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings.
• Solution Focused: This is a type of therapy that places importance on discussing solutions than problems.
• Creative Therapy: This one-use art forms such as dance, drawing, or music to help treat your mental health
• Body-Mind Work: This approach uses therapies that use the body to affect the mind, such as yoga, progressive relaxation, meditations mindfulness and hypnosis.

 

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Talk therapy that helps you learn to acknowledge, bear, and put into perspective your emotional lives.

 

Motivational Interviewing: helps people resolve ambivalent feelings and insecurities to find the internal motivation they need to change their behavior.

 

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: skills training to improve emotional regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, distress tolerance and mindfulness.

 

Insight-Oriented Psychotherapy: help you understand how past experiences can affect your current behavior.

Techniques used:

• Free association
• Dream Interpretation
• Exploration of Past
• Interpretation of symptoms
• Confrontation
• Psychoeducation

2. Mind-Body Therapy is a different technique designed to enhance the mind's positive impact on the body. The main mind-body therapies we focus on are as follows,

Meditation Practices is a big one that we like to use. We find it helpful because meditation can help to regulate yourself. The following are different types that we recommend to our clients to use,

• Body Scan Meditation
• Concentrative Meditation
• Mindfulness Meditation
• Loving Kindness Meditation
• Breathing Meditation
• Grounding Meditation

Guided Imagery: This therapy focuses on mental images in order to evoke feelings of relaxation, is based on the concept of mind-body connection.

 

Mindfulness Techniques: It focuses on learning how to be more aware of thoughts, feelings, emotions, surroundings, and situations, and to reduce automatic responses.

 

Breathing Exercises: These exercises focus on your breathing and help you to self-regulate using breathwork.

 

3. Somatic Therapy is a body-centric approach that works by helping to release stress, tension, and trauma from the body. The main somatic therapies we focus on are as follows,

Stress Management is something that we all struggle with. This is very helpful when looking at a holistic approach. The following are different techniques we use to manage your stress holistically,

• Task Management: This is used to help manage your tasks better and provide yourself structure by creating a schedule or routine with your daily tasks
• Stress Journaling: This technique is used as a mind dump. It allows you to journal about whatever comes to mind that is stressing you out.
• Mood Tracking: We use mood tracking to help notice patterns in your mood throughout your day to determine if there are other environmental or social aspects to your mood shifts.
• Relaxation Techniques: These techniques are used to help create relaxation from stress such as grounding, self-soothing, and muscle relaxation.
• Self-Care Practice: We always recommend finding different self-care practices to add into your daily or weekly routine to manage your stress. This could be a bubble bath or a nice dinner. Check out our blog on self-care for more ideas.
• Mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy: This is a therapeutic technique in which we use practices like meditation and yoga to help reduce stress levels. 

Trauma Focused Therapies are the different types of trauma-based therapies we use in our practice. The following are different techniques we use to work through trauma holistically,

• Exposure Therapy: This type of therapy helps you overcome things, activities, or situations that cause fear or anxiety.
• Cognitive Processing: This is a type of cognitive behavioral treatment focused on helping you through your thoughts that are "stuck" about a traumatic experience.
• Trauma Narrative: This is a psychological technique that helps you make sense of the experiences you have suffered.

Overall, we hope that you found this blog beneficial and follow us on social media to keep updated on our practice and different holistic therapies that we plan to provide in the future.