Tree of Hope Services
Play Therapy
Play therapy is a journey, or a process, that uses the therapeutic power of play. Play is a child’s natural language. Just as adults use words to express themselves and communicate their problems, children use play to figure out their world. Through play therapy, children process their situation and discover appropriate means of coping. Many common childhood issues such as anxiety and phobias, attention problems, bed wetting, sibling rivalry, and defiance can be treated through play therapy.
Filial Therapy
Filial therapy is a combination of play therapy and family therapy. Parents are taught to conduct child-centered play sessions with their own children. Parents can look forward to increased confidence in their parenting skills, decreased feelings of frustration with their children, and working together better as a team.
Sandtray Therapy
Sandtray therapy is an expressive therapy that uses miniatures to represent the world of the client. The client gives meaning to the miniatures by placing them in the sand. The sandtray provides distance for the client to explore emotions. Sandtray therapy is especially effective in treating trauma and grief.
Art Therapy
Art therapy is an expressive therapy. Clients use different mediums of art (painting, drawing, sculpting, etc.) to express themselves and give meaning to their experiences. Therapists interpret the clients’ art to help the clients gain understanding and healing through self-expression.
Child Parent Relationship Therapy
Child Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) is based on a filial model of therapy. CPRT is generally conducted in groups consisting of 6-8 parents although it can be conducted individually. Parents attend an individual pre and post assessment to evaluate problems in the child- parent relationship and measure progress made. Parents are taught to strengthen attachment with their children through such skills as limit setting, responding rather than reacting, and offering choices for non-compliance. CPRT runs for 10 weeks.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy that focuses on identifying and changing negative thought patterns in order to experience positive emotions and behaviors. CBT is useful in treating disorders such as depression, post traumatic stress disorder, and eating disorders.
Neuro Linguistic Programming
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) looks at how we think and process thoughts, the language patterns we use, and our actions. It is a collection of techniques designed to help us achieve what we want to experience in our lives. NLP is effective in treating such things as phobias and anxiety disorders.
SYMBIS
Based on Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott’s award-winning book Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, the SYMBIS assessment provides couples with a personalized roadmap for their marriage. By completing the on-line assessment, couples will be scored in areas such as finances, intimacy, personalities, and communication. Their therapist will then explain how these scores can affect their marriage and help them to build a strong and healthy foundation for a fulfilling marriage. The SYMBIS assessment can also be used to help married couples enhance and strengthen their marriages.
Trauma Sensitive Yoga
Trauma Sensitive Yoga is an evidence-based treatment which has been found to be more effective in treating anxiety, panic and dissociative episodes than any psychotropic medication. It is a very gentle intervention which allows the client to understand that when it comes to the body, they have choices and they are in control. It involves mindfulness practices, and as these therapies are implemented, traumatic memories surface spontaneously, as the client is able to tolerate them and then they are able to process them in session. This type of therapy does not focus on creating a trauma narrative, as this can be unproductive and actually re-traumatizing. The goal is to identify the feelings of discomfort in the body, which trigger feelings that the trauma is happening again, now. This treatment allows trauma to surface in a more tolerable manner, and thus the trauma narrative comes about more naturally. Clients learn to process experiences rather than events. The goal in trauma therapy is not remembering, but the ability to be “here” instead of “there.”
Dissociation and Internal Family Systems
In Internal Family Systems (IFS), a client is assisted in, first of all, understanding dissociation, and then building a foundation to begin to work on the problems. In this therapy, the progress is incremental and carefully builds a client’s skills to be able to focus on anger, fear, guilt and shame, self-harming, and meeting the needs of the inner child, just to name a few. These are just a few of the problems that a client is able to face without overwhelming reactions. It is very difficult to resolve the symptoms, such as addiction, anxiety, panic and major depression when the client has not addressed the underlying problems. As IFS progresses, these symptoms begin to resolve.
SSP
The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) is an innovative intervention designed to improve an individual’s social communication behaviors by reducing hearing sensitivities and improving the ability to process human speech. This intervention is very helpful for the treatment of trauma that is held in the body. As the frequencies of the music begin to stimulate the muscles of the face, head and ears, the effect spreads throughout the body via the vagus nerve. In the brain, new neural pathways are opened, and the olfactory nerves and auditory nerves are stimulated. This protocol is not a cure, rather it opens a person up to more learning. When we feel safe, we are better able to process painful feelings and memories. The immediate effects of SSP are often quite remarkable, as people experience better sleep, fewer nightmares, migraines and panic attacks. Over time these effects appear to diminish, as the individual suddenly finds that they are beginning to have memories and feelings that have been long buried.
SSP is also a very helpful intervention for children who have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum, or with ADHD. There is an increase in focus, eye contact and connection.