Psychotherapy is a personal process faciliated by a mental health practitioner to help alleviate distress, find direction in life, and gain self-mastery. There are many forms of psychotherapy, ranging from depth-oriented to solution-minded. All forms of psychotherapy have some benefit and specific types of therapies are best-suited for particular problems and for certain people. Studies show that the "therapeutic fit" between patient and doctor is a powerful predictor of positive outcomes. This highlights the significance of establishing trust and rapport, feeling an "alliance" with, and having confidence in your doctor's skills and abilities. It is important to take your time in determining who you will work closely with, as this will have a bearing on treatment outcomes.
If there is one distinguishing factor among psychotherapy types, it is whether they access the past or do not. For example, counseling is a methodology that does not seek to explore the past, so it is different from psychotherapy. Studies show that depth- and insight-oriented work is geared toward lasting change, while cognitive behavioral work is appropriate for changing patterns and habits now. Both approaches offer great benefit. The effects of depth-oriented psychotherapy come about largely through a complex process, whereby what was once unknown becomes conscious knowledge, and people are given the opportunity to grapple with a dynamic that likely once caused a good deal of pain. To make lasting the effects of cognitive behavioral therapy, some of the practices and tools that are taught must be implemented to some degree each day. Each type of therapeutic modality can aid with certain issues, with some modalities more efficacious than others for particular concerns.
Dr. Parisi is a general psychiatrist and a marriage and family therapist, or psychotherapist. This means that he offers comprehensive mental health care, including psychiatric medication management, as well as multi-modal psychotherapy services. He has been providing psychotherapy since 2002. He has been educated in, received training in, practiced, and taught a wide variety of psychotherapy modalities. He has worked with individuals, couples, families, and groups, including adults, adolescents, children, and seniors. He has employed a wide range of therapeutic interventions in working with people from all walks of life. You can work together to establish a short-, medium-, or long-term treatment plan that makes sense for your life. In all approaches, Dr. Parisi welcomes that you and he discuss your experience in treatment.
The following includes some details about various therapeutic approaches that you may ask be part of your treatment or that may be used by Dr. Parisi at his discretion:
- Acceptance and Commitment: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a type of psychotherapy that helps you accept the difficulties that come with life. ACT is a form of mindfulness based therapy, theorizing that greater well-being can be attained by overcoming negative thoughts and feelings. Essentially, ACT looks at your character traits and behaviors to assist you in reducing avoidant coping styles. ACT also addresses your commitment to making changes, and what to do about it when you can't stick to your goals.
- Attachment-based: People demonstrate secure, ambivalent, disorganized, or avoidant types of attachment. Deepening your understanding of these types of attachment can help you to better navigate the complex world of relationships. Discussing your own attachment type can likewise help you learn to better soothe yourself. Attachment-based therapy is a form of therapy that applies to interventions or approaches based on attachment theory, which explains how the relationship a parent has with its child influences development.
- Clinical Supervision and Licensed Supervisors: Dr. Parisi can supervise physician assistants and train clinicians who are becoming licensed clinical social workers or licensed marriage and family therapists. Supervision services are offered by qualified practitioners who provide feedback and expertise for less experienced professionals. While each state and licensing board has its own unique requirements, professionals offering supervision play a key role in helping new practitioners advance their clinical knowledge, as well as satisfy requirements leading to licensure.
- Cognitive Behavioral (CBT): Cognitive-behavioral therapy stresses the role of thinking in how we feel and what we do. It is based on the belief that thoughts, rather than people or events, cause our negative feelings. The therapist assists the client in identifying, testing the reality of, and correcting dysfunctional beliefs underlying his or her thinking. The doctor then helps the patient modify those thoughts and the behaviors that flow from them. CBT is a structured collaboration between doctor and patient and often calls for homework assignments. CBT has been clinically proven to help patients in a relatively short amount of time with a wide range of disorders, including depression and anxiety.
- Culturally Sensitive: What may appear to one culture to be peculiar may to another be standard and meaningful. By developing an understanding of these differences, misunderstandings might be alleviated. Culturally sensitive therapists provide therapy that is culturally sensitive. They understand that people from different backgrounds have different values, practices, and beliefs, and are sensitive to those differences when working with individuals and families in therapy.
- Eclectic: Many practitioners take an eclectic approach to therapy, drawing upon various aspects of cognitive-behavioral and psychodynamic methods to create their own custom-made approach. Such doctors often work with their patients to create a treatment plan that encompasses different techniques to best address the patient's particular problems and to appeal to their sensibility.
- Experiential Therapy: Experiential therapy is a therapeutic technique that uses different means of expression to re-enact and re-experience emotional situations from past and recent relationships. The patient focuses on the activities and, through the experience, begins to identify emotions associated with success, disappointment, responsibility, and self-esteem. Under guidance, the patient can begin to release and explore negative feelings of anger, hurt, or shame as they relate to past experiences that may have been blocked or still linger. There is a focus on the moment-to-moment experience of being in the therapeutic environment, engaging the therapeutic space as the means through which to heal, usually very effective, often sought out when “nothing else has worked.”
- Family/Marital/Couple: may involve independent interviews of adults and/or appropriate youths, as well as direct observation during sessions for family, couple, or both, can be intense or confrontational, where responsible and affirming means of communication will also be taught and encouraged. Of note is that each member of a family makes up a meaningful part of the dysfunctional dynamic and no one person alone is to blame. This modality strives to be highly supportive in repairing deep family wounds, though can be very challenging. Couples who complete psychotherapy may come to a number of realizations. One possible outcome is that they desire to stay together, seeing the relationship as a vehicle for growth in which they can optimally live, while another outcome is that a couple may decide to end the relationship as they know it. This is commonly a profound experience, with far-reaching repercussions, and when couples move in this direction, the therapy may be accessed to optimize affirming and respectful manners of interacting, as well as for mitigating loss, on a number of levels, as stakes may be quite high.
- Family Systems: Family Systems practitioners view problems within the family as the result not of particular members' behaviors, but of the family's group dynamic. The family is seen as a complex system having its own language, roles, rules, beliefs, needs and patterns. The docdtor helps each individual member understand how their childhood family operated, their role in that system, and how that experience has shaped their role in the current family. Family systems therapy identifies roles played by and unconscious struggles among family members, noting how these dynamics enforce negative patterns, and challenging the family members to negotiate different roles and responsibilities; uplifting, encouraging, challenging, may involve working to resolve unsettled past discord.
- Gestalt: Gestalt therapyseeks to integrate the patient's behaviors, feelings, and thinking, so that their intentions and actions may be aligned for optimal mental health. The doctor will help the patient become more self aware, to live more in the present, and to assume more responsibility for taking care of themself. Techniques of gestalt therapy include confrontation, dream analysis, and role playing.
- Humanistic: The humanistic method takes a positive view of human nature and emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual. Practitioners in this tradition, who are interested in exploring the nature of creativity, love, and self-actualization, help patients realize their potential through change and self-directed growth. Humanistic therapy is also an umbrella term for gestalt, patient-centered therapy, and existential therapy.
- Interpersonal:Interpersonal therapy is a psychotherapy in which doctor and patient identify the issues and problems of interpersonal relationships. They also explore the patient's life history to help recognize problem areas and then work toward ways to rectify them.focusing on your relationships with others and how these interactions impact you, engendering insight into developing healthy boundaries
- Intervention: typically reserved for supporting the cessation of addictive behavior, helping to prepare a group for a respectful and effective path for moving forward, knowing what to expect, or participating in said intervention, typically high stakes
- Jungian: Jungian or analytical therapy, developed by Carl Jung, seeks to help people access their unconscious to develop greater self-realization and individuation. Jung, a psychoanalyst, sought to understand the psyche via dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. The Jungian practitioner helps the patient find more meaning in their life, with respect for the complex nature of the psyche, focusing on archetypes that are significant for common struggles, identifying shadow, or that which you or others may judge and seeing how your grappling with it may be significant, could include dreamwork, engenders insight.
- Motivational Interviewing: Motivational Interviewing is a method of therapy that works to engage the motivation of patients to change their behavior. Patients are encouraged to explore and confront their ambivalence. Practitioners attempt to influence their patients to consider making changes, rather than non-directively explore themselves. Motivational Interviewing is frequently used in cases of addition.
- Psychodynamic: Psychodynamic therapy,also known as insight-oriented therapy, evolved from Freudian psychoanalysis. Like adherents of psychoanalysis, psychodynamic practitioners believe that bringing the unconscious into conscious awareness promotes insight and resolves conflict. But psychodynamic therapy is less intensive than psychoanalysis and also focuses on the relationship between the doctor and the patient, as a way to learn about how the patient relates to everyone in their life. This is insight- and depth-oriented, facilitating an understanding of past dynamics and how they may be painfully replaying in your present circumstances, identifying and expressing related emotional states, working on boundaries, longer term, can be deeply impactful, has long-term efficacy.
- Relational: Relational therapy offers strategies to combat relationship dysfunction and restore harmony in interactions. Couples--those recovering from affairs, traumatic events, or a lull in passion--can find it helpful. To repair discord, the doctor identifies the main conflict upsetting the couples' emotional intimacy. Once the partners see how they both contribute to the problem, the doctor teaches them skills to improve the ways they relate to each other. Couples may see a change in their relationship within three to six months.
- Solution-focused: Solution-focused therapy focuses on what patients would like to achieve through therapy rather than on their troubles or mental health issues. The doctor will help the patient envision a desirable future, and then map out the small and large changes necessary for the patient to undergo to realize their vision. The doctor will seize on any successes the patient experiences, to encourage them to build on their strengths rather than dwell on their problems or limitations.
- Trauma Focused: Trauma focused therapy helps people who may be experiencing post-traumatic stress after a traumatic event to return to a healthy state. There are many types of trauma. Taking account of disempowered states in which patients felt out of control during traumatic events in their lives can help to foster feelings of self-mastery and the courage to engage with healthy boundaries.
