We Focus On You

We Use A Results-Driven Process

Once you're connected with your Care Provider, they will work together with you using a practical, phase-by-phase approach that makes the helping process as comfortable and results-driven as possible. Any time during treatment, please feel free to express any fears, doubts, questions, or concerns about your progress or the process in general (which is quite normal in the ups and downs of practicing real change).

PHASE 1

In Phase 1, you share your story with your Care Provider, describing what challenges or issues have made you seek out help. Then, your Care Provider can help you identify what is specifically bothering you or what you would like changed about those particular circumstances. Your Care Provider might also have you complete some assessments to help narrow it down. After that, they will make note of any hopes, dreams, potential, or goals that are being hindered, stopped, or obstructed by those issues. Once you're both fully aware of your situation and how it effects you and those around you, your Care Provider will work with you to create customized goals and a plan for change.

PHASE 2

In Phase 2, you'll be digging deeper in order to discover and understand any underlying causes for your distress or internal blocks that may be contributing to or maintaining your challenging circumstances. Whether issues have developed as a result of others' thoughts, feelings, behaviors, patterns, and communications or your own thoughts, feelings, behavior patterns, and communications, there can often be a deeper process that's driving the distress. Once underlying cause(s) are identified, Phase 3 can begin.

PHASE 3

By Phase 3, goals have been set, insight has been gained, and you have become aware of what changes need to occur to achieve your desired results. This is when the hardest work begins--the actual change. In this practical phase, you'll move back and forth between your sessions and the outside world, practicing new behaviors, interventions, and communications based on the issues targeted during Phase 2. 

As you practice, you bring your outside experiences back to session for processing and feedback. Your Care Provider will act as a guide and mirror, reflecting your experience back to you in an objective and neutral way. This reflection is done so that you are able to track progress from a nonjudgmental and neutral perspective. In other words, if forward progress is made, you can allow yourself a sense of accomplishment and success, and if backward steps are taken, you can address them without feeling shame, inadequacy, or judgment. This process enables you to treat any relapses into old patterns as learning opportunities and areas for further practice, as opposed to failures.

PHASE 4

Once you and your Care Provider agree that your goals have been reached, Phase 4 begins. This phase is spent looking back on your successes, setbacks, insights gained, coping skills obtained, solutions found, and goals achieved. You'll review what you did, how you did it, and how you can maintain growth and progress in the future. You'll be able to act out hypothetical future scenarios with your Care Provider in order to best prepare for whatever circumstances might come your way. 

This review process solidifies your learning, bolsters your sense of confidence, and highlights your ability to self-manage and create change in your own life. By Phase 4, you should be seeing direct, concrete results of your own hard work, and will have thus proven to yourself that you are capable of producing the life, relationships, career, etc., that you desire--in the present and the future. We have seen that the Phase 4 review process is a key ingredient to continued success. Our doors are also always open for booster sessions or if new and unfamiliar challenging situations arise in the future.

We Customize Your Care

We understand that every client and situation is different.

At Caring Connected, we know people can feel differently on different days, different techniques can work at different times, and the same treatment won't work for every person. That's why our Care Providers follow our simple but powerful standard: the right approach, with the right client, at the right time. 

We are committed to working in the way that helps you reach your highest potential for success.

Our Care Providers are compassionate, dedicated, and attentive professionals. Their style is collaborative, flexible, and objective, giving you the time, space, and nonjudgmental environment you need to grow and excel. By carefully combining a variety of theoretical orientations, treatment modalities, interventions, and techniques, they form a customized, integrated approach that best fits your unique needs, learning styles, identity, and goals.  Care Providers can also coordinate with medical, legal, or academic professionals as well as community or religious figures as needed on a case-by-case basis.

With flexibility always in mind, our Care Providers have most often helped their clients achieve powerful and lasting results using certain theoretical orientations:

If you're not sure which therapeutic technique is right for your situation,  please Contact Us for a FREE consultation.

We Believe in the Power of Therapy

WHY PEOPLE ENTER THERAPY

When clients first come to us, it is because they want their life to change in some way (e.g., to feel less stressed, have a better relationship, leave a traumatic situation, explore identity, etc.). This desire for change usually comes about from one of the following reasons: something about their present does not feel emotionally correct to them (e.g., they feel stressed, their relationship feels unhealthy, they are being victimized, etc.); they received an incorrect emotional experience in the past (e.g., childhood neglect, a traumatic experience, mistreatment at work, etc.); or, they do not feel emotionally or culturally heard or respected in either their past or present (e.g., they feel misunderstood, invalidated, betrayed, unbelieved, inarticulate, or alone in their feelings / lived experience). In any case, these situations lead to distress and ultimately drive clients to seek help. 

We call this driving force the desire for "emotional correction." Clients have come to a point when they no longer believe themselves or communities capable of correcting their emotional circumstances, articulating themselves in a way that will leave them feeling understood, or creating change in their lives on their own. This inability, or belief of inability, might be because they feel too overwhelmed, depressed, stressed, etc., to cope or change alone, or are facing circumstances beyond their or their community's control. When any of those situations are true, asking for help is extremely understandable and should be seen as brave, courageous, and resilient. People should be seen as especially strong if they have the wherewithal not only to see and admit they need help, but to reach out during a time of deep and difficult struggle when their energy is already low and hopes are already down. We believe clients have immense strength when it comes to their own survival.

HOW THERAPY REALLY WORKS

We believe therapy provides lasting, powerful, and positive change for clients by giving them the "corrective emotional experience." We believe this corrective emotional experience happens in therapy often as a direct result of the therapist-client relationship itself, as well as the process and learning that takes place during the building of that relationship. Forming, and more importantly, sustaining for enough time, an honest, collaborative, and emotionally vulnerable relationship with another person allows the client to step back and look at that therapist-client relationship as real, "in-their-face" evidence that they are actually capable of having a relationship that looks and feels healthy. Out of that relationship and the process of its building, clients learn what elements make up a safe relational experience, and are thus able to reproduce the same happy, healthy, nurturing relationships  in their outside lives (at home, work, with family, in friendships, etc.). Corrective emotional experiences can also relate to culture, gender, religion, or any number of identity-based or lived experiences.

For example, let's say a client was emotionally neglected as a child and gets stuck in a pattern of neglectful relationships as an adult (because that is the only example they were shown). Or, there could be a client who isolates themselves from new relationships out of fear of being physically, economically, or emotionally hurt like they were in their past. A positive, trusting therapist-client relationship could create an opposite, emotionally healthy new model for either of these clients to then replicate in their outside lives and relationships (which is what they always deserved in terms of basic human rights). A normal, healthy, therapeutic relationship's existence also proves to clients that they are worthy of unconditional, kind, patient, non-judgmental, and non-threatening care and that this type of healthy relationship is possible and desirable for them. 

In other words, as clients move through the therapeutic process, they are supported and encouraged during both their progress and setbacks until they reach their desired goals. After a while in that kind of unconditionally nurturing environment, the brain becomes retrained, clients learn to love themselves unconditionally, and thus any self-sabotaging or self-defeating patterns or behaviors can start to change (even despite the most difficult upbringings, complicated community or cultural landscapes, addictions, behavior patterns, relational history, or present situations). This principle--the learning from a healthy new model that offers the "corrective emotional experience"--can apply to almost any situation a client brings to therapy (e.g., issues with food, sex, work, motivation, oppression, etc.). Although, we believe that in a way, all distress is connected to some kind of relational issue (whether that relationship is with the self, food, objects, sex, family, coworkers, community, friends, or siblings, etc.).  

THE NEED TO BE HEARD

We believe one of the most important, healing aspects of therapy is the fact that clients are finally heard and understood in a way that validates their specific feelings and lived experience. Very often, people are not truly heard or listened to by friends, family, coworkers, community, or even themselves. People get caught up with life, are too busy surviving their own difficulties or unique circumstances, or are even sometimes emotionally incapable or unskilled at listening to their own intuitions or others' healthy suggestions. How many times have you "spaced out" in a conversation with a friend and needed to ask them to repeat what they said? How many times have you pushed your own gut feelings away in order to give someone or something another chance (that they maybe didn't earn or deserve)? These are just a few examples of the ways we do not listen to ourselves and others. People often listen just enough to get by in a conversation, show reasonable, polite concern, or avoid immediate danger to themselves or their loved ones. We call this phenomenon "fringe listening." We all do it--even if we don't realize we do--and in a lot of cases, it doesn't turn into a problem. 

However, when we fringe listen to (or flat out ignore) our own instincts for too long, or we are chronically only fringe-listened-to by others, we begin to feel like we don't matter. Maybe we start to resent or give up on our romantic partner because they "just don't get it" or we don't trust they're really listening. Maybe we ruminate about quitting our job because our boss doesn't make an effort to "even hear or appreciate me, my ideas, or my unique identity." Our friends or family show concern during conversations, but then make us feel terribly unimportant when they pull out their phones in the middle of our story. We might even become angry at or lose trust in ourselves when we ignore our instincts or only fringe listen to the self--like that time we "knew that person would be trouble," but went for it anyway, and now we're stuck in a toxic relationship, work, or housing arrangement. When things like this happen, we end up beating ourselves up in our heads with things like, "Why didn't you listen to yourself, you idiot?" or, "I should have known what was coming when I saw them behave that way in the beginning." 

All those feelings of anger, sadness, resent, mistrust, self-blame, shame, under-appreciation, and unimportance, build up over time and are behind a majority of the issues our Care Providers see in their practice. Even mental "disorders" like depression and anxiety can be solely caused by being chronically unheard (not always, of course, but it's common enough that we're mentioning it here). Very often, as clients share more and more in session and are actually heard by their Care Providers, the fact of their being chronically unheard becomes clear to them. Sadly, therapy can sometimes be the very first time clients are truly being heard or are hearing themselves. Our Care Providers report across the board that almost every client they see says things like: "I didn't realize how much this was bothering me until I talked about it," "I never thought about it like that until I said it out loud to you," and, "I thought I was going crazy because no one was really understanding or listening to me." We believe you, and we would feel crazy if no one listened to us, too!

Luckily, and logically, once clients begin listening to themselves, they become open to more possibilities, pathways, confidence, and behavior they once thought was impossible for them. Being heard by another, and finally hearing themselves, helps clients to reach new emotional vistas that are calm and peaceful, as well as new rational perspectives filled with solutions and motivation. We believe clients have unlimited potential for change once they start to tune in, get heard, and finally listen to themselves. 

As therapy progresses and clients have given themselves enough time to hear and attend to their own needs, they can naturally expand their energy and capacity to hear about the needs, suffering, or opinions of others more calmly and without worrying that no one cares about them. It becomes easier for clients to leave unhealthy situations or relationships and stop reacting impulsively or angrily, taking others' behavior personally, or becoming resentful or jealous that someone else is being heard instead of themselves. When clients allow themselves to be truly heard, they are also gifting themselves with another corrective emotional experience--direct evidence that they not only are capable of creating safe relationships to be heard in, but that they are also worthy of being heard. Creating a sense of worth then corrects the excruciatingly painful emotional experience  of "never being good enough," or "not being worthy of love, safety, etc.," and is one of the most common and important keys to mental health.

FOR THE LONG RUN

Because the above healing processes usually take a while (as true listening and learning should), therapy should generally be thought of as a long-term strategy. We like to remind clients that in most cases, they or their situations didn't become the way they are overnight, so changing won't happen overnight either. Therapy can also take time because it aims to address, improve, and/or fix the underlying causes for a client's distress, as opposed to a "band aid" of temporarily relieving symptoms on the surface. For the majority of clients, it takes a significant amount of time to develop these new patterns of listening, coping, and caring for themselves and others; though, some clients are able to achieve results in shorter time frames. Luckily, regardless of duration, therapeutic benefits are not just an "end result." Most clients tend to feel better along the way as they reduce current symptoms, alleviate emotional isolation, make healthier decisions, and break out of patterns that no longer serve them. We like to say that our Care Providers' main goal is to teach clients to be their own best therapist so they can carry their new skills into the future, helping them to stay healthy and happy long after therapy has ended. 

Therapy is hard work--but, genuine, lasting change usually is. Therapy can sometimes feel emotionally draining or uncomfortable, but therapy can also feel enlightening, deeply healing, and truly liberating. If you think you might want to try therapy, but can't tell if it will be worth your while, we encourage you to ask yourself, "What do I have to lose by trying?" People are great at finding plenty of "reasons" not to try therapy, like, "It's a bad time", "My schedule is too hectic right now and I don't want to add another thing on top of it", "What if it doesn't work for my set of problems?",  "What if they don't believe or understand me?", or, "My issues are probably too severe," but we find that those reasons usually just arise out of fear of failure or poor past experiences. And while it's totally ok to be scared when trying something new, especially if a bad experience or two looms in your past history, we encourage you to ask yourself what we consider to be the most important question when deciding whether to engage in therapy: "Is it ok for me, my life, relationship, career, community, kids, etc., for things to stay the way they are?" If your answer is no, we hope you'll Contact Us to start your healing today. 

Change is possible.