Bayview Counseling

	I approach counseling in a pragmatic and pluralistic manner. You choose your own path toward healing. It is a flexible process, aimed at finding what works for you. Below I have defined some of the methods I use:
				Rogerian - This is person-centered Counseling. The counselor tends to see clients positively and responds to them with warmth, support, unconditional positive regard, genuiness and empathy. Client-centered counselors assist their clients in the change process by focusing predominantly on affect. The counselor notices client feelings and empathizes with those feelings to help the client fully experience their affect and become more open to their life experiences.
				Family systems theory - I use an integrative approach, using a combination of many theorists: Haley, Bowen, Menuchin, Adler and other therapeutic methods. I determine the subsystems, roles, themes, communication, perceptions and independent personality dynamics. From there we determine the security and insecurity of the family, the patterns of behavior of all members, increase mutuality, privacy and independence to help the family work together for common goals. We define expectations and set realistic expectations, followed by appropriate consequences and follow-thru. Role confusion is addressed, defined, and articulated to see inconsistency, division of labor, ascribing, labeling, triangulating or scapegoating. The family's covert and overt mechanisms are discovered to determine its member’s needs. The goal is to raise the homeostasis of the family.
				Behavioral counseling - The focus is on inappropriate learning as the source of client problems and work on positive reinforcement to facilitate change. The behaviorist recommends that a patient be confronted with his or her problematic behavior and retrained consciously to behave differently.
				Cognitive-behavioral counseling - Here, counselors see inappropriate thoughts as the cause of painful feelings and harmful behavior. They work on the selective attention, magnification of problems, and illogical reasoning that can lead to depression; the habitual thought patterns that can create negative behavior.
				Existential - The focus of this therapy is on the integration of mind, body and emotions into a higher-order; unity, a deeper totality. They are concerned with the fundamental meaning in life. Maslow suggests that self-actualization and meaning are intimately related.
				Gestalt training - Concentration is on nothing but the immediate present, in all its forms, and the body-mind awareness which discloses it. Its originator, Fritz Perls, focused on the awareness of the here and now. In Gestalt training, it is the avoidance or resistance of the here and now that constitutes most pathologies.
				Humanistic Therapies - The aim is to heal the split between the ego itself and the body, to reunite the psyche and soma so as to reveal the total organism. It is called the Third Force (the other two major forces in psychology being psychoanalysis and behaviorism) and it is often referred to as the “human potential movement.”
				Psychoanalysis - This form of psychotherapy is to heal the split between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche so that a person is put in touch with all of the mind.
	Whether you are concerned about your child, your parent, your family, your relationship or yourself, some combination of these methods can help you achieve your goals.