Mind-Body Therapy (Integrative Psychotherapy)

Integrative psychotherapy is an approach to healing and easing life’s problems by increasing one’s resilience and personal resources. It incorporates the fundamental principles of traditional psychotherapy and holistic medicine to promote healing on all levels: emotional physical, mental and spiritual. Integrative psychotherapy aims to create a healthy alliance between mind and body to enable patients to manage stress and create a healthy lifestyle. In addition to counseling services, some of the tools available at our Center include meditation and visual imagery.

We know that our minds can quickly jump to worst-case scenarios, worry and self-defeating behaviors. We can feel overwhelmed, lose direction, and lose our center. These patterns of thought contribute to illness, stuck relationships, and loss of self esteem. At the Total You Behavioral Medicine & Research Center and the Reflexology & Polarity Therapy Plus, our therapists work with patients to develop and strengthen their mental and emotional health. We help increase the strengths that exist in each patient, discover new ways of managing current stressors, and create strategies to assist their movement onto a positive future.

People who enter into integrative psychotherapy are choosing a path of self-exploration that can yield many benefits. Therapy can help identify the causes of current concerns, help to identify factors that perpetuate problems, and also help patients become aware of fears or hurts that limit their psychological freedom. As patients come to understand what triggers their pain, anxiousness, or moodiness, the old patterns lose their hold. With the help of a therapist, patients can set goals and practice new, healthy behaviors, enabling changes to occur as they feel the courage and support to move beyond prior limitations of thought and attitude.

Why Seek Integrative Psychotherapy?

In this culture we often believe we should “do it on our own,” and if that fails, then “just give me the pill to fix it.” Seeking psychotherapy is a positive step towards a more sustained sense of well-being. We encourage patients to bring to therapy the intention of reaching your goals to live a happier, less stressful, and more fulfilling life. We will help patients do the work that will enable them to achieve their goals.

About Our Psychotherapists

The psychotherapists at our center are licensed in their fields of expertise and also bring additional resources to the counseling setting. They bring high professional standards to insure that each client is treated with respect and that the work is confidential. These practitioners’ services are sometimes insurance reimbursable. Patients are advised to check with their insurance company to see what their coverage allows.

Mind-body interventions utilize the mind’s capacity to affect the body and its physiological responses. They thereby influence health. The response to stress (the “fight or flight” reaction) may be automatic, but recovery toward relaxed parameters (“the relaxation response”) can be learned through self-regulation and the regular use of mind-body interventions. Many of these interventions originate from Eastern healing practices. Western science has found some of them to be helpful as adjunct modalities in the treatment of disease, and their use is increasing.

Mind-body medicine focuses on the communication between mind and body and the powerful ways in which emotional, mental, social, and spiritual factors can directly affect health. Western, or allopathic, medicine tends to consider the scientific, or medical, model of medicine superior to mind-body therapies. It often has negated the fact that one’s mind has any affect on the body. But in the last generation, with the meeting of Eastern and Western healing practices, we have come to accept and understand that mind and body are powerfully related.

Mind-body interventions include relaxation, massage, reflexology, exercise, stretching, imagery, meditation, hypnosis, tai chi, yoga, and others. They often help patients experience healing for their illnesses in new and different ways.

A mind-body modality we often experience, many times unbeknownst to us, is the placebo response. It happens even without our planning or effort. In scientific studies, it has been shown to interfere with clinical outcomes. It is often looked upon as puzzling or confusing and unfortunately has thereby been undervalued. A positive placebo response typically improves a patient’s trust and hope for an affirmative outcome.

Mind-body therapies regard as essential an approach that acknowledges each person’s capacity for self-knowledge and self-care. It emphasizes the person’s openness to participate and his or her desire to succeed. It often has been said that mind-body medicine views illness not as an obstacle but as an opportunity for personal growth and transformation.

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