Emotion-Focused Family Therapy

Emotion-Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) is a treatment model first developed for individuals struggling with an eating disorder and their families. It has since been adapted for a variety of mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and adjustment disorders, as well as parent-child relationship difficulties.

EFFT is rooted in the deep belief in the healing power of parents and caregivers. As such, the goal of EFFT is to support parents and caregivers to take on the dual roles of recovery coach (with respect to problematic symptoms and patterns of behaviour) and emotion coach (with respect to emotion “processing”).  If appropriate, parents and caregivers are also taught how to facilitate the healing of emotional injuries in the family’s past, including relationship repair.

EFFT is a lifespan approach that is built on the framework that difficulties with emotion are at the root of many mental health issues and relationship difficulties. The ability to have a healthy relationship with ones emotions is the treatment target in EFFT – a model that can be delivered with individuals only, parents and caregivers only, and with families.  The treatment approach incorporates the principles and techniques of 1) behavioural family therapy, 2) traditional emotion-focused therapy, 3) motivational enhancement therapy, and 4) the New Maudsley family skills-based approach.

From: https://emotionfocusedfamilytherapy.org/Home_Page.php

We are pleased to offer Emotion-Focused Family Therapy at our Aurora location, facilitated by Molly Pocklington Thompson MSW, RSW. To sign up for the Winter 2014 session, please email info@edoyr.com as our Fall group filled up fast! For details please visit http://www.edoyr.com/support-groups.html

Understanding Addiction: Rat Park

Here is an interesting illustrated comic about the rat park:
http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/

Globalization of Rat Park:
http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/cartoon-blog/globalization-addiction-bruce-alexander/

Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980) by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Alexander’s hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.^[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that “severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can.”^[2]

To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m² (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.^[3]:166 The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. “Nothing that we tried,” Alexander wrote, “… produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment.”^[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments. – From Wikipedia

More about Bruce Alexander:

http://boingboing.net/2013/09/16/bruce-alexanders-rat-park-a.html

Perfection

From “Sensing the Self: Women’s Recovery from Bulimia” by Sheila M. Reindl

Music is Magic

Have you gotten your tickets for Justin Hines yet? Visit www.edoyr.com!

We Love Culture!

Janice, Executive Director, is excited for our own Culture Day this Friday, September 27th! Join us for a free Zentangle workshop in Aurora! For details visit http://www.edoyr.com!

BBC: Can cognitive behavioural therapy really change our brains?

The following article is taken from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/23590545

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a type of talking therapy that’s used to treat a wide range of mental health problems, from depression and eating disorders to phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It recommends looking at ourselves in a different way that might prove useful for all of us in everyday life. But what happens to our brains when we have CBT?

What is cognitive behavioural therapy?

CBT is based on the idea that problems aren’t caused by situations themselves, but by how we interpret them in our thoughts. These can then affect our feelings and actions.

The way we think about a situation can affect how we feel and how we act

For example, if someone you know walks by without saying hello, what’s your reaction?

You might think that they ignored you because they don’t like you, which might make you feel rejected. So you might be tempted to avoid them the next time you meet. This could breed more bad feeling between you both and more “rejections”, until eventually you believe that you must be unlikeable. If this happened with enough people, you could start to withdraw socially.

But how well did you interpret the situation in the first place?

Common errors in thinking style

• Emotional reasoning – e.g. I feel guilty so I must be guilty
• Jumping to conclusions – e.g. if I go into work when I’m feeling low, I’ll only feel worse
• All-or-nothing thinking – e.g. if I’ve not done it perfectly, then it’s absolutely useless
• Mental filtering – e.g. noticing my failures more than my successes
• Over generalising – e.g. nothing ever goes well in my life
• Labelling – e.g. I’m a loser

CBT aims to break negative vicious cycles by identifying unhelpful ways of reacting that creep into our thinking.

“Emotional reasoning is a very common error in people’s thinking,” explains Dr Jennifer Wild, Consultant Clinical Psychologist from Kings College London. “That’s when you think something must be true because of how you feel.”

CBT tries to replace these negative thinking styles with more useful or realistic ones.

This can be a challenge for people with mental health disorders, as their thinking styles can be well-established.

How do we break negative thinking styles?

Some psychological theories suggest that we learn these negative thinking patterns through a process called negative reinforcement.

Graded exposure can help people confront their phobias

For example, if you have a fear of spiders, by avoiding them you learn that your anxiety levels can be reduced. So you’re rewarded in the short term with less anxiety but this reinforces the fear.

To unlearn these patterns, people with phobias and anxiety disorders often use a CBT technique called graded exposure. By gradually confronting what frightens them and observing that nothing bad actually happens, it’s possible to slowly retrain their brains to not fear it.

How does cognitive behavioural therapy work on the brain?

Primitive survival instincts like fear are processed in a part of the brain called the limbic system. This includes the amygdala, a region that processes emotion, and the hippocampus, a region involved in reliving traumatic memories.

“It seems that CBT really can change your brain and rewire it.” Dr Paul Blenkiron, Consultant Psychiatrist

Brain scan studies have shown that overactivity in these two regions returns to normal after a course of CBT in people with phobias.

What’s more, studies have found that CBT can also change the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher-level thinking.

So it seems that CBT might be able to make real, physical changes to both our “emotional brain” (instincts) and our “logical brain” (thoughts).

Intriguingly, similar patterns of brain changes have been seen with CBT and with drug treatments, suggesting that psychotherapies and medications might work on the brain in parallel ways.

How effective is cognitive behavioural therapy?

Of all the talking therapies, CBT has the most clinical evidence to show that it works.

Studies have shown that it is at least as effective as medication for many types of depression and anxiety disorders.

But unlike many drugs, there are few side effects with CBT. After a relatively short course, people have often described long-lasting benefits.

“In the trials we’ve run with post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and social anxiety disorder, we’ve seen that even when people stop the therapy, they continue improving because they have new tools in place and they’ve made behavioural and thinking style changes,” Dr Wild explains.

CBT may not be for everyone, however.

Since the focus is on tackling the here and now, people with more complicated roots to their mental problems which could stem from their childhood, for example, may need another type of longer-term therapy to explore this.

CBT also relies on commitment from the individual, including “homework” between therapy sessions. It can also involve confronting fears and anxieties, and this isn’t always easy to do.

Ultimately, as with many types of treatment, some people will benefit from CBT more than others and psychologists and neuroscientists are beginning to unravel the reasons behind this.

HuffPost Blog: The Life Out Loud: Yoga for Eating Disorders

Update!

Chelsea Roff is occupying a roof in Santa Monica to help raise funds as her campaign comes to an end!
http://www.smmirror.com/articles/News/Eating-Disorder-Advocate-Chelsea-Roff-Occupies-Main-Street-Roof-In-Santa-Monica/38427

By MeiMeiFox. Blog post taken from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meimei-fox/yoga-eating-disorders_b_3903535.html

When she was my editor at Intent.com, a “spiritual Twitter” (as I fondly call it) and blogging platform founded by Deepak Chopra’s extraordinary daughter Mallika, I had no idea that Chelsea Roff was only 20 years old. She inspired me with her depth, wisdom, and compassion in writing her own posts, as well as suggesting topics to me and the other bloggers and choosing articles to feature.

One day, Chelsea shared her own story. I learned that she had suffered from anorexia in her teen years — a case so extreme that she almost died at age 15 from a stroke. She weighed only 58 pounds at the time. Yoga had helped her to heal, teaching her to love her body again. At the same time, Chelsea was courageous in disapproving of the body-consciousness that modern Western yoga fosters, in its advertising of sleek, lithe, muscular forms, and the peer pressure felt in many studios to have “the perfect yoga body.”

I was delighted to hear this past spring that, after having been featured in Carol Horton’s seminal book 21st Century Yoga: Culture, Politics, and Practice and showcased on Sanjay Gupta’s CNN show, Chelsea was following her passion for health, yoga, and helping others overcome eating disorders. She left her editorial position at Intent.com, and is currentlyraising money to conduct an evidence-based study on yoga for eating disorders. As Chelsea says, with yoga, “I went from surviving to thriving; from living half a life to experiencing joy and freedom I never imagined possible.” The funds she collects from this campaign will fund her in offering the Yoga for Eating Disorders program at treatment centers across the country — at no charge.

Speaking with Chelsea about her decision this past week, she shared that she is blessed to get a tremendous sense of gratification from working with people and families who struggle with eating disorders. At first, she hesitated about leaving the security of a full-time job and consistent paycheck. But she felt the call to “live out loud.” She said, “I have a friend who used to tell me tell me, ‘Leap and the net will appear. And if it doesn’t, you’ll build your wings on the way down.’ So I took the leap.”

Chelsea admitted her doubts going into this project: that she wouldn’t raise enough money, that the research would fail, or that she herself would run out of cash. But she realized that was only fear speaking. “There’s a quote from John Lennon that I love: ‘All hope for a better world rests in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life,'” Chelsea offered. “While I think caution and skepticism are wise guides for decision-making, fear is paralyzing. It never gets you where you want to go. It’s just a game of choosing trust over fear.”

When I asked Chelsea what words of wisdom she would share with her 15-year-old self — that sick, lost, little girl who’d given up on life — she said, “Take refuge in impermanence. Don’t be afraid of change; embrace it. I know how badly you want consistency, certainty, solid ground beneath your feet… But there is no security in stasis. Changelessness is a prison. Take comfort in knowing that the pain, sorrow, and grief you feel now will pass, just as later joy and ecstasy will fade away.”

When Chelsea thinks back now on those difficult years, she feels the most regret not for damage she did to herself, but for how she hurt others — most of all, her parents and her younger sister, who had to go into foster care when Chelsea was hospitalized for 18 months. In healing from her eating disorder, Chelsea had to forgive the child she had once been, realizing that she had been doing the best she could at the time. “This is part of being human: We stumble, we fall down, and then we pick ourselves up, and hopefully gain a few tools and skills to propel us forward,” Chelsea said.

And on the other side of her eating disorder struggles, it is those very mistakes she made that have given Chelsea her greatest gift: empathy. Her suffering helps her understand why people can act in seemingly incomprehensible ways. It’s given her the capacity to connect deeply with people in the midst of their own suffering — especially those with similar struggles. She said, “I think failures, if we’re able to move past them, provide the greatest opportunities to develop strength, insight, and wisdom.”

As for people struggling with eating disorders, Chelsea offers this advice: “Ask for support. You can’t fight this battle alone.” Chelsea says that most people with eating disorders suffer from “fiercely independent (wo)man syndrome.” They don’t want to ask for help, because if they do, they fear rejection or overwhelming others. So they dig in and decide to just take care of themselves.

But Chelsea cautions that this attitude is extremely dangerous. She urges anyone suffering from a mental illness to reach out. “Healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Allow yourself to be vulnerable, to be mirrored in the eyes of someone else. You will be loved. You will be supported. Life will get better, and you’ll have more to offer to those you love because of it.”

Photo credit: Sarit Z Rogers, Sarit Photography

For more by MeiMei Fox, click here.