We hold that the purpose of psychotherapy is to help people overcome their limitations, adapt to their circumstances, and experience more positive emotions.
As an evolving branch of the medical field, psychotherapy has traditionally been based on more remedial assumptions. Therapists, like physicians, tend to identify health problems, and make attempts to correct those problems. However, there is a growing recognition that this approach leads to very surface-level treatments and ultimately unsatisfying results. That is why more medical doctors and psychotherapists alike are beginning to focus on prevention and on good health rather than mere symptom reduction. Because people shouldn’t have to settle for simply not feeling bad, they should be able to feel good.
At ChicagoPsychotherapist.net, we strongly embrace this more holistic philosophy of treatment. We believe that most psychological symptoms represent a client’s best solutions to the problems of living. By targeting the most basic and specific missing ingredients in a client’s experience, we develop custom-tailored, targeted psychotherapeutic interventions to enrich the number of behavioral choices you have available to you at any given time. This not only alleviates symptoms, but allows for general performance enhancement as well.
We aim for every client to end treatment in better than average condition. We are not satisfied to simply alleviate symptoms, or to facilitate clients in achieving the most basic tasks of life. Our goal is for every single one of our clients to become superior to the average individual in every way: better adapted, happier, healthier, more successful in relationships, more motivated, and more productive. We are constantly revising and adapting our treatment approach to meet this ambitious goal.
Psychotherapeutic tools that we use
- Brief Strategic Psychotherapy
- This model of treatment is quite different than what most people think of when they imagine psychotherapy. There’s less crying, for one thing, and it’s much less likely that we will repeatedly ask you to tell us how you feel.
- Instead, we will attempt to understand what specific internal and external barriers stand between you and your desired behaviors and states of consciousness, and to ruthlessly eradicate those barriers.
- Clinical Hypnosis
- Hypnosis is not a type of therapy in itself, but is rather a tool that we use as therapists to access internal processes that are occurring outside of your awareness. We use hypnosis to gain more direct communication with these processes, and to manipulate them without interference from the conscious decision-making processes.
- Attachment-Based Treatment
- In many cases, psychological symptoms are the result of basic feelings of insecurity. If a person can’t trust the world they live in, then their options will be severely restricted. We find that optimizing individuals’ internal systems for representing other people can bring about extremely rapid and far-reaching improvements in the quality of their experiences at every level.
- Applied Positive Psychology
- As we have mentioned, we are concerned not only with inducing symptom remission in our patients, but also in bringing about substantial and lasting functional improvements. Positive psychology is the science of optimal experiences. It examines the nature of experiences like happiness, satisfaction, and love to try and understand exactly what these words refer to and how we can get more of it.
- Many of the techniques we use in psychotherapy are geared toward providing a greater number and intensity of these optimal experiences. We find it is quite difficult to experience depression or anxiety when one is overcome with feelings of love and satisfaction.
Like any mental health professionals, we can’t make any guarantees about the positive outcomes you will experience as a result of participating in our treatment. However, research has shown that more optimistic therapists tend to realize better treatment outcomes. And we remain extremely optimistic about our ability to help our clients achieve better and more fulfilling lives.
You can now call us at (312) 869-2323.