Psychology

Psychology Services

At Honour Health, we believe in supporting wellness of the whole person, and we believe this includes our mental, emotional, spiritual, and relational health. We offer psychology services in order to support these aspects of healing and wellness.

OUR APPROACH

While each of our therapists may offer different modalities, our overall approach honours the importance of the mind, body and spirit in healing. Many of our therapists will use both client-centred and somatic practices in session. A client-centered approach means that each session is catered to what you need, and the therapist will adapt their approach to what your goals are.

Somatic psychotherapies bring our bodies, our senses, movements, and posture into the therapy process and can help heal trauma, grief, anxiety, depression, attachment concerns, and more. These types of therapies work on the neurobiological level to help create emotional healing, in that they can help us honour our body’s natural reaction to stress, threat, and harm, and then create shifts in our nervous system’s response when we are in a place of safety. We can change the way our body and nervous system respond to stressors, relationships, memories, triggers, and traumas in our life by rewiring neurological connections in our brain.

Somatic psychotherapies can go beyond trauma healing and create wellbeing, because each and every time we consciously use our skill of interoception (the brain’s ability to feel inside our body, like how we sense hunger in our bellies), we build a connection, relationship, and attachment to ourselves. Moreover, when we use interoception, we engage the part of our brain that can help us to regulate our emotional experiences.

In a typical session, a somatic psychotherapist may track your body’s reactions to different experiences and encourage you to use your senses, felt sense, movements, posture, in addition to your thoughts, memories, stories and internal images to explore experiences. You may also be encouraged to explore resources in your body that move towards what is needed for healing and wellness, with the idea that we can honour the body’s inherent wisdom, knowledge, and desire to move toward safety.

Play Therapy is a common form of therapy for children. The belief behind most theories of play therapy is that children will show their emotional or psychological struggles through imaginative and relational play. Play Therapy often involves having a room available for children to choose different toys, games, and activities with their therapist, although sometimes the therapist will have structured activities for a child client.

Synergetic Play Therapy

Synergetic Play Therapy (SPT) is a way of working with children through the regulation of the nervous system. The SPT therapist will act as an external regular for the child as the child uses play, toys, and other means to find empowerment through their struggles.

Sandtray

Sandtray involves a child choosing figures (toys) to use within a tray of sand. Theories of sandtray work state that a child’s inner world is often displayed through the figures they use in the sand and how they choose to display or play with them in the sand.

Expressive Art

Expressive Art is a process of accessing one’s inner creativity and imagination. This allows a child to build a deeper relationship with themself, as well as express what they may not have language for.

Theraplay

Theraplay builds and uses the attachment relationship between parent and child to promote regulation, healing, and wellness in a child. This therapy includes the parent in the therapy room, and provides tools, resources and strategies for the parent-child relationship.

We offer individual therapy to teenagers and adults. Each therapist may offer different forms of therapy.

Here are some forms of a therapy that we offer:

Somatic Experiencing® (SE)

Somatic Experiencing® is a somatic psychotherapy that explores the fight/flight/freeze and shutdown responses in our body in response to threat, stress, and trauma. SE strategies help discharge these responses in our nervous system, as they become “stuck” in response to traumatic events and developmental and relational wounds.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP)

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) is a holistic and somatic psychotherapy for well-being, trauma and relational wounds. The body is tracked as both a source of information and as a way to heal by allowing us to build awareness into and then change learned patterns of beliefs and behaviors that impede our access to well-being. Resources are discovered and reinstated in our body, particularly those that were missing during traumatic experiences.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

Most commonly used for processing trauma but is also a beneficial therapy for stress, anxiety, panic attacks, grief, and depression. EMDR helps us to disconnect the thoughts and feelings associated with trauma to reduce nightmares, triggers, negative emotions and flashbacks.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT is a form of therapy that helps us to move toward acknowledging, validating and accepting our own suffering as part of the human experience. ACT also helps us take committed actions steps toward being in our lives in a way that feels consistent with our values.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

DBT is a form of therapy that may take place in individual therapy or group form. It helps us learn skills for emotional regulation, helps deepen our ability to tolerate distressing and difficult emotions, helps us gain skills in relationship with others, and helps us to live with more mindfulness.

Ego State

This is a form of psychodynamic therapy that honours the different psychological parts or ego states within us that make up our personality. It helps us identify these parts and the different conflicts, traumas, emotions and behaviours that our ego states are holding onto that remove us from feeling integrated and whole.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

IFS also helps us to identify and understand our different internal parts. IFS recognizes these different parts as developing out of protection, but become problematic when that protection is no longer needed or is harmful. Some examples of protection from parts may include dysfunctional behavioral patterns like addiction, critical beliefs about oneself, and anxiety in new situations. In IFS therapy, we may work toward identifying, acknowledging, and befriending their parts, releasing our internal parts from the protective forces no longer needed, and moving closer to our core selves.

Gottman Method

An approach to couples therapy that uses interventions based on the Sound Relationship House Theory. Therapists may facilitate a thorough assessment of the couple's relationship before integrating research-based interventions

Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT)

EFT is based on attachment theory and the idea that emotions are integral in relationships. An EFT approach to couples therapy helps us to identify patterns of attachment and emotional triggers that interfere with connecting to and communicating with our partner. It helps us to resolve conflict and build a closer, loving connection.

Family Counselling

Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT): uses principles of EFT in a family therapy setting. Its focus is to restructure parent and child interactions and reduce negative interaction patterns.

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Some Examples of Conditions Treated

Stress
Anxiety
Trauma
Depression
Interpersonal difficulties
Grief
Chronic pain
ADHD
Recovering after Narcissistic abuse