Traditional  Psychotherapy, EMDR, and Addictions Psychotherapy Services

Individual PsychoTherapy

Individual therapy involves an interaction between the patient/client and therapist and is designed to facilitate positive change in one’s maladaptive patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.  Bergen’s  counseling techniques include EMDR, Cognitive-Behavioral and Schema therapy strategies, as well as meditation, guided imagery, and relaxation training.  In addition to these traditional counseling techniques,  Addictions focused therapy may include  SMART (Self-Management Addiction Recovery Training), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Guided Self-Care, Recovery Coaching and 12-Step assisted individual therapy.  Individual Therapy is usually conducted weekly or every two weeks for 8 or more  sessions.

Group PsychoTherapy

Group therapy is a special form of psychotherapy in which a small group of people meet under the guidance of a specially trained Licensed Therapist to help themselves and one another.  The therapy has been widely used as a standard treatment option for over 50 years.  Groups consist of 5-10 patients and range in time from 60 to 75 minutes. We offer separate group services, one for Addiction Recovery and another for Non-Addicted Adults.  We also offer Addiction Recovery Group Therapy for Adolescents Males/Young Men and Multi-Family Substance Abuse Group.  Non- Substance Abuse groups include Personality/Schema Therapy Groups for individuals and couples.  Examples of group topics include Assertiveness, Parent Effectiveness and Stress Management Training.  Group therapy is usually conducted weekly for 8-24 sessions and is offered during or after a course of individual therapy.

Relationship Counseling and Couples Therapy

Relationship counseling is the process of counseling the parties of a relationship in an effort to recognize and to better manage or reconcile troublesome differences and repeating patterns of distress. The relationship involved may be between members of a family or a couple, employees or employers in a workplace, or between a professional and a client.

Couple therapy is a related and different process. It may differ from relationship counseling in duration. Short term counseling may be between 1 to 3 sessions whereas long term couples therapy  may be between 12 and 24 sessions. An exception is brief or solution focused couples therapy. In addition, counseling tends to be more ‘here and now’ and new coping strategies the outcome. Couples therapy is more about seemingly intractable problems with a relationship history, where emotions are the target and the agent of change.  Here at Bergen counseling, we utilized research-based IBCT,  Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy techniques as well as Schema Therapy based Couples strategies.

EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a comprehensive, integrative psychotherapy approach. It contains elements of many effective psychotherapies in structured protocols that are designed to maximize treatment effects. These include psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, interpersonal, experiential, and body-centered therapies.

EMDR psychotherapy is an information processing therapy and uses an eight phase approach to address the experiential contributors of a wide range of pathologies. It attends to the past experiences that have set the groundwork for pathology, the current situations that trigger dysfunctional emotions, beliefs and sensations, and the positive experience needed to enhance future adaptive behaviors and mental health.