Individual Counseling, Life Skills-Behavior Therapy, and Group Experiences
Individual Counseling
Lifelong therapists approach clients from a client-centered,
behavioral,
and strength-based orientation grounded in respect for client dignity.
Cognitive
challenges coupled with mental health issues such as depression and
anxiety negatively affect stability and interfere with
interactions at work, home, or in the community.
One purpose of counseling is to help minimize or remove
emotional barriers that occur with
disabilities and interfere with living a
productive life.
Recognizing, understanding, accepting, and using strengths and limitations
Our
therapists assist clients in gaining a keen awareness of the effects
of their disability on daily functioning , vocational success,
and their personal and social life. Developing compensatory skills
based on the individual’s strengths are a primary goal for all our
clients with disabilities.
Therapists may use interventions that:
·
Confront avoidance or denial patterns
related to the disability that block the growth of positive
compensatory and interpersonal skills by asking
questions about the effectiveness of current
behaviors.
·
Help the
clients find the words to
express themselves more clearly and get their needs met at home, work, and the community.
·
Help the client to
identify strengths using a skills
inventory and empower clients to own and use these strengths in
their daily lives.
· Help clients set realistic goals that can be achieved between sessions and that can be built upon to increase the client’s confidence.
Developing effective
self-advocacy skills:
Individuals with disabilities may nod their
head in agreement when uncertain, or stay quiet in situations when their
voice needs to be heard.
This can lead to confusion and frustration for significant others,
friends and employers. We assist
clients in developing assertiveness and self-advocacy skills through:
·
Modeling of
effective interactions, facilitating behavioral and verbal rehearsal, and
providing role-play opportunities so clients can improve communication skills
and assertiveness.
·
Providing direct
and concrete education about the situations where
advocacy or assertiveness may be needed.
·
Assigning weekly behavioral homework exercises
so clients can practice their skills in the real world and generalize
their new skills to new situations.
Managing stress and changing unhealthy patterns of thinking and behaving:
Unmanaged stress can lead to emotional,
cognitive, and physical disturbances that can interfere with productive
living and impact mental health.
Clients with mental health problems may engage in unhealthy behaviors
that provide short-term relief, but that in the long run complicate
their emotional stability and impede productivity.
We help our clients learn skills to
overcome or manage stress and mental health symptoms by:
· Assisting clients in identifying negative thought or behavior patterns that create barriers to success. Clients are taught ways to respond to these patterns that promote well being, rather than using the same old, comfortable and familiar patterns of thinking or behaving.
·
Teaching the
use of organizational strategies such as planners, calendars, timers,
alarms, and sticky notes, and emphasizing how to apply these strategies
in their daily lives.
· Teaching progressive relaxation and stress reduction techniques that can help clients to relax and reverse the stress-response that can contribute to unhealthy thinking and behavior patterns.
·
Providing clients
with opportunities to develop a better
understanding about their emotions, behaviors, and thinking processes.
·
Supporting clients in clarifying their
values (“I want to be a good father”) and using them as a motivation
strategy to take actions consistent with their identified values.
People who live in congruence with their values often experience
less stress and mental health symptoms.
·
Using systematic
desensitization to reduce fears in stressful situations by identifying
hierarchies within the anxiety provoking situations and alleviating the
anxiety step by step by using relaxation skills and
visualization.
·
Assisting
clients in planning for and responding to setbacks they will inevitably
experience as a part of their daily lives by examining
outcomes and identifying alternative actions to take in the event that
they recur. Predicting and
normalizing setbacks as part of the growth process helps clients to avoid
feelings of failure that can impede progress.
Life
Skills/ Behavioral
Therapy
For the past fifteen years, Lifelong AES has been offering life skills development (daily living skills) and behavioral therapy for clients with cognitive deficits or developmental delays. Because of their cognitive limitations, they often have a history of abuse or neglect, or find themselves and/or their families in unfavorable situations due to their poor problem solving and decision making.
Lifelong therapists believe that helping clients gain independence in their lives should be the primary goal of therapy. Through patience, strong rapport and by using here-and-now techniques of therapy, Lifelong therapists are able to provide therapy relevant to the needs of this population. Therapists use interventions consistent with a client's cognitive abilities.
Lifelong believes that meeting with clients in their community at home, or at work helps them to generalize what they are learning in therapy. Combined with meetings in the safe environs of Lifelong's offices, life skills and therapeutic interventions can happen through real-life demonstration, modeling, and supervised practice to help integrate the newly learned skills into real-life situations. Lifelong incorporates the learning experience with understanding of emotional processes so that clients can generalize their learning and feel good about the experience, leading to better decision-making/problem-solving in the future. Using behavioral and hands-on approaches that focus on the here-and-now tends to be the most effective treatment modality with these clients.
Experiential and
hands-on skills training:
Experiential and hands-on training allows clients with cognitive limitations to practice skills by observation, rehearsal, role-play, activities and repetition. Through hands on training, clients can learn to advocate for themselves, increase their self-sufficiency and learn compensatory skills. Training occurs in a variety of settings, at the client’s home, in the community and in the office. Therapists start with the basics and work with their clients to foster independence in many areas of their life.
Parenting and
relationship skills:
Parents with cognitive limitations, developmental disabilities, and learning disabilities face unique challenges. Parents with cognitive limitations have difficulties with communication skills, decision making, and understanding cause and effect. Parenting can be a daunting task for people with developmental delays. Some of the challenges that our clients face include difficulties implementing discipline techniques, keeping a schedule, and setting limits for their children. Parents with cognitive limitations have difficulty understanding child development. Because of their poor ability to understand and read facial cues, parents sometimes have difficulty reacting to and understanding their child’s emotional cues and acting in an appropriately nurturing manner. While helping whole families build new coping and disciplinary skills and techniques, Lifelong therapists
·
Help clients build parenting and
relationship skills by using repetition, role-play, and rehearsal. Lifelong therapists
model appropriate discipline techniques and allow parents to
observe techniques first hand.
·
Slow down the therapeutic process and break techniques into manageable
steps.
Therapists help
implement these steps, and redirect and physically intervene while
parents are disciplining their children.
·
Provide instruction to parents to help them understand
developmental milestones.
·
Set
appropriate and realistic goals.
·
Use
positive reinforcement, which helps clients to build upon and
acknowledge client successes.
Interpersonal skills at
home and work:
In the effort to help clients increase interpersonal skills at home and
at work,
Lifelong therapists believe it is important to discuss
disability openly and honestly. It is imperative to build a strong
rapport and work to develop a trusting relationship when working with
clients with cognitive limitations. In building a strong therapeutic
alliance with the client, Lifelong therapists
·
Acknowledge a client’s
strengths and build upon those strengths to help the client learn ways
to compensate for their limitations.
·
Help clients understand
and identify their limitations and how these limitations affect their
relationships at home and in the workplace.
This knowledge helps reduce guilt and personal responsibility
tied to their limitations.
·
Use role play,
repetition, rehearsal and feedback, clients practice interpersonal
situations under therapeutic supervision and build skills to better
interact with others.
Group Experiences
Group experiences may be tailored
to meet the specific needs of clients or of agencies. Our popular,
Building Blocks for Success and
Getting Your Needs Met modular group
experiences have been modified for and used extensively with agencies
looking for productive (and countable) activities to enhance their
existing programs. Anxiety reduction and stress management, social skills
development,
and coping with disabilities are examples of group therapy topic areas
or targets. Benefits of group
counseling include:
· Peer feedback and support from group members, facilitated by therapists. Clients may be more receptive to suggestions from their peers than from significant others and this can promote faster behavior change.
·
Group cohesion
promotes the feeling within clients that, “I’m not alone, others struggle too”, and aids in the
growth and healing process.
· Improvement of skills related to stress management, advocacy/assertiveness, parenting and problem solving in a group setting where opportunities to rehearse and engage in role-play are available.