Modalities
At Creative Ways, you or your child may be guided in using various therapy techniques that foster self-expression, active participation, imagination, mind-body connections, and emotional growth. Your therapist may incorporate
some of these interventions:
Trauma-Informed Care
When trauma occurs, it affects an individual's sense of self, their sense of others, and their beliefs about the world. These beliefs can directly impact an individual's ability or motivation to connect with and utilize support services. In utilizing a Trauma-Informed Care approach, Creative Ways realizes the direct impact that trauma can have on access to services, and is therefore guided by policies, procedures and practices meant to minimize potential barriers. Creative Ways therapists are trained to recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma and thus avoid any possibility of re-traumatization. Your therapist will fully integrate knowledge about trauma into all aspects of their work.
Sand Tray Therapy
Sand tray therapy is a creative counseling technique in which clients use a sand box to express their inner world. "Creating their world" within the sand tray allows participants to achieve many important trauma-related goals: First, they externalize their concerns, worries, or fears by selecting miniature objects that they identify with; Secondly, they use projection to establish a safe enough distance from painful or difficult feelings and thoughts; Third, through the use of pretend play and story-telling, they begin to organize a coherent nonverbal narrative, they expose themselves to threatening material and develop a tolerance of it, and they develop a sense of mastery through controlled recall. Often children or adults may find it comfortable to talk about the sand scenarios that they have created and a verbal narration may be constructed spontaneously. Through their play, options and resources can emerge, and clients can benefit greatly from this work in the sand. Sometimes it is in the telling of their story to a trusted witness that healing can begin to take place. Other times it is in the development of coping strategies to deal with what is brought forth that the healing process can occur. Observing the sand tray scenes that clients create, clinicians may make inferences about relevant strengths and vulnerabilities, and observe how traumatic memories are represented, processed, and eventually transformed. Sand tray work often yields a decrease in symptoms, affect enhancement, and a sense of well-being.​
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
In EMDR work, eye movements (or other bilateral stimulation) are used during the session. After the clinician has determined which memory to target first, they ask the client to hold different aspects of that event or thought in mind and to use the eyes to track the therapist’s hand as it moves back and forth across the client’s field of vision. As this happens, internal associations arise and the client begins to process the memory and disturbing feelings. In successful EMDR therapy, the meaning of painful events is transformed on an emotional level. The insights a client may gain in EMDR therapy result not so much from clinician interpretation, but from the client’s own accelerated intellectual and emotional processes. The net effect is that when clients conclude EMDR therapy, they feeling empowered by the very experiences that once debased them. Their wounds have not just closed, they have transformed. As a natural outcome of the EMDR therapeutic process, the clients’ thoughts, feelings and behaviors are all robust indicators of emotional health and resolution.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Mindfulness
