Communication Therapies

Positive-Psychology based Communication Therapies for Nonverbal Children

Coming Soon!

Affirming Trauma-Informed Therapies

Positive-Psychology based Trauma and Behavioral Therapies more suitable for Neurodivergents

ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)

helps the patient come to understand that certain reactions and thoughts that are typically viewed as problematic, are actually human and may at times be helpful, not pathological. Developed by Dr. Steven Hayes, a clinical psychologist and Nevada Foundation Professor Emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno, ACT teaches how to accept even the negative emotions and thoughts — not in the sense of tolerating them, but in the sense of being open to learning from them and allowing them to be part of a life journey. It does not have an assumption that people need to “reduce symptoms”.

Through recognizing, acknowledging, and accepting, the negative thoughts and behaviors, and the underlying triggers for them, this, in itself, results in a natural reduction of their negative impact on the whole person and their choices. It is through understanding, openness, and mindfulness, that an individual begins to develop a healthier relationship with themselves. It is ok to feel stress. It is ok to feel overwhelmed and anxiety. It is ok to feel sad. It is even ok to feel angry. Likewise, there is nothing wrong with stubbornness, or panic, etc.

ACT rests on the fundamental premise that pain, grief, disappointment, illness, and anxiety are inevitable features of human life, with the therapeutic goal of helping individuals productively adapt to these types of challenges by developing greater psychological flexibility rather than engaging in counterproductive attempts to eliminate or suppress undesirable experiences —

Source: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: A Transdiagnostic Behavioral Intervention for Mental Health and Medical Conditions — PMC (nih.gov)

This is the therapy I have heard the most good things about from other autistics, even that it has saved their lives, because DBT and CBT were destroying their self-worth.

Special thanks to Dr. Steven C. Hayes, who took the time to respond, and tweak the information for accuracy.

Somatic Therapy

Somatic Therapy is focused on coping with stress and trauma. The patient learns to recognize internal sensations-

Interoception: internal sensations in the body, including heart rate, respiration, hunger, fullness, temperature, and pain, as well as emotion sensations

And Proprioception: also known as kinesthesia, it is your body’s ability to sense movement, action, and location. It’s present in every muscle movement you have. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to move without thinking about your next step.

…Instead of cognitive or emotional experiences, like what CBT and DBT focus on.

Developed by Dr. Peter A. Levine, who holds a doctorate in medical and biological physics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a doctorate in psychology from International University, Somatic Experiencing is predicated on psychoanalyst Dr. Wilhelm Reich’s theories of sensory awareness. Somatic therapy treats the body as the starting point for healing. It is less about desensitizing people to uncomfortable sensations, instead aiming to resolve symptoms of stress, shock, and trauma that accumulate in our bodies and nervous systems. It focuses on how trauma shows up in the nervous system and how that dysregulation impacts life.

Anxiety, depression, etc, are processed from functions in parts of the nervous system, such as the gut, not the brain, like cortisol, produced by the two adrenal glands which are located on top of each kidney. It regulates your body’s stress response, and when it is too high, it creates that familiar “butterflies in the stomach” feeling, or anxiety, because it is actually adjacent to the stomach. So it isn’t much of a stretch to understanding that learning to focus on, and calm effects on the nervous system will, in turn, also calm the reactionary response of emotions caused by dysregulation of those functions. It is, after all, the same thing psych medications do, regulating those very functions of the nervous system.

Somatic Therapies operate on that same idea, but without the artificial regulation from a substance. One can improve the regulation of the nervous system through non-medicated means. One only has to reference the research of Dr. Peter Breggin, a Harvard College Psychiatrist who had a teaching fellowship at Harvard Medical School, and was a staff member at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), as well as referencing the research behind hallucinogens such as ibogaine, which delves into the connection between synapses and regulation of the nervous system.

Through increasing and improving synapses, it improves the communication to the brain that a function is not operating well, allowing the brain to adjust levels of that function’s output. In cortisol’s case, for example, it would communicate the levels are too high, and adjust to lower it. One can improve this neuro-communication without substances.

Learning something extremely difficult, and truly coming to understand the material, for example, improves your synapses. So does facing fears without a crutch. What more intense way to work out the brain, than not letting it fall back on comforts that calm, but rather, pushing through something difficult, and coming through it okay? This also happens to be an effective way to recover from addictions, and withdrawal syndrome from psych meds.

IFS (Internal Family Systems therapy)

IFS focuses on the different personalities within oneself. Your Exiles, for example, are your inner child. Or rather, your traumatized self where traumas were never addressed and treated, let alone healed, and thus led to trauma responses and damaging thoughts and behaviors. Without that healing, it leads to problems like attachment or avoidant issues, and continues to effect one's life negatively until finally confronted in a healthy, safe, controlled environment with guidance from a mental health professional to navigate through it. Other personalities involve a protector who protects that inner child or traumatized self through those learned trauma responses, and the distractor, who conjures often unhealthy behaviors to distract and detach when traumas are being triggered. Behaviors including extremes like suicidal ideation.

Resulting problematic behaviors from traumas are not going to be resolved until the individual addresses it. IFS helps people do just that- identify and accept the different parts of themselves, and heal the injuries. It isn’t everything. The traumatized parts of you only account for so much. If you are currently living under poor circumstances that are lending to stress, anxiety, and frustration, IFS does not address that. But the foundation of many behavioral issues do lie within these injured parts of you.

There are three parts:

Exiles represent psychological trauma, often from childhood, and they carry the pain and fear. Exiles may become isolated from the other parts and polarize the system. Managers and Firefighters try to protect a person’s consciousness by preventing the Exiles’ pain from coming to awareness.

Managers take on a preemptive, protective role. They influence the way a person interacts with the external world, protecting the person from harm and preventing painful or traumatic experiences from flooding the person’s conscious awareness.

Firefighters emerge when Exiles break out and demand attention. They work to divert attention away from the Exile’s hurt and shame, which leads to impulsive and/or inappropriate behaviors like overeating, drug use, and/or violence. They can also distract a person from pain by excessively focusing attention on more subtle activities such as overworking or overmedicating.

Source: “Grief and the Internal Family System” — Derek Scott
(Not available at this time, the author has sadly recently passed, and his website was shut down, but here is a list of his work- Derek Scott Publications - IFSCA)

First the core Self is helped to get to know the Protector and its good intentions, to begin to develop a trusting relationship between these parts. Then you are taught to access the Exile, the primary injured part of yourself, to uncover the past traumatic experiences that are the root of the issue, in order to heal.

Important note- Therapists Sharon A. Deacon and Jonathan C. Davis suggested that IFS may not work well with delusional, paranoid, or schizophrenic clients who may not be grounded in reality and therefore misuse the idea of “parts.” So, this is not a good option for everyone.

The developer, Dr. Richard C. Schwartz is a psychiatrist in marriage and family therapy. He taught at the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University as well as Harvard Medical School. Like with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, he teaches that there are no bad parts, instead relying on awareness of the root of negative thoughts and behaviors equaling healthier reactions and sense of self, being a positive side effect of the therapy. The more you know..

AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy)

AEDP works to help you understand emotions and traumas behind certain thoughts and behaviors. It revolves around the effects of childhood trauma, and focuses on healing emotional distress utilizing the research within a few therapies- the neuroscience of attachment, positive psychology, emotion research, interpersonal neurobiology, and phenomenology of the psychological experience of sudden change.

Developed by Diana Foșha, a Clinical Psychologist who studied at Barnard College and City College of New York, and underwent post-doctoral training with Dr. Habib Davanloo, the developer of a form of psychodynamic psychotherapy called intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy. Foșha taught at City College of New York and Adelphi University. She was also an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, and was on the faculty of New York University and the St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Center, and the primary focus of her work is on the psychotherapy of adults suffering the effects of childhood attachment trauma and abuse.

In what Foșha calls ‘transformance drive,’ emotional healing is sought through helping the patient experience emotions that had been blocked due to traumatic overwhelm, in a controlled setting. Healing is processed through the patient undergoing a complete emotional experience, and then reflects upon the experience of the healing change, itself. Basically- reliving the traumas, but with the therapy treatment they didn’t receive originally, in order to fully process and heal that trauma.

AEDP does not consider the emergence of defense to be a form of pathology, but considers the defense as the only coping mechanism available to the child. Therefore, as opposed to the psychoanalytic focus upon the interpretation of symptoms, AEDP focuses upon identifying and amplifying the client's psychological resilience.

In contrast to intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy, in which the therapist directly confronts the client's defenses or resistance, the AEDP therapist will explicitly appreciate that the defense was necessary at the time it emerged in the context of the trauma, and will help the client to notice that the defense is no longer necessary.

Source: Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy | Encyclopedia MDPI

AEDP utilizes the reflection upon the experience as it is happening, and explores the attachment-based therapeutic relationship as it is unfolding. It views PTSD as developing when a person is “not socially assisted in the repair of the overwhelmed nervous-system and psychological shock.” The therapist works to keep emotions tolerable during the reprocessing of the trauma, and aids the client in healing the experiences with a healthier new processing of the trauma.

Like other affirming trauma-aware therapies, the behavior and pushing the patient to mask, or rather, change who you are and/or symptoms of a trauma via unhealthy suppression which teaches the patient they are not acceptable as they are, is not the goal. Processing the root of the issue -the trauma- is the goal. The belief is that in processing the core issue in a healthy, positive manner, the symptoms will resolve themselves, as the patient sees the trauma responses are no longer needed to protect them from more harm.

As with IFS, AEDP is not for everyone. One in a mentally fragile state could be pushed over the edge with this therapy, since they would be reliving the emotions of past traumas. Also, it does not have a focus in accepting one’s natural traits, such as those a person has with autism. It delves into trauma and resulting behaviors, so would be recommended to undergo it in addition to a therapy such as ACT, where there is a focus on accepting your natural self.

I hope this list proves helpful. The feedback I have seen about each of them has been positive, hopeful, and life-improving for many. If you have experiences with any of these, good or bad, please speak about your experience in the comments on our Medium article. The more we know, the better the information we can provide!