Bethel Olentangy Psychological Services

Parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT) is an evidence-based treatment for young children (ages 2-6) with emotional and behavioral disorders PCIT emphasizes improving the quality of the parent-child relationship and changing parent-child interaction patterns. Children and their caregivers are seen together in PCIT. Most of the session time is spent coaching caregivers in the application of specific therapy skills. Therapists typically coach from an observation room, using a “bug-in-the-ear” system for communicating to the parents as they play with their child. Concluding each session, therapist and caregiver together decide which skill to focus on most during daily 5-minute home practice sessions the following week.

Meditative Mindfulness is an approach to psychotherapy which is quickly becoming one of the more researched and empirically based forms of therapy. Psychotherapy which incorporates meditation and mindfulness skills has been found to be very helpful for people who are encountering depression, anxiety, compulsive behaviors (such as gambling, pornography, eating disorders), managing emotions, impulsive behaviors, marital, parenting, and interpersonal issues, and processing intense issues such as family or origin and abuse.  Most exciting is research showing that, with meditation and mindfulness training,  there is actually physical changes to parts of the brain, most notably growth in the thickness of the prefrontal cortex.  This is the part of the brain  where all of the most complex processes take place, such as emotional management, ability to conceptualize , and making  healthy choices for behaviors, and to be  planful instead of impulsive.  This is the only form of psychotherapy, thus far, which has been proven to make actual physical changes to the brain.  Many psychotherapists incorporate some form of meditation and mindfulness into their psychotherapeutic work.  It is worth asking your psychologist if this is part of their training and practice in psychotherapy.   

Biofeedback is a treatment technique in which patients are trained to improve their health and well-being using signals from their bodies. Patients are taught techniques to improve control of body processes that normally happen involuntarily, such as heart rate, muscle tension and skin temperature. Sensors or electrodes connected to the skin measure these processes and display them on a monitor. Patients receive immediate information (feedback) about these (biological) processes and can monitor their changes. Eventually, patients learn to recognize the changes without the aid of the monitor. Biofeedback is an effective treatment for many conditions, including chronic pain, anxiety, high blood pressure, tension headache, migraine headache and urinary incontinence. Different types of biofeedback include heart rate variability, thermal biofeedback, neurofeedback and electromyography (EMG).

Habit reversal training (HRT) is a multi-component program designed to reduce the frequency of targeted behaviors in habit disorders. It is an effective treatment for chronic verbal or motor tics (such as those associated with Tourette’s disorder), trichotillomania (hair pulling), nail biting, skin picking and thumbsucking. Basic components of HRT include increasing awareness of the behavior, developing and practicing a competing response and receiving social support. When functional analysis is added to HRT, it is called Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tics (CBIT). Techniques taught is session are practiced at home and generalized to any situation in which the behavior occurs. The goal of HRT is to reduce the frequency and/or intensity of the targeted behavior (e.g., motor and vocal tics) or replace the behavior with a more socially appropriate or less conspicuous behavior.