Your Path to Healing
Therapy works best when it fits the person, not the other way around. At Contemplative Caregiver, we use a flexible and integrative approach to support people navigating grief, caregiver stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, life transitions, and relationship challenges.
Some clients need practical tools to manage the day. Some need space to grieve without being rushed. Some need help understanding old patterns, reconnecting with their body, setting boundaries, or finding meaning after loss. Others simply need a steady place where they can be honest about what they are carrying.
Therapy may include conversation, mindfulness, body awareness, creative expression, nature-based reflection, family systems work, or practical problem-solving. You do not need to know which approach is right for you before starting. Part of therapy is discovering what actually helps.
- Telehealth Sessions: Flexible, accessible therapy from the privacy of your own space. Telehealth can be especially helpful for caregivers, busy professionals, people with transportation barriers, and clients managing anxiety, depression, grief, or major life stress.
- Nature-Based Sessions: Outdoor therapy sessions that use movement, fresh air, sensory awareness, and the natural world to support reflection, grounding, grief work, and nervous system regulation.
- Workshops: Structured group experiences designed to support self-awareness, emotional resilience, grief processing, caregiver support, creativity, and meaningful connection.
- Retreats: Immersive healing experiences that create space for rest, reflection, grief work, mindfulness, nature-based support, and deeper personal growth.
The therapy techniques below are not rigid formulas. They are options that may be used thoughtfully depending on your needs, goals, comfort level, and lived experience. Each approach can be adapted to support grief, caregiving stress, anxiety, depression, trauma recovery, relationship concerns, and personal growth.
Therapy Techniques
Authentic Movement
Description: Authentic Movement is a gentle, body-based therapy practice that helps clients notice emotions, memories, and body sensations that may be hard to put into words. This is not dance performance, exercise, or choreography. Movement can be small, slow, seated, still, or even imagined. The focus is on noticing what is happening inside with curiosity and care.
How This May Help: For grief, anxiety, depression, and caregiver stress, emotions often show up in the body before they become clear in words. A client may notice heaviness in the chest, tightness in the shoulders, numbness, restlessness, or the urge to collapse or withdraw. Authentic Movement can help clients safely explore those experiences without needing to explain everything perfectly.
Sample Intervention: A grieving client may be invited to slowly notice what their body wants to do when asked, “What does this loss feel like today?” They might place a hand on their heart, look down, reach outward, sit very still, or notice the urge to turn away. Afterward, the therapist helps the client reflect on what emerged—such as heaviness, longing, anger, numbness, or tenderness—and connect it to their grief process without judgment or pressure.
Resources:
American Dance Therapy Association
What Is Dance/Movement Therapy? — ADTA
Body-Based Therapy
Description: Body-Based Therapy helps clients notice the connection between emotional stress and physical experience. Anxiety, grief, depression, trauma, and caregiver burnout often show up through muscle tension, fatigue, shallow breathing, numbness, restlessness, digestive discomfort, or a sense of being disconnected from the body.
How This May Help: This approach can help clients slow down and listen to what their body is communicating. For anxious clients, it can support grounding and regulation. For depressed clients, it can help reconnect with sensation and energy. For grieving clients and caregivers, it can make space for the body to release some of what has been held for too long.
Sample Intervention: A caregiver who feels constantly tense may be guided through a slow body scan, noticing areas of pressure, tightness, or exhaustion. The therapist may ask, “Where does responsibility live in your body today?” The client might notice their shoulders, chest, stomach, or jaw, then practice softening, breathing, or placing a hand on that area with compassion.
Resources:
Body-Mind Centering
Somatic Experiencing International
Contemplative Therapy
Description: Contemplative Therapy uses mindfulness, reflection, awareness practices, breathwork, and compassionate observation to help clients relate differently to their thoughts and emotions. The goal is not to empty the mind or force calm, but to notice inner experience with more honesty, patience, and care.
How This May Help: For anxiety, contemplative work can help clients step back from racing thoughts. For depression, it can support gentle awareness without self-judgment. For grief, it can create space to sit with sadness, love, anger, confusion, or longing without needing to fix it immediately. For caregivers, it can offer moments of inner steadiness in the middle of ongoing responsibility.
Sample Intervention: A client struggling with grief may be guided to sit quietly and notice the breath while repeating, “This is grief right now.” The therapist helps the client observe thoughts, body sensations, and emotions as they arise, without trying to push them away. The practice becomes a way of staying present with pain without becoming completely consumed by it.
Resources:
Mindful
Center for Mindfulness — Brown University
Fishing Therapy
Description: Fishing Therapy combines the calming rhythm of fishing with therapeutic reflection, mindfulness, patience, and time in nature. It can be helpful for clients who feel more comfortable opening up while doing something active, quiet, or outdoors rather than sitting face-to-face in a traditional office.
How This May Help: For anxious clients, casting, waiting, and observing the water can support grounding. For depressed clients, the structure of an outdoor activity can gently encourage movement, attention, and connection. For grieving clients, water and quiet can create space for memory and reflection. For caregivers, fishing can offer a rare experience of slowing down and not being responsible for everything.
Sample Intervention: A client experiencing anxiety may use casting as a mindfulness practice. The therapist may invite the client to notice the feeling of the rod, the sound of the water, the breath before casting, and the uncertainty of waiting. This can lead into a conversation about control, patience, grief, caregiving stress, and learning how to be present when outcomes are uncertain.
Resources:
Recreational Therapy — NCTRC
American Therapeutic Recreation Association
Gaming Therapy / Nerd Therapy
Description: Gaming Therapy, sometimes called Nerd Therapy, uses video games, tabletop games, fantasy, science fiction, comics, roleplay, and character-based storytelling as tools for reflection and growth. This approach takes clients’ interests seriously and uses them as meaningful entry points into therapy.
How This May Help: For clients with anxiety or depression, games and stories can make difficult emotions easier to approach. For grieving clients, characters and narratives can help explore loss, courage, identity, and continuing forward after change. For caregivers, gaming metaphors can help discuss roles, burnout, resource management, teamwork, boundaries, and support.
Sample Intervention: A depressed client may talk about a favorite character who keeps going despite repeated failure or loss. The therapist may ask, “What helps this character continue?” and “Where do you see even a small version of that strength in yourself?” This can help the client identify resilience, values, support systems, and next steps without feeling forced into overly direct emotional disclosure.
Resources:
Take This
Geek Therapeutics
Eclectic Therapy
Description: Eclectic Therapy draws from multiple therapy approaches instead of relying on one single method. The therapist selects tools based on the client’s needs, goals, comfort level, culture, symptoms, strengths, and current life circumstances.
How This May Help: This approach can be useful when clients are dealing with overlapping concerns such as grief, anxiety, depression, trauma, family stress, and caregiving responsibilities. Some sessions may need practical coping skills. Others may need emotional processing, body awareness, communication work, or meaning-making.
Sample Intervention: A caregiver experiencing burnout may use cognitive tools to identify guilt-based thoughts, mindfulness skills to calm the nervous system, and person-centered reflection to reconnect with their own needs. The therapist may shift approaches depending on whether the client needs grounding, problem-solving, grief support, or emotional release that day.
Resources:
Psychology Today: Types of Therapy
GoodTherapy: Types of Therapy
Ecotherapy / Nature-Based Therapy
Description: Ecotherapy uses the natural world as part of the healing process. Sessions may include walking, sitting outdoors, observing natural surroundings, using sensory grounding, or reflecting on patterns in nature. The focus is not athletic performance or wilderness skill, but connection, regulation, and reflection.
How This May Help: Nature-based work can support anxious clients by helping the nervous system slow down. It can help depressed clients reconnect with movement, light, texture, and sensory experience. For grief, nature can offer powerful metaphors for change, death, renewal, memory, and impermanence. For caregivers, outdoor space can provide relief from enclosed routines and constant demands.
Sample Intervention: A grieving client may be invited to walk slowly and notice signs of change in the landscape—fallen leaves, flowing water, bare branches, new growth, or shifting weather. The therapist may ask, “What in this landscape feels familiar to your grief?” This can help the client explore loss, transition, and continuing connection in a grounded way.
Resources:
Association of Nature and Forest Therapy
Nature-Based Therapy Research — NIH / PMC
Ephemeral Forms Therapy
Description: Ephemeral Forms Therapy uses temporary creative materials such as sand, stones, sticks, leaves, water, flowers, or natural objects to explore emotions and experiences. The focus is on the process of creating, changing, and letting go rather than making permanent art.
How This May Help: This can be especially supportive for grief, because grief itself changes shape over time. For anxious clients, temporary forms can reduce pressure to make something “good.” For depressed clients, small acts of creation can support agency and expression. For caregivers, the process can help symbolize what they are carrying, what they want to release, and what still matters.
Sample Intervention: A client may create a temporary arrangement of stones and leaves to represent what they are holding emotionally. After reflecting on the piece, they may choose to change it, add to it, take a photo, dismantle it, or leave it to the natural elements. The therapist helps the client explore what it feels like to create, witness, release, and allow change.
Resources:
American Art Therapy Association
What Is Art Therapy? — AATA
Existential Therapy
Description: Existential Therapy explores major human concerns such as meaning, death, freedom, responsibility, isolation, uncertainty, and choice. It can be especially useful when loss, illness, caregiving, trauma, or major life transitions raise deep questions about identity and purpose.
How This May Help: Grief often brings people face-to-face with mortality and the fragility of life. Anxiety may intensify when clients feel uncertain or out of control. Depression may deepen when life feels meaningless or disconnected. Caregivers may struggle with guilt, limits, resentment, love, and responsibility. Existential Therapy creates room to explore these realities honestly.
Sample Intervention: A caregiver supporting a seriously ill loved one may explore the question, “Who am I becoming through this experience?” The therapist helps the client examine meaning, limits, fear, love, anger, guilt, mortality, and the choices still available within a difficult situation.
Resources:
Existential-Humanistic Institute
Existential Therapy — GoodTherapy
Experiential Therapy
Description: Experiential Therapy helps clients learn through direct experience rather than only talking about problems. It may include roleplay, imagery, movement, creative activities, symbolic exercises, or guided enactments.
How This May Help: For anxious clients, experiential work can help practice new responses in a safe setting. For depressed clients, it can bring energy and emotion into the room when words feel flat or stuck. For grieving clients, it can help express unfinished conversations or emotions. For caregivers, it can support boundary-setting, communication, and role changes.
Sample Intervention: A caregiver who struggles to ask for help may practice a conversation with a family member during session. The therapist may help the client notice body tension, fear, guilt, or assumptions that arise while saying, “I cannot do this alone anymore.” The client can then practice a clearer and more grounded version of the request.
Resources:
Experiential Therapy — GoodTherapy
American Psychological Association: Psychotherapy
Family Systems Therapy
Description: Family Systems Therapy views the family as an interconnected emotional system. It looks at roles, boundaries, communication patterns, conflict cycles, loyalty, caregiving expectations, and how each person’s behavior affects the larger system.
How This May Help: This approach can be helpful when grief, caregiving, anxiety, depression, or illness affects the whole family. One person may become the default caregiver. Another may avoid conflict. Another may minimize the problem. Family Systems Therapy helps identify these patterns so the family can communicate more clearly and share responsibility more honestly.
Sample Intervention: A caregiving family may map who handles appointments, finances, emotional support, transportation, decision-making, and crisis calls. The therapist helps the family notice patterns of overfunctioning, resentment, silence, guilt, or withdrawal, then supports a more balanced and realistic plan for care.
Resources:
The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family
Bowen Theory: Eight Concepts
Feminist Therapy
Description: Feminist Therapy explores how gender roles, power, oppression, identity, culture, social expectations, and systemic barriers affect mental health. It supports empowerment, self-definition, advocacy, and a clearer understanding of how personal struggles are shaped by larger social forces.
How This May Help: Many caregivers, especially women and marginalized people, are taught to put their own needs last. Anxiety, depression, resentment, and burnout can grow when clients feel they must be endlessly available. Feminist Therapy helps clients question harmful expectations, reclaim agency, and build boundaries without shame.
Sample Intervention: A caregiver who feels guilty resting may explore messages they learned about being “selfless,” “strong,” or “needed.” The therapist may ask, “Who benefits when your needs disappear?” This can open space to discuss power, family roles, gender expectations, grief, anger, and the right to receive support.
Resources:
Association for Women in Psychology
Feminist Therapy Institute
Gestalt Therapy
Description: Gestalt Therapy focuses on present-moment awareness, emotional expression, body experience, unfinished business, and integration. It helps clients notice what is happening now rather than only talking about what happened before.
How This May Help: For grief, Gestalt Therapy can support conversations that never happened or feelings that remain unresolved. For anxiety, it can help clients notice what they are avoiding in the present moment. For depression, it can help reconnect with emotion, desire, and aliveness. For caregivers, it can help clarify resentment, love, exhaustion, and unmet needs.
Sample Intervention: A grieving client may use an empty chair to speak to a loved one who died, a part of themselves, or even to grief itself. The therapist helps the client notice words, pauses, body sensations, tears, anger, numbness, or relief as they emerge. The goal is not to force closure, but to support honest contact with what remains unfinished.
Resources:
Gestalt Institute of Cleveland
Gestalt Centre
Hakomi
Description: Hakomi is a mindfulness-centered, body-based therapy that explores how unconscious beliefs and emotional patterns are held in the body. It uses gentle awareness, curiosity, and present-moment experience to help clients better understand themselves.
How This May Help: For anxious clients, Hakomi can help uncover beliefs such as “I am not safe” or “I have to stay in control.” For depressed clients, it may reveal beliefs such as “I do not matter” or “My needs are too much.” For caregivers and grieving clients, it can help explore patterns of over-responsibility, guilt, disconnection, or longing.
Sample Intervention: A client may be guided to notice what happens inside when the therapist gently says, “You do not have to carry this alone.” The client might notice tightness, sadness, disbelief, anger, warmth, or numbness. The therapist helps the client stay with the experience slowly and safely, allowing hidden beliefs about support, burden, and worthiness to become clearer.
Resources:
Hakomi Institute
What Is Hakomi?
Harm Reduction Therapy
Description: Harm Reduction Therapy helps clients reduce the negative consequences of risky or harmful behaviors without requiring immediate abstinence or all-or-nothing change. It emphasizes safety, dignity, realistic goals, and client choice.
How This May Help: Grief, anxiety, depression, trauma, and caregiver burnout can increase reliance on alcohol, substances, avoidance, overworking, emotional eating, isolation, or other coping strategies. Harm Reduction Therapy helps clients understand what the behavior is doing for them while also creating safer, healthier options.
Sample Intervention: A grieving client who uses alcohol to get through difficult evenings may identify patterns around anniversaries, loneliness, sleep, and emotional overwhelm. The therapist helps the client create a safer plan, such as reducing quantity, eating before drinking, avoiding driving, scheduling support, and developing alternative rituals for grief.
Resources:
National Harm Reduction Coalition
Harm Reduction Principles
Holistic Health Therapy
Description: Holistic Health Therapy considers the whole person, including emotional, physical, relational, spiritual, behavioral, and environmental well-being. It recognizes that mental health is affected by sleep, food, movement, medical stress, relationships, meaning, and daily routines.
How This May Help: Anxiety and depression often worsen when the body is depleted. Grief can disrupt sleep, appetite, energy, and connection. Caregivers may neglect their own health while focusing on someone else’s needs. Holistic Health Therapy helps clients identify realistic supports across multiple areas of life.
Sample Intervention: A caregiver experiencing exhaustion may review sleep, hydration, meals, movement, medical appointments, emotional support, spiritual practices, and daily stress. Instead of creating an overwhelming wellness plan, the therapist helps the client choose one small, realistic action, such as eating breakfast before caregiving tasks or taking a 10-minute reset after appointments.
Resources:
National Wellness Institute
SAMHSA: Creating a Healthier Life
Humanistic Therapy
Description: Humanistic Therapy emphasizes dignity, self-awareness, personal growth, authenticity, choice, and the client’s own capacity for healing. The therapist offers empathy, respect, and a nonjudgmental relationship where the client can explore who they are and what matters.
How This May Help: Depression can disconnect clients from identity, desire, and hope. Anxiety can make clients feel trapped by fear or expectation. Grief can leave people unsure of who they are after loss. Caregivers may lose touch with themselves after years of focusing on others. Humanistic Therapy helps clients reconnect with their own experience and inner direction.
Sample Intervention: A client who feels lost after caregiving may be asked, “What parts of you have had to go quiet?” The therapist supports exploration of grief, anger, exhaustion, longing, creativity, values, and hope without rushing the client toward a quick fix.
Resources:
APA Society for Humanistic Psychology
The Humanistic Psychologist — APA Journal
Internal Family Systems
Description: Internal Family Systems, or IFS, views the inner world as made up of different parts, each with its own emotions, beliefs, protective strategies, and needs. The goal is not to get rid of parts, but to understand them and build a more compassionate inner relationship.
How This May Help: Anxiety may come from a protective part trying to prevent danger. Depression may involve a shut-down part trying to reduce pain. Grief may include parts that feel angry, numb, guilty, abandoned, or still deeply connected. Caregivers may have parts that feel responsible for everyone and other parts that want to run away.
Sample Intervention: A client with caregiver burnout may identify a “responsible part” that says, “I have to handle everything,” and an exhausted part that says, “I cannot do this anymore.” The therapist helps the client listen to both parts with curiosity, understand their protective roles, and create more internal space for choice and compassion.
Resources:
IFS Institute
Foundation for Self Leadership
Mindfulness Therapy
Description: Mindfulness Therapy helps clients pay attention to the present moment with curiosity and less judgment. It may include breathing, grounding, body awareness, sensory attention, mindful walking, or noticing thoughts and emotions as they arise.
How This May Help: For anxiety, mindfulness can help clients step back from racing thoughts and return to the present. For depression, it can support gentle reconnection with the body and the environment. For grief, it can help clients ride waves of emotion without being completely overtaken. For caregivers, it can provide brief moments of steadiness during stressful days.
Sample Intervention: A client experiencing panic or grief may practice the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise: naming five things they see, four things they feel, three things they hear, two things they smell, and one thing they taste. The therapist then helps the client notice whether their body feels even slightly more present or settled.
Resources:
The Mindfulness Initiative
Center for Mindfulness — Brown University
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
Description: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, or MBCT, combines mindfulness practices with cognitive therapy. It helps clients notice negative thought patterns, rumination, and automatic reactions without immediately believing or following them.
How This May Help: MBCT can be especially useful for depression and anxiety because it helps clients recognize thoughts as thoughts rather than facts. For grieving clients, it can help separate natural sorrow from harsh self-blame. For caregivers, it can help identify repetitive thoughts such as “I should be doing more” or “I am failing.”
Sample Intervention: A client may notice the thought, “Nothing will ever get better.” The therapist helps the client name it as a thought, observe how it affects the body, return attention to the breath, and choose one small values-based action. The goal is not to argue with the thought, but to reduce its control.
Resources:
Oxford Mindfulness
MBCT.com
Motivational Interviewing
Description: Motivational Interviewing helps clients explore ambivalence and strengthen motivation for change. It is collaborative, respectful, and centered on the client’s own values, goals, and reasons for change.
How This May Help: Anxiety, depression, grief, and caregiver burnout often create stuck points. A client may want change but also feel afraid, guilty, exhausted, or unsure. Motivational Interviewing helps clients explore both sides without shame or pressure.
Sample Intervention: A caregiver may say, “I know I need help, but I feel guilty asking.” The therapist may reflect, “Part of you knows this is not sustainable, and another part worries that asking for help means you are failing.” From there, the client explores values, fears, supports, and one realistic step toward change.
Resources:
Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers
Center for Evidence-Based Practices: Motivational Interviewing
Multicultural Theory
Description: Multicultural Theory recognizes that culture, identity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ability, religion, family history, immigration, community, and social context all shape mental health and therapy. It supports care that is respectful, responsive, and aware of power and difference.
How This May Help: Grief, anxiety, depression, and caregiving do not happen in a vacuum. Clients may carry cultural expectations about mourning, family duty, emotional expression, independence, spirituality, or asking for help. Multicultural work helps therapy honor the client’s lived context rather than assuming one universal way to heal.
Sample Intervention: A grieving client may be asked about family rituals, cultural mourning practices, spiritual beliefs, community expectations, or messages they received about showing emotion. The therapist works with the client to understand what feels supportive, what feels burdensome, and what kind of grieving process fits their identity and values.
Resources:
American Counseling Association: Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies
Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development
Music Therapy
Description: Music Therapy uses music to support emotional expression, memory, connection, regulation, and meaning-making. Depending on the provider’s training and scope, music-based work may include listening, lyric reflection, rhythm, songwriting, playlist creation, or exploring personal memories connected to music.
How This May Help: Music can reach emotions that words may not. For grief, songs may hold memory and continuing connection. For anxiety, rhythm and sound can support grounding. For depression, music can help reconnect with emotion, energy, or meaning. For caregivers, music may provide comfort, shared memory, and emotional release.
Sample Intervention: A grieving client may bring in a song connected to the person who died. The therapist helps the client explore memories, lyrics, emotions, body sensations, and unfinished feelings connected to the song. The session may also include creating a playlist for remembrance, comfort, or emotional expression.
Resources:
American Music Therapy Association
Certification Board for Music Therapists
Narrative Therapy
Description: Narrative Therapy helps clients examine the stories they carry about themselves, their relationships, their pain, and their future. It separates the person from the problem and looks for overlooked moments of strength, resistance, meaning, and identity.
How This May Help: Depression often tells a story of failure or hopelessness. Anxiety may tell a story of danger or inadequacy. Grief may tell a story that life is only loss now. Caregivers may carry the story, “I am never doing enough.” Narrative Therapy helps clients challenge thin, painful stories and develop fuller, more compassionate ones.
Sample Intervention: A caregiver who says, “I am failing everyone,” may be supported in externalizing “the failure story.” The therapist helps identify evidence of care, sacrifice, advocacy, love, limits, and survival. The client then begins to build a more accurate story about who they are and what they have been carrying.
Resources:
Dulwich Centre
What Is Narrative Therapy? — Dulwich Centre
NeuroAffective Relational Model
Description: The NeuroAffective Relational Model, or NARM, is a therapy approach that addresses the long-term effects of developmental trauma, attachment wounds, and survival patterns. It focuses on the connection between identity, emotions, body experience, relationships, and present-day behavior.
How This May Help: Anxiety, depression, shame, disconnection, and relationship struggles may be connected to early patterns of survival. For caregivers, old beliefs such as “My needs do not matter” or “I have to earn love by helping” may become intensified. NARM helps clients notice these patterns while reconnecting with agency and aliveness.
Sample Intervention: A client with chronic shame may explore what happens when they say, “My needs matter.” The therapist helps them notice body sensations, emotions, resistance, or disbelief in the present moment. The work focuses less on retelling every detail of the past and more on how old survival patterns are still shaping life now.
Resources:
NARM Training Institute
What Is NARM?
Person-Centered / Rogerian Therapy
Description: Person-Centered Therapy is based on the belief that clients are the primary experts on their own experience. The therapist offers empathy, honesty, warmth, and unconditional positive regard so clients can explore themselves without fear of judgment.
How This May Help: For anxious clients, being deeply heard can reduce the pressure to perform or explain perfectly. For depressed clients, a supportive therapeutic relationship can help restore dignity and self-trust. For grieving clients, it creates room for pain without rushing. For caregivers, it offers a space where their needs matter too.
Sample Intervention: A client overwhelmed by grief may speak freely about sadness, anger, guilt, numbness, relief, or confusion. The therapist listens closely and reflects the emotional truth of what is being shared. Instead of giving immediate advice, the therapist helps the client feel heard, understood, and more connected to their own inner wisdom.
Resources:
Center for Studies of the Person
Person-Centered Therapy — NCBI Bookshelf
Psychodynamic Therapy
Description: Psychodynamic Therapy explores unconscious patterns, early experiences, attachment wounds, defenses, relational themes, and unresolved conflicts that influence present-day emotions and behavior. It helps clients understand why certain patterns keep repeating.
How This May Help: Anxiety and depression may be connected to old relational wounds, unspoken grief, or internalized beliefs. Caregivers may find themselves repeating family roles such as rescuer, peacekeeper, invisible one, or responsible one. Psychodynamic Therapy helps bring these patterns into awareness so clients have more choice.
Sample Intervention: A client who feels guilty asking for help may explore early experiences where needing support was criticized, ignored, or treated as weakness. The therapist helps connect past relationship patterns to current caregiving stress, depression, or anxiety, allowing the client to understand the emotional roots of their present struggle.
Resources:
American Psychoanalytic Association
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy — APsA
Solution Focused Brief Therapy
Description: Solution Focused Brief Therapy, or SFBT, focuses on strengths, preferred outcomes, exceptions to the problem, and small practical steps. Rather than spending most of the session analyzing what is wrong, it helps clients identify what is possible and what is already working.
How This May Help: For anxious or depressed clients, SFBT can create movement when problems feel overwhelming. For caregivers, it can help identify manageable next steps instead of impossible expectations. For grieving clients, it can support small signs of coping, connection, and meaning without minimizing the loss.
Sample Intervention: A caregiver who feels overwhelmed may be asked, “On a scale from 1 to 10, where are you today?” If they answer “3,” the therapist may ask, “What keeps it from being a 2?” This helps identify existing strengths, supports, values, and coping strategies before choosing one small step toward a 4.
Resources:
Solution Focused Brief Therapy Association
Institute for Solution-Focused Therapy
Somatic Therapy
Description: Somatic Therapy focuses on the connection between the mind and body. It may use breath, posture, movement, grounding, body awareness, and nervous system regulation to support healing from stress, anxiety, depression, grief, and trauma.
How This May Help: Anxiety may show up as tightness, shallow breathing, or restlessness. Depression may show up as heaviness, collapse, numbness, or low energy. Grief may come in waves through the chest, throat, stomach, or eyes. Caregiver stress may live in the body as chronic tension or exhaustion. Somatic Therapy helps clients notice and work with these patterns safely.
Sample Intervention: A client experiencing anxiety may be guided to notice their feet on the floor, lengthen their exhale, orient to the room, and track small changes in their body. The therapist may ask, “What tells your body that you are a little safer right now?” This helps the client build awareness of regulation rather than staying trapped in activation.
Resources:
Somatic Experiencing International
Somatic Experiencing Professional Training
Telehealth-Based Therapy
Description: Telehealth-Based Therapy provides counseling through secure digital platforms, allowing clients to receive care from home or another private location. It can be especially helpful for people with busy schedules, transportation barriers, caregiving responsibilities, health concerns, anxiety, or limited access to in-person services.
How This May Help: For anxious clients, telehealth can reduce the stress of getting to an office. For depressed clients, it can make therapy feel more accessible on low-energy days. For caregivers, it allows support without leaving the person they care for for long periods. For grieving clients, it offers continuity of care during emotionally difficult weeks.
Sample Intervention: A caregiver who cannot easily leave home may use telehealth for weekly support. The therapist may help them process anticipatory grief, identify stress patterns, practice grounding skills, and create a realistic plan for respite, support, and emotional care within the limits of their daily life.
Resources:
American Telemedicine Association
APA Guidelines for Telepsychology
Transpersonal Therapy
Description: Transpersonal Therapy integrates psychological healing with spiritual, existential, symbolic, and transcendent dimensions of human experience. It may explore meaning, purpose, dreams, ritual, meditation, nature, awe, intuition, spiritual struggle, or connection beyond the individual self.
How This May Help: Grief often raises spiritual and existential questions. Depression may involve a loss of meaning or disconnection from what feels sacred. Anxiety may grow when clients feel cut off from trust, purpose, or belonging. Caregivers may wrestle with suffering, devotion, resentment, compassion, and spiritual exhaustion. Transpersonal Therapy creates space for these deeper dimensions without imposing any belief system.
Sample Intervention: A grieving client may explore how their relationship with the person who died continues through memory, values, dreams, rituals, nature, prayer, or symbolic connection. The therapist helps the client make meaning from the relationship and the loss while respecting the client’s own worldview.
Resources:
Association for Transpersonal Psychology
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology
Continuing Your Journey Beyond Therapy
At Contemplative Caregiver, our support extends beyond individual therapy sessions. Explore the various ways you can continue your journey of self-discovery and healing:
Contemplative Caregiver 