How I Work

To provide a customized solution for your particular relationship problems and concerns, I combine my training in three types of therapy described below. These therapies specifically address your relationship interactions, their impact on your physical well-being, and your long-standing relationship patterns and deep feelings.

• Imago Relationship Therapy focuses on how you relate to your partner. Imago helps you and your partner increase communication, build empathy, and create compassion and safety in your relationship. In addition, it can also help you develop profound insights into your specific relationship history and pattern.


• Self-Regulation Therapy (SRT) is based on the most recent brain research on how we deal with relationship traumas or painful life events—big or small. SRT identifies the biological bases for our reactions in our relationships and works to regulate and deal with them rather than simply stay stuck in a reactive rut. For example, do you or your partner tend to “flee,” “fight,” “freeze” or “give in” when you feel threatened? These are biologically-based reactions that are “hard-wired” in the brain and can be refined and “rewired” with SRT.
  
  Even something seemingly as harmless as a recent dental surgery or your first broken heart in Grade 4 can have significant and long-term impact on your physical well-being! This can affect your ability to connect with others in the present. It can also contribute to longstanding problems with intimacy and closeness in relationships.
  
  SRT addresses how traumas can create imbalances in the nervous system. By correcting these imbalances, relationship change can occur more quickly and things that you thought you had no control over can now be changed. Looking at the biological responses can release you and your partner from a perpetual cycle blaming each other.


• Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Therapy (ISTDP) is an in-depth technique focusing on how you experience your feelings in your body. When you carefully and attentively experience the sensations, impulses, anxieties, and even your resistance to feeling emotions, changes in your relationship patterns occurs.
  
  Experiencing your emotions must be done in a precise fashion—not too much intensity of emotion and not too little—but “just the right amount.” ISTDP is designed to work specifically with an optimum balance of intensity to ensure you derive the maximum benefit from our work.
  
  ISTDP can accelerate “getting to the root” of long-standing problems and behaviours. Lifelong patterns of defending against painful emotions or situations are quickly resolved in a short-term fashion.

Research on successful and long-lasting outcomes of counselling demonstrates that the experiencing of your emotions and how they feel in your body is required to make long-lasting change.

I came to you because I realized how cut off I was from my body: I did a lot of unconscious overeating and had frequent urinary tract infections, and avoided my most painful emotions. Being married for only a few years, I also was having a lot of difficulty in acknowledging how much I needed my husband. I couldn’t tolerate needing him so much and that made me distance from him. I would get a pain in my gut every time I wanted to talk to him and realized that I could not reach him.

Despite years of counselling and analysis, I was surprised to realize how cut off from my feelings and needs I was. I didn’t realize how anxious my sadness and anger made me. I also never realized how extensively I dissociated in response to my anxiety.

In working with you in the past 6 months, I have greatly decreased my episodes of unconscious eating and have lost 15 pounds. In our work together, I have become aware of how much anxiety I have had and now I can pay attention to it. I also recognize the feelings underneath that are creating this anxiety. I now attend to my feelings and take good care of myself.

My ability to be intimate in my relationship with my husband has increased and I can accept my need for him. I see that as a very positive thing to have.

Maggie, 45
Psychiatrist, White Rock, Canada

Video-Recording of Sessions:

I use videotape/DVD to record the sessions (with your permission and written consent) for a number of reasons:

• I take my work with you seriously and want us both to be successful in our work together. Videotaping allows me to review sessions and examine my work with you to ensure “quality control”—that is, that we are making the best use of your time in therapy.
  
  Like a coach who reviews the tape following the game, I look to see how I can better apply my clinical skills to your problems. If our progress plateaus or stalls, I can review sessions to get us back on track or to push us through to the next level of success.


• Clinical research shows—and my clients report—that reviewing their own personal copy of the session helps to maximize their time in counselling. Some of my clients say it helps them care for themselves better between sessions—especially if they are struggling with anxiety about change.
  
  Clients also report that to see me working with them again on tape is comforting. Reviewing the tapes also helps clients get a clearer picture of their own unhelpful or hurtful behaviours, reactions, neglect, and criticism. When they see themselves, clients say it is easier to treat themselves, their partners, and others with more compassion.
  
  Most importantly, I see that when clients review their sessions, it helps them to more fully integrate our work from session to session. Clients who review the session tapes tend to move through therapy more quickly.
• Since my clinical approach deals with deeply-held feelings and your body’s reaction to hurt, the “thinking” part of your brain sometimes takes a back seat to the “experiencing” part. Therefore, reviewing the tape gives an additional opportunity for the “thinking” part to catch up with the body!
  
  Clients also report that they like to be able to go back and watch not only the changes happening with their body language (sighing, eye rolls, foot-tapping, distancing from people), but that they are more capable of understanding themselves, their reactions and their partners’ reactions.

When I reviewed the video after our session, I had some very deep emotion. Initially, when I watched it, I started to pick apart my appearance, my hair, my weight, of course. And then I stopped and became quite mesmerized with it all.

After a while of watching, I realized I had a huge amount of compassion for myself. It was such a great feeling! In fact, as I talk about it right now, I can start to feel that compassion for myself beginning to rise again. It was just amazing! I thought, "Wow! Look at me! I'm having no problem feeling my emotions there. Good for me!"

And there were times where I could see the emotion rising up in me and then I saw how I try to stop it—and that was getting me so choked up. I thought, "Why would I do that to myself [i.e., cut off and stop the emotion]. Why would anyone do that to themselves. It's your emotion! It's your feeling! It's you!"

I had deep compassion for myself and I got that from watching myself. I don't usually see my mannerisms and patterns. It's a whole different perspective to see yourself this way and to see what you do with your emotions. It's a deeper awareness.

I saw not only my emotions rising up, but the anxiety too—I saw myself with such sadness and then with such nervousness about the sadness. It was such a liberating experience because I have put this wall up inside of myself for so long that I even forgot what I looked like, who I am, and how I interact with other people. So, to have that different perspective was so helpful. It's another way to reacquaint myself with who I really am.

So it was totally helpful for me to watch the video of the session. Totally! I would tell you, Diane, to recommend it to everyone you consult with.

M.B.
Consultant, Richmond, Canada

I actually found the experience of reviewing the tape to be positive! I realized how much I had forgotten from the session and it was useful to go back and to have that on tape.

Watching the session made me more alert. It made me pay more attention to myself, rather than resorting to my usual tendency to drift away from intense feelings. It was very interesting to watch my face doing things—some really subtle things—and to recognize what was going on underneath. For example, at one point you said something about experiencing my angry feelings and I watched how, in response, I started to “fade away” in my face. A minute earlier, I'd been forward and engaged. And then when you talked about anger, my face started to turn into this featureless blob and even though my body stayed still, I could see myself start to fade away in my face. I also noticed while viewing that tape that I pulled down into my neck and I saw it as a defense mechanism, a guarded quality—a way of putting a wall up, of pulling back—and that was very evident while watching.

I also didn’t hate myself as much as I thought I would have. I actually thought, “Well, you’re not so awful!” It felt the same empathy as when I look at a picture of myself as a child. That was a nice feeling, a happy feeling. There was a sense of relaxing and letting go of my tendency to avoid images of myself.

I got so much out of the tape!

A.F.
Teacher, Vancouver, Canada

At first I was taken aback with the videotaping because it was new to me and I was aware of it. Now it doesn’t bother me at all and I can’t wait to see it. I think it is a very useful tool in our process.

I have enjoyed our sessions and look forward for more to come.

E.D.
Journalist, Vancouver, BC

• Please note that videotaping is not a condition of counselling with me. You may decline permission to record at any time… although I do highly encourage clients to consider videotaping because of the benefits to our work together. Videotapes/DVD’s are destroyed at the end of our work together.

As you may be able to tell, I work actively with you to reach your goals and help you to become more capable of creating healthy connection and closeness in your relationships. Most importantly, our aim in therapy is to get you to a level of awareness and ability to meet your relationship goals.

Subsequent sessions may vary from 60 minutes to 2 hours depending on what you and Diane decide would best fit your counselling needs and goals, your budget and your schedule. 

You may schedule your appointments one at a time, or you can book several sessions at once to reserve a time that seems to fit your schedule best and to really make the commitment to staying the course and meeting your goals.

We will work actively with you to reach your relationship goals and help you to become more capable of creating healthy connection and closeness in all your relationships. Most importantly, my aim in therapy is to get you to a level of awareness and to enhance and increase your ability to meet your goals for love and happiness.
                      

Call today for a free 10-minute consultation.

Call today or email today to set up a FREE 10-minute telephone consultation with Diane Anderson. We will discuss your issues and concerns and explore how she can help you solve them.

Phone: 778-292-0260
Fax: 778-292-0261
E-mail: info@DianeAndersonCounselling.com.

For general inquiries regarding our practice (fees, hours, appointment times), please contact Lanita, our office administrator, at info@DianeAndersonCounselling.com

Diane Anderson & Associates — Counsellor
Serving: Greater Vancouver, Surrey, South Surrey,
White Rock, Langley, Cloverdale, Fraser Valley, and Tsawwassen, British Columbia as well as Blaine,
Bellingham, and Seattle, Washington.