The Body Psychotherapy Group

MARRIAGE COUNSELING AND INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOTHERPY IN LOS ANGELES

DARLENE BASCH, RILEY K. SMITH, JULIEANNE SEARLES, RHODA PREGERSON

We are an association of psychotherapists who share a model of treatment called Integrative Body Psychotherapy. We work with Individuals, Couples and Families in West Los Angeles.

Areas of Experience & Training

Relationships
Anxiety/ Depression
Panic
Recovery from Childhood Abuse
Adult Children of Alcoholics/Addicts
Post Traumatic Stress
Pregnancy Loss
Adolescents

Parenting
Addictions
Co-dependency
Sexual vitality
Eating Disorders
Holocaust Concerns
Grief
Health Problems
Aging

Our Work

We humans are born with a "Self" - a core Self that is always there. Inside. It’s the "me" that comes into our body when we are born and goes somewhere else when we die.

As we experience life in our family - first with parents, then with significant others - we develop strategies for surviving and thriving. We form beliefs about our selves and what it is to be alive. We develop internal (physical, emotional and mental) and external (behavioral) strategies starting from our first moment.

Although our survival strategies served us in growing up in our family, they also limited, and continue to limit, the expression of our core Self and our experience of aliveness and intimacy. Living our survival strategies can mean living with depression, anxiety, spousal abuse, chemical dependency, inability to sustain intimacy, sexual dysfunction, migraines and other emotional and somatic problems.

That is why people come to therapy.

As psychotherapists, we use our tools and knowledge to help people understand and be aware of their survival strategies and the core Self that is always there, hidden behind the facade of their survival strategies or "ego." We help them to consciously experience life in a new way so that they can modify their survival strategy to be more fully present in life and love.

Although we use several different therapy styles in our work. the central theory and practice that brings us together as a group is based on the body-mind-spirit interface. The work is a powerful joining of the best elements of Object Relations, Gestalt, yogic and Reichian breath work. In effect, the mind work of psychotherapy is done in concert with full aliveness in the body so that the intervention is experienced in the mind, the emotions, the body and, ultimately, in the core Self.

Our clients learn to experience their core Self, fully alive in the body, unencumbered by the survival strategies of childhood.