As a visual learner, I tend to use a lot of analogies in sessions. As the Change Heals logo might suggest, I tend to use the comparison to a tree to explain the healing process. A tree is comprised of roots, a trunk, branches, and leaves. Thinking of ourselves as a tree, the leaves are all the areas of our lives, (family, friends, work, etc). Clients tend to come into therapy when there is a problem with the leaves (or a cluster of leaves). Many common therapeutic approaches identify and focus on treating these leaves. Often they are effective, but what many clients find is that they then are struggling with a different set of leaves, or over time the issue returns in the same leaves. While good and beneficial in their own right, these approaches are only addressing the surface and current issue. They tend to operate from a top down approach. They are missing the issues that lie under the surface because they aren’t designed to dig deeper. 

After 10 years of working as a counselor in numerous settings with various populations, I was determined to find a more effective treatment for myself and my clients. That’s when I discovered the HOCI model (Healing Our Core Issues) and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy. These are designed to operate from a bottom up approach. Since incorporating these methods with my clients, I have seen a drastic improvement in the effectiveness of treatment and life changing healing.

What makes these treatments so different? (Back to my tree analogy) When a client comes in and identifies the distress that they want to address (the leaves), these treatments are designed to help the client track that distress back through the branches, down the trunk, and into the roots. You can’t heal a dying tree by sticking a bucket of water up under a leaf and expect the leaf to absorb and spread that water across the tree (top down approach). That is not how it was created to work, and neither were we. We have to identify the root of the issue, heal and nurture that root, so that the healing can spread throughout the tree. Clients often find that they are able to achieve healing, not only in the leaves that they came in to address, but in other areas as well, because the healing is not focused on one branch, but the healing of the whole tree.