1. Express interest in our therapeutic services via phone, email, or form submission at bottom of page. 

2. Two emails from Icannotes.com will be sent to the email address provided.

3. Register for a client portal account and complete profile. 

4. Complete intake paperwork via client portal account.

5. Schedule appointment via phone (215-880-6262 or 302-867-8448), mobile app, submission form, or email: info@mscats.org

6. Counseling is provided in-office:  1500 Walnut St Ste: 804 Phila, Pa 19102 or 700 W. Lea Blvd. Ste: 105 Wilmington, DE 19802, online: Google Meet or Zoom phone: Doxy.me, school/community center: TBD. 

7. After the first initial therapy session, you and one of our medical professionals will determine the modalities of treatment that would be best fit. ​The modalities utilized varies overtime and is subject to change situationally. The most commonly used treatment modalities at Multi-State Counseling and Therapy Services, LLC (MS. CATS) are as follows:

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• Adlerian Therapy:  Adlerian psychotherapy is the process of encouragement, grounded in the feeling of universal co-humanity. 4 Step approach: engagement, assessment, insight, reorientation. (C) Humanistic and goal oriented. (TR) Therapist strives to understand two important things in a client—ways of thinking and context. Adlerian therapy is integrative in that a therapist may call on any number of approaches within the general Adlerian approach.

• Bowen Family Therapy: Increase differentiation of self, Decrease emotional reactivity, increased intimacy 1-1 w/important others. (C) Intimacy, autonomy, cutoff, triangulation. (TR) Coach-objective, educator, expert not collaborator. Genogram, process questions, therapist calm self/part of triangle with clients.

• Client Centered:  therapist establishing a warm, safe environment for the client, and providing genuine empathy. The therapist does not give advice.

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:  Modify patterns of thinking and/or behavior to alleviate the presenting symptom. (C) Schemas, Cognitions, Reinforcement, Distorted thoughts.  (TR) Ask questions rather than challenge assumptions, teach the family emotional problems are caused by unrealistic beliefs. Behavioral assignments, communication skill building, training in the model.

• Cognitive Processing Therapy: Combines cognitive therapy and exposure therapy. The cognitive component works to teach patients to identify and modify distorted thoughts. The exposure component consists of writing a trauma narrative and reading it repeatedly.

• Contextual Family Therapy:  Balanced ledger. (C)Entitlements, invisible/split loyalties.  (TR): Directive, Expert in Assessment, process and relational questions, multi-directional impartiality.

• Crisis Intervention: Crisis intervention therapy aims to intervene as quickly as possible after the traumatic event occurred. Goals/TR: help the client clarify the event, minimize the use of destructive coping skills, and create productive coping techniques.

• Dialectical Behavior Therapy: DBT is based on the idea that some clients react abnormally to emotional stimulation and have a hard time returning from peak arousal to baseline. (G) Teach methods to evaluate emotions and thus reduce life-threatening behaviors (Used with suicidal individuals).

• Exposure Therapy: Developed to help patients address their feared objects or situations through confrontation. Clients are instructed to use imagery, memory, and real life objects to construct a vivid, anxiety producing image of a traumatic event, and are encouraged to remain in the anxious state until their fear of the event declines.

• Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing: the therapist ask the patient to generate anxiety producing images/thoughts while he/she elicits rapid saccadic eye movements by having the patient track the therapist’s finger as it is waved back and forth. The belief is that eye movements override neural blockage of a traumatic event.

• Emotionally Focused Therapy: Identify & break negative interactional patterns, increase emotional engagement between couples. (C) Primary & secondary emotions, withdrawer reengagement, blamer softening. (TR) Client centered, choreographer of relationship dance, reflection, validation, evocative questions, self-disclosure.

• Experimental Family Therapy: Promote change, make covert overt, increase emotional closeness. (C) Placating, blaming, honest emotion. (TR) Use own personality, teach family effective communication skills, be open/empathetic/take risk/spontaneous. Sculpting, role playing, reconstructions.

• Gottman Couple Therapy: Empower couple, problem solving skills, creating shared meaning. (C) Four horsemen-negative reaction, love maps. (TR) Coach, provide tools that the couple can use with one another/make own. Label destructive patterns, enhance martial friendship.

• Milan Family Therapy: Disrupt family games. (C) Family patterns that maintain the problem, rituals. (TR) Therapist as expert, don’t get sucked into family game, neutral to each family member. Rituals, circular questions, prescribe the system.

• Narrative Therapy: Change the way clients view themselves, Give options to different stories that don’t include problems. (C) Dominant narrative, beliefs, values/deconstruction/landscape of action +consequences. (TR) Genuine curious listener, question assumptions. Ask questions, opening space.

• Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalytic therapy aims to uncover unconscious thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

• Psychodynamic:  Free family members of unconscious constraints so that they can interact as healthy individuals, Separation- Individuation Differentiation. (C) Internal objects, attachment, mirroring, countertransference, transference. (TR) Listener, Expert position, Interpret. Psychodynamic theory also focuses on uncovering repressed thoughts and emotions while focusing on the dynamics of the client’s family.

• Psychoeducation: This therapy involves the therapist teaching the survivor about the impact of trauma, common disorders associated with trauma, and ways to cope with symptoms.

• Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Help clients to think/do differently, shift clients language from problem talk to solution talk, modest goals. (C) Well informed goals, Change talk patterns, Clients are the experts in their lives. (TR) Cheerleader/coach, offer hope, client centered, miracle question, scaling questions.  Help set clear achievable goals.

• Strategic Therapy: Help the family define clear, reachable goals. Break pattern/perturb system. (C) Symptoms are messages, family rules, reframing, double binds. (TR) Expert position, directive, create conditions for change i.e., assignments, homework, go slow messages, prescribe symptoms.

• Strategic Therapy: Help family define goals, realign hierarchy, break patterns. (C) Family rules unspoken, intergenerational collusions, content/process.  (TR) Expert position, work with resistance to change, directive, create conditions for change, interrupt unhelpful sequences of interaction.

• Structural Family Therapy: Structural change, individuation of family members, infer the boundaries from the patterns of interaction among family members. (C) Boundaries, hierarchy, subsystems, cross generational coalitions. (TR) Perturb the system because its chaotic/closed or enmeshed, directive/expert, structural mapping, challenge unproductive assumptions.

• Creative Therapies: Involves using art, dance, and drama, to promote self-awareness, express trauma, aid communication, and facilitate change in survivors who have difficulty verbalizing their emotions.

• Critical Incident Stress Debriefing: 7-phase group therapy designed to take place soon after a trauma occurs. Clients go through the facts of their trauma, address their reactions and symptoms, and learn about stress reduction.

• Guided Imagery: Guided imagery is a self-directed relaxation tool that helps the survivor of a traumatic event regain control by reducing their anxiety and anger.

• Skills Training in Affective & Interpersonal Regulation (STAIR): Two-phase approach that works to help clients effectively regulate their emotions, and improve their interpersonal relationships.

• Traumatic Incident Reduction: TIR works to alleviate the effects of trauma by having the client repeatedly “view” the traumatic event as if they were watching a videotape. The goal is to replay the incident enough times so that the client no longer has negative emotions associated with it.

•  Trauma Recovery and Empowerment Model (TREM): Manualized group intervention program designed for trauma survivors with severe mental disorders. 33 topics focuses on teaching coping skills, establishing boundaries, and building relationships.