Carmelita Horne LMFT, LPCC

My trauma work began at Boston Area Rape Crisis in 1999 and continued when I moved to CA in 2001 at Napa Rape Crisis, then River Oak Center for Children, and since 2010 at Positive Change Counseling Services. Unprocessed traumas often establish negative behaviors in relationships in an effort to get needs met. Through trauma processing, an individual is more able to identify and express feelings in healthy ways.

Depression has a crippling effect on relationships, physical abilities, sleep, and cognitive abilities. Through processing, support, skill set application, and collaborative work with medical professionals, an individual can often improve functioning socially, in the work/school world, intellectually, and home life.

Symptoms of anxiety can become paralyzing and generate negative behaviors that sometimes harm relationships. Through awareness, an individual is able to establish positive coping strategies and feel more successful.

Through time, couples often establish negative interactional patterns. You can almost predict how an interaction will go about certain topics. Thorough assessment will detect the communication errors, patterns in need of improvement, and strengths from which to build success.

Good quality of family relationships often support mental health. Family members seek therapy to improve relationships, process traumas, cope with grief/loss, create positive behavioral change, discuss vulnerabilities, and many other concepts.

The CBT triangle with each of the 3 vertices being 1. BEHAVIORS, 2. THOUGHTS, and 3. FEELINGS allow for two interventions on corner that is problematic. For example, with depression, an individual may be FEELING down. That individual has intervention options to BEHAVE through healthy eating/exercise AND apply positive THOUGHTS that defy the distorted thinking that often accompanies depression. There are many skill set training and applications available through CBT.