EMPOWERMENT THERAPY

About Empowerment Therapy

While I do provide online counseling on a regular basis, my specialty is Empowerment Therapy, simply referred to as ET,  a unique form of therapy that I developed and copyrighted and is offered for those people with more severe emotional difficulties whose lives are problem-saturated.  You may wish to visit my FAQs section to learn the difference between psychotherapy, therapy and counseling. 

• Perhaps you’re stuck in a destructive relationship, but you can’t break the destructive pattern.  Online counseling can very much help in interrupting dysfunctional patterns in a manner that offers total privacy without the aggravation of having to schedule appointments and endure long delayed waiting lists. 
• Perhaps you’re in a difficult transition period with a new job that includes a new community, new schools for your kids and new co-workers.  Thus, you may need someone to offer you some professional support and guidance with online counseling to get you on the right track.  Getting on the right track with online counseling means that you don’t have to get on any busy roads and driving through rush hour traffic to get to the counselor’s office. 
• Perhaps you are feeling very tense and anxious, are having difficulty sleeping or may be even abusing food, alcohol and/or other substances.  Online Counseling, counseling that can be conducted from your home or office so a busy schedule will not be interrupted, can be a very wise option. 
• Perhaps compulsive behaviors such as smoking, gambling or sex are ruining your life, online counseling may be a sure-fire solution since embarrassing face-to-face contacts with a therapist is not necessary. 
• Or, possibly you’re just plain down in the dumps in which your life seems ‘in the pits’ and could use an uplift. You may simply need someone using the very convenient techniques of online counseling to listen with total empathy and sensitivity to facilitate this upswing. 
• Perhaps you have become physically disabled or chronically medically ill and learned after hospital discharge that there are no specialized community services to help with the devastating emotional aftermath associated with these traumatic losses. It is very likely that you could use such one-of-a-kind professional trained in ET who is uniquely expertised in dealing with these types of traumatic losses to pull your life together again.
• Perhaps you have been through an extremely stressful event, taking a heavy toll on your former sense of well being, such as a act of violence(e.g. rape, robbery), a traumatic accident(e.g. car wreck, industrial accident), a humanly created catastrophic event (e.g. war, kidnapping, act of terrorism)or a natural disaster)e.g. fire, earthquake, tornado). The aftermath of these traumatic events very well could lead to the need for strong support as well as unique ET that specializes in post traumatic losses to teach you new ways of coping for a more harmonious and productive life. 
• Perhaps you have lost a loved one through divorce, death, separation, abandonment, etc.  These losses usually are emotionally devastating. You, whether a child, teen, adult or senior, could greatly benefit from the unique skills of a professional trained in ET that focuses on losses and grief issues.
• Perhaps you’re a family member or friend of any one of these people and not only want to help, but also learn how to cope better with your loved ones difficulties, online ET very well could be just what you need. 
• And let’s not forget other professionals. Perhaps you are a professional in another specialty of mental health or a professional in another related field, such as rehabilitation, education and medicine, and you have a client/patient who is overwhelmed by the emotional impact of a physical disability, chronic illness, PTSD, etc..  Consultation with a professional anchored in ET could assist in preventing yourself from becoming overwhelmed as well.

If there is one word that describes what Empowerment Therapy helps people with, that word is ‘loss’.  That loss may be a natural loss, such as loss of job and identity when retiring, others are traumatic, such as the loss of ability to see, hear or walk, and Empowerment Therapy focuses on both these types.  More significantly, however,  Empowerment Therapy focuses on  losses that are too overwhelming to bear and getting relief from these gut-wrenching losses so productive lives  can be acquired. 

While Empowerment Therapy deals with the losses that have become too overwhelming to deal with, this model operates through the use of a structured, brief therapy approach rooted in systemic change that is based on solutions rather than problems.  Systemic change is the expansive therapeutic practice in which a small amount of change leads to greater change if the new thoughts and behaviors stay in a positive mode.  Thus, while the pivotal principle of this innovative, structured therapy approach is change,  the pivotal turning point of this dynamic approach is making a commitment to change in a positive direction, no matter how despairing life seems to be.  It is rooted in my own philosophy that I practice professionally and personally, no matter how bad things are, you are, without an iota of doubt, better off operating in a positive mode.  That is why it is very likely that it  indeed is highly possible that you can feel much better and much more freed from the grip of your emotional difficulties after only one session, certainly after a few.  However, this likelihood of relief is dependent on your appropriateness and desire for online Empowerment Therapy as well as your willingness to work with me.    Ultimately, this kind of change in a positive direction leads to a change in the ‘eight elements of empowerment’ that I have written in my book FROM EMPTINESS TO EMPOWERMENT: Changing Physical and Other Losses into Strengths.  These eight elements are: self-awareness, responsibility, solution-focused, goal-setting, collaborative, genuine, empathic and personal growth.

The type of change in ET is very manageable and comfortable because you, as the consumer, will decide the rate and direction of change with my highly qualified guidance and support.  Therefore, although the hallmark of Empowerment Therapy is making a commitment to change somewhere down the road, the change is never coerced or pressured through confrontation, but is based on genuine agreement through an encounter of close collaboration.  This type of therapeutic collaboration and consultation would not be possible without deep trust that is the cornerstone of a supportive, empathic relationship which, in turn, is the cornerstone of successful therapy.   

I developed and copyrighted ET as a result of my thirty years of professional experience, particularly the past fifteen years in which I founded and developed Counseling for Independent Living, Inc., or simply CIL.  CIL was the nation’s first program to provide professional psychotherapy to individuals with physical and cognitive disabilities on a community-based systematic level.  It was twice funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the grant proposal ranking first nationwide, but, more importantly, it was helping people cope with devastating losses in their lives.  The idea for CIL came from dealing with my own sight and hearing losses, which made me very aware that there were very few resources to help people cope with the emotional component of a physical loss.  The psychiatric manual for coding diagnoses for mental health problems cites ‘loss of physical functioning’ as an extreme psychosocial stressor, yet there was no systematic approach to treating this type of emotional problems linked to physical or other losses.  Conducting research on my own, I found that less than 3% of all people being treated in mental health were consumers with a physical disability and that the greatest barrier for the physically disabled to live independently was lack of self-confidence.

But CIL wasn’t enough because there are too many other barriers for the physically disabled to get quality mental health therapy, including architectural, transportation, financial and attitudinal barriers.  These attitudinal barriers were and still are the greatest barriers, both on the part of the consumer (e.g. ‘I am already physically disabled, I don’t want the added stigma of a mental disability’ or ‘I am already seeing a counselor, I have a rehabilitation counselor) and the professional (e.g. ‘I am too uncomfortable with people who are physically disabled; that could be me some day’ or ‘there’s not enough financial benefit in treating these people’).   Thus, it was the strong recognition of these barriers that I developed Empowerment Therapy online.

But to think that I, with the use of ET, serve only the physically disabled and chronically ill would be a grave mistake.  In my thirty years of professional experience, I have provided psychotherapy to about 75% non-disabled and 25% to those dealing with some type of physical loss.  Empowerment Therapy helps people deal with losses, and the common denominator for any emotional problem is the inability to cope successfully with loss.  Any emotional difficulty is rooted in loss OR a threatened loss, whether it be an adjustment problem, relationship problem, problem coping with physical disability or chronic illness, post traumatic stress disorders, problems coping with life’s inevitable transitions (transiting from adolescence to adulthood, or from adulthood to senior citizenry and retirement),  problems with depression and/or  anxiety/phobias, compulsive problems (smoking, overeating, other obsessive behaviors etc.) or substance abuse.  Therefore, loss is universal and inevitable, some more intensive and severe than others, some are natural, others are traumatic, but it is the universality of painful losses that Empowerment Therapy deals with.  Experts in mental health all too knowingly understand the universality and destructive power of painful losses. In fact, every diagnosis of an emotional disorders made by a mental health clinician must include a precipitating loss that actually brought on the emotional disorder.  You may desire to read a more detailed explanation about losses in life in the Introduction of my book FROM EMPTINESS TO EMPOWERMENT: Changing Physical and Other Losses into Strengths by clicking on the link to my website www.brianjhubbard.com, then clicking on the link titled ‘Introduction to Brian’s Book FROM EMPTINESS TO EMPOWERMENT.  It was from my writings as well as my pioneering work with CIL that Empowerment Therapy evolved, developed and became my copyrighted brainchild.