INDIVIDUAL COUNSELING
COUPLES COUNSELING
CHILDREN'S COUNSELING
EMDR
Substance Abuse Therapy
STEPPS
Mental Health Therapy in Urbandale, West Des Moines, CLIVE, FT. MADISON, AND Ft. Dodge, Iowa
cognitive processing therapy (CPT)
INDIVIDUAL COUNSELING
(ADOLESCENTS & ADULTS)
New Hope Healing provides a safe and supportive environment where you will always be respected and heard. You will have an opportunity to explore and share openly, honestly and freely. Although we may sometimes explore areas that pose difficulties, you will always be encouraged to use your personal strengths and resources to grow. We believe that each individual is gifted with strengths and talents that help you traverse the journey of your life. We will help you identify your personal strengths and learn how to put them to use as you grow and thrive through your journey.
How does individual counseling help?
- You can learn to be as generous and kind to yourself as you are to the other people you encounter, thereby learning to be a good friend to yourself.
- You can learn to understand your feelings and that you can choose to act on them rather than react to them. It can help you recognize ways to prevent your mood from dominating your life.
- You can learn how to bring more balance into your life.
- You can learn to identify your ‘buttons’ or the ‘triggers’ which often send you down a path of self-depreciation or criticism.
- You can learn about healthy boundaries in all relationships and how to apply them to specific situations in your life.
- You can learn how your past impacts your current life and relationships.
- Counseling can help you sort through your priorities and learn to live a more fulfilling life of integrity.
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Couples Counseling
Working to bring clarity and a sense of purpose to the feelings that enhance or hinder your lives together is what couples counseling is all about. We can help you explore the feelings that often lie behind the issues that stir repeated or frequent unresolved arguments.
We will help you develop an understanding about how each of you experience the relationship and how that may have an impact on the way you relate to each other. We will also work to define purpose and goals for the relationship, as well as introduce you to tools that can help build communication, trust, and security in your relationship. As trust between you grows, the relationship can be nurtured on intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and physical intimacy levels. You will learn how to grow in your coupleship.
How does couples counseling help?
- It can help you learn to express yourself in a way that will increase the likelihood that what you have to say will be truly heard.
- You can learn to talk about the most important (and often most difficult) issues without getting bogged down in arguments and dead ends.
- You will learn about ways in which to repair those moments in the relationship when you may have said or done things that you wish you could take back.
- It can help you understand one another in a deeper way so that you will feel safer, closer, and more loving in your relationship with each other.
- You can learn to communicate in a more healthy and respectful way.
- You will learn tools in helping with conflict resolution.
- You can learn how to recapture and embrace the loving life that brought you together in the first place.
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Children's Counseling
Child Centered Play Therapy (CCPT)
Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT) is a unique form of play therapy where children take the lead in setting the pace, activities, and direction of play, guided by a trained therapist. This approach allows children to naturally express and process their emotions, thoughts, and experiences, using play as their primary means of communication. Recognizing play as essential for how children make sense of the world, CCPT creates a safe, supportive environment for exploration and growth.
While sessions typically involve just the child and therapist, parents play a vital role in the therapeutic process. They support their child at home, observe progress, and maintain regular communication with the therapist to reinforce the work done in therapy. This collaboration ensures the child’s emotional needs are addressed both in and out of sessions.
In CCPT, the therapist follows the child’s lead, fostering self-awareness and confidence by allowing them to navigate challenges at their own pace. Unlike directive approaches, CCPT emphasizes independence and emotional development. A primary goal is to build a trusting, safe relationship where children feel respected, understood, and accepted as they explore difficult emotions.
The therapist provides empathy, unconditional positive regard, and gentle guidance when necessary, reflecting the child’s feelings and validating their experiences. By working through emotions and scenarios during play—such as role-playing family conflicts or expressing anxiety through art—children develop emotional resilience and healthier coping strategies.
CCPT is particularly effective for children facing emotional or behavioral challenges, trauma, stressful life events, social difficulties, or developmental and attachment issues. Although progress may take time, the benefits are long-lasting, including improved emotional regulation, communication, self-esteem, and problem-solving skills.
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TRADITIONAL Play Therapy
Traditional therapy for children and adolescents combines talking, guided activities, and creative expression to help them process emotions and develop important life skills. Sessions are goal-oriented and tailored to the child’s unique needs, often incorporating structured activities like role-playing, problem-solving exercises, sand-tray processing or art projects to address specific challenges. This blend of approaches helps children and adolescents feel engaged and supported as they work toward emotional growth and resilience.
By creating a safe and understanding environment, traditional therapy encourages children to explore their thoughts and feelings at their own pace while focusing on personal goals. With the guidance of a skilled therapist, children learn to build coping strategies, improve emotional regulation, build communication and problem solving skills and navigate life’s challenges more confidently, setting a foundation for long-term well-being.
cognitive processing therapy (CPT)
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is a compassionate and effective approach to healing after trauma. It helps individuals understand how trauma can impact their thoughts and beliefs, often creating "stuck points" that make it hard to move forward. By gently exploring these thoughts and working to shift unhelpful patterns, CPT empowers people to see their experiences in a new light. This process fosters emotional healing, helping individuals feel more in control and less burdened by guilt, shame, or fear.
What makes CPT unique is its focus on how trauma shapes the way we see ourselves, others, and the world. Through guided conversations and practical tools, clients learn to navigate these changes and reduce distress. It's especially helpful for those dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), offering a safe space to break free from feelings of self-blame or avoidance and rediscover a sense of safety, connection, and strength.
EMDR
EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, is a form of psychotherapy that has been shown to be effective in treating trauma, anxiety, depression, grief and loss, and PTSD. This therapy involves a structured approach where the therapist guides the client through sets of bilateral stimulation, such as side-to-side eye movements, hand tapping, or auditory tones, while the client recalls distressing memories or experiences.
The bilateral stimulation is believed to mimic the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep phase, during which the brain processes information and emotions. By engaging in this bilateral stimulation while focusing on the traumatic memory or distressing experience, EMDR aims to help the brain reprocess these memories in a way that reduces their emotional intensity and allows them to be stored in long-term memory.
Imagine our minds as a library filled with countless books representing our memories and experiences. When we go through difficult or traumatic events, it's as if those books get scattered on the floor, the pages jumbled and chaotic. EMDR therapy steps in as the librarian, guiding us through the process of sorting through those scattered pages. With the therapist's help, we can identify the chapters of our lives that hold the most pain or distress. Then, through the bilateral stimulation and focused attention, it's like carefully organizing those pages back into coherent chapters. As we work through this process, it becomes easier to close those chapters and place the books neatly back on the shelf. The memories are still there, but they no longer dominate our thoughts or emotions in the same overwhelming way. We can revisit them if needed, but they no longer hold the same power over us.
Another analogy is to imagine our minds as well-traveled trails through the woods. Along these trails, there are both clear paths (positive beliefs and resources) and overgrown areas (negative beliefs and obstacles). EMDR therapy helps us navigate these trails more effectively. When we encounter challenging terrain or obstacles on the trail, it's like facing difficult experiences or negative beliefs in our lives. EMDR serves as a guide, helping us identify these obstacles and find alternative paths around them. Moreover, just as well-traveled trails become more defined and easier to navigate with each passing hiker, EMDR strengthens the neural pathways associated with positive beliefs and resources. By revisiting and reinforcing these positive experiences and beliefs while engaging in bilateral stimulation, EMDR helps carve out clearer, more resilient pathways in our minds.
Over time, these well-traveled trails become our go-to routes, guiding us towards greater self-assurance, resilience, and well-being. We learn to navigate life's challenges with confidence, knowing that we have well-established paths to guide us through even the roughest terrain. Picture these trails as winding through diverse landscapes, each offering new perspectives and insights. Just as the scenery changes along a trail, EMDR therapy helps us view our experiences through different lenses of understanding.
Shame and guilt often cloud our perceptions, making it difficult to see ourselves and our experiences clearly. EMDR therapy invites us to explore these feelings in a safe and supportive environment, allowing us to uncover the underlying beliefs and experiences that contribute to them. As we traverse these mental trails, guided by the therapist, we encounter alternative viewpoints and interpretations of our experiences. Through bilateral stimulation and focused reflection, EMDR helps us reframe our understanding of past events, reducing the burden of shame and guilt.
Like a hiker ascending a mountain and gaining a broader view of the landscape below, EMDR therapy enables us to see our experiences from new angles. We recognize that our worth is not defined by past mistakes or perceived shortcomings. Instead, we embrace a more compassionate and forgiving perspective towards ourselves. With each step along these trails of understanding, we shed the weight of shame and guilt, replacing them with self-compassion and acceptance. EMDR therapy empowers us to walk lighter, with a newfound sense of freedom and clarity on our journey towards healing and growth.
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Holistic Substance Abuse Therapy
New Hope Healing offers a holistic focus on substance use and its impact on one’s life. This encompasses identifying and processing through root experiential and emotional causes, processing of traumas, effects on interpersonal relationships, identification and expansion of workable coping skills, processing of difficult emotions related to and as an effect of addiction, and a focus on personal goals and values to assist in moving forward in one’s life. Getting and remaining clean and sober from substance use is only one factor; substance abuse therapy focuses on the client as a whole to build or rebuild a foundation for a healthy life that individual desires.
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STEPPS for Emotional Regulation
STEPPS, or Systems Training for Emotional Predictability and Problem Solving, is a manual-guided teaching program designed for those with emotional regulation issues such as borderline personality disorder (BPD). Participants learn about the behaviors and feelings that define BPD and learn several emotion management and behavioral skills to help cope with the disorder. STEPPS can be offered as a group program, but we at New Hope run this in one-on-one sessions.
People in this program learn how to communicate more effectively with those around them that are their support system, or their reinforcement team, about how their disorder presents and how best to help them. For everyone participating in STEPPS there is at least one educational session for members of their reinforcement team.
STEPPS sessions are scheduled as weekly appointments. Attending a STEPPS session is a lot like a class, and participants will need a binder or folder (not provided) to keep all their STEPPS work in. In session the therapist will review the lesson, read over the materials with you and ensure understanding of the material, and then the participant will receive a homework assignment due the next week. Besides the written homework, STEPPS also includes poetry, artwork, songs, and relaxation activities.
