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Methods and Approaches

Eclectic, I draw from several different counseling approaches so that I can best tailor the therapy for you and our specific situation. I use forthright, caring and effective "here and now"-oriented counseling for individuals and couples of all lifestyles.

My eclectic style uses Existential, Systemic/Holistic, Psycho Dynamic, Insight-Oriented, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Problem-Solving/Solution-Focused approaches or interventions.

Psychopharmacology is often necessary, these days, when treating depression, anxiety, or OCD. Through you, we will work closely with a primary care physician or psychiatrist.

Treatment Modalities

Individual, Marital/couples. Areas of expertise include the treatment of adolescents and their families, women, individuals of all ages, couples and families. I am especially skilled in helping individuals and couples with relationships. I have experience providing both short-term and long-term psychotherapy depending on the needs and desires you bring.

Disorders Treated: Areas of Experience

Adjustment disorders, Anxiety disorders, including panic attacks, Depression, Dysthymia, Men's Issues, Relationship issues/communication, anger/depression, career issues. I work with chronic or life-limiting illness, care-giving, loss, grief and bereavement, clergy or religious in transition, mid-life transitions and gay/lesbian issues. Occupational and organizational change consultation available. Often we agree to coaching for everyday life, joy-seeking consultations, and basic common-sense reality checks available; focus on relationships at work or elsewhere is a sub-specialty. Though I work with men and women of all ages and presenting problems, I use special skills if you struggle with issues of low self-worth, distress due to gender role conflict and relationship disharmony. I do serve adults facing major life transitions. Depression, anxiety, conflicted relationships, poor communication, obsession, addiction, career stress, loss and transition, alternative lifestyle issues, intimacy, self-esteem, and personal growth. Dissociative Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder)

We may uncover Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in adults physically and sexually abused as children, and previously battered women. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is often under-diagnosed or mis-diagnosed as an anxiety disorder.

Anger management. Grief and loss - may have an impact for years and may stem from co dependency or Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) or Dysfunctional Families. I see persons suffering from Fibromyalgia, a chronic and painful medical condition requiring emotional support and treatment of depression that often accompanies it.

Other Considerations

We learn to respect our defenses because we trust that we will deal with painful material when we are ready to do so.

Shame, a sense of being defective in some way accompanied by a fear of exposure resulting in painful humiliation, is often a core issue in the treatment of hard habits.

Often, the price we have to pay for recovery from addictions, or any set of stopgap tactics, is to confront those areas that are most difficult for us, such as honesty, intimacy, patience, tolerance, or letting go of control. This process is even more difficult for most of us who are learning how to accept and appreciate ourselves.

We as humans intertwine our spirituality, mind, body and emotion as inseparable, so problems in one area affect the other three.

Growing up, we inevitably learn to ignore various parts of ourselves. Too many of us move through life with a vague ache that something is not right, though we cannot identify what the problem is exactly. We have lost essential aspects of ourselves, and with awareness, can reintegrate the missing pieces into our being.

Bill Harding further solidified his expertise in long-term, insight-oriented treatment working in a residential setting with elderly and psychotic dealing with severe neglect and abuse.

Bill Harding believes that personal trouble can develop early in our lives and interfere with our sense of personal well-being, ability to connect with others and fulfillment in life.

My Psychotherapy Approach

My psychotherapy orientation is psychodynamic. This means that I emphasize a developmental perspective while promoting the main objective of emotional integration. Alternative terms for this therapy include "self psychology", "ego analytic" and "object relations" therapy.

The time-frame can be either short-term or long- term; the therapy can be either individual or group. When needed, I will integrate cognitive and behavior therapy techniques, interpersonal psychology, use a family systems approach, or apply information from developmental or social-learning theory.

Whenever I determine that you may benefit from medication, I will encourage you to see your physician or a psychiatrist. I will work closely with any physician treating you.

Results and Side Effects

Like other psychotherapy recipients, you may obtain increased emotional health, reduced symptoms, reduced impairment caused by prior/old psychologically damaging experiences, new approaches in intimate relationships, peace of mind, and a new level of psychological maturity and creativity. You may have decreased visits for medical treatment because psychotherapy enhances the immune system. You may find your capacity for intimacy increased and work more rewarding.

There are known side effects from psychotherapy. You may go through time periods when your feelings are very intensified and you worry that you are not in control. You may go through times when it is very difficult to feel close to important people in your life, including parents, siblings, and spouses and partners. You may feel as if you have outgrown some relationships. You may become overly sensitized to others or you may find that your changes are confusing to others.

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Bill Harding Likes This Style

(Bill Harding uses these quotes by Dieter M Burckhardt, Ph.D. to separate doubt from certainty and then goes on to adapt a longer Dieter article.)

My preferred treatment modality is a one-on-one psycho-dynamic approach that combines elements of many different schools from Rogerian to Family Systems, Jungian to CBT. The main focus of my therapy is always the individual in need of therapy and intervention and not the confines of a slavish treatment concept.

Experimental empiristic psychology should have an important place in the overall order of things, and scientific psychology has produced wonderful insights, valuable data, and instruments that help tremendously in our every day therapeutic experience. Still, our craze for research (part of our own anxiety management?) has sometimes left the practitioner with a vast amount of uncharted data, of scattered results of tests and trials, and it was only recently that we are trying to focus on the patterning of the elements.

The excruciating task I as a practitioner have remains: to take the bits and pieces of the puzzle and try to reconstruct the elements into a complex whole - and sometimes I get simply overwhelmed. A fair amount of my [work] in everyday encounters is of the first kind - the therapeutic relationship - has been the lack of help and support in this arduous task.

What I see in my office is the synthesis of all the atomistic details. No surprise, this synthesis looks complete and utterly different from what I would expect from scientific data alone. My task thus remains to put the pieces together and target our treatment efforts toward the whole.

The dialectic approach demands inquiring and hermeneutic methods in its quest for the truth. The humanities have arrived at their theories and models using this way for millennia and we have now the opportunity of applying their integrative and synthetic properties to develop comprehensive models and theories of mental illness and mental health as an interrelated body of internal and external elements that makes up the human mind.

However, we will need to continue the scientific way to be able to distinguish and scrutinize the parts of the whole and understand their intrinsic function and their uniqueness in the overall picture.

I admit to the limitations of the empiristic methodology: I have to go the dialectic way when I am trying to understand, because the human condition is not reproducible in a test environment in a laboratory.

A new emphasis on understanding the whole as an intricate web of elements interacting dialectically may actually enrich psychology and allow for courageous new concepts and interpretations and may bring back those precious components of the human mind that many of us feel lacking in behaviorist and "single track" empiristic science: creativity, intuition and maybe genius.

I have to look at the system, find the dialectically interrelated "faulty" parts and try to reintegrate and readjust them as components of a wonderfully organized whole. Thus I accept the idea that the parts (traditional psychological science) are nothing without the system and that the "Gestalt" (holistic approach) is nothing without its components.

As other sciences like, e.g., physics had to acknowledge sometime ago that they are limited to answering the question "How?" and that empiristic methodology cannot even attempt to answer the question "Why?" as so many renowned scientists have come to admit (i.e., Heisenberg, Einstein, von Weizäcker). They also turned to heuristic models and theories of interpretation. Psychology as a science and a humanity will make that change or else be stuck in a meaningless mountain of data.

Psychology remains an Art even if it uses scientific methods. This is essentially the philosophical background we bring to counseling. We are trying to be mediaries between the parts and the whole and consider an idea of balance crucial for a person's mental and emotional well-being. Integration of diverging components plus finding a healthy balance between defense mechanisms that protect and defenses that are counterproductive.

Dieter M. Burckhardt, Ph.D.
Online Psychological Services

More quotes from Dieter M. Burckhardt, Ph.D.
in The Scientific Approach - A Dead End?:

"The excruciating task of the practitioners, the women and men at the frontline, remains to take the bits and pieces of the puzzle and try to reconstruct the elements into a complex whole."

"As therapists we have to look at the system, find the dialectically interrelated 'faulty' parts and try to reintegrate and readjust them as components of a wonderfully organized whole."

"Our task thus remains to put the pieces together and target our treatment efforts towards the whole."

Towards YOU, the person asking for help, to take the next few steps in a marvelous, fascinating episode of life. For know that we "travel the world, and carry vast unexplored territories within." (Thinker's Daily Ponderable)

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Healing Stories

As the light shines into darkness so does “Open care” bring warmth and peace to the blackest of the blackest places. And we have seen some black places.

When in a black (no light) room and we open a door to another room that is lighted, the light shines into the dark room, the dark room does not blacken the light room. So it is in us. "Open care" does bring peace to the dark places that we hide in ourselves. Guilt, shame and blame do fall into the category of dark places. Do we have any dark places that need light?

The key to letting light in our rooms is forgiveness of self. To rid ourselves of the guilt, the shame and the blame that we have allowed to be our truth. We have tortured ourselves long enough. It is time to admit that we make mistakes and now is the time to let them go.

Within our healing stories we bushwhack paths of forgiveness. We tell when forgiveness:

• Requires blind faith.
• Demands an act of bravery.
• Boils down to forgiveness of self.
• Impels a search.

We find a small beam of light in a bleak and dense jungle of rage and grief.

We have come to believe that forgiveness is an active response to the cruelties in the world, not a passive acceptance of them. We gain a muscularity that protects the innocent from violence, and stand against acts of callous indifference toward the weak by the powerful. It is no pastel forgiveness that we find; no benign sense of giving over responsibility to an inscrutable God. It is an engaged, dynamic forgiveness that stands up for our hopes and the dreams of those who see a kinder world for all of us.

We hope those of us who struggle with the question of how to honor the kindness in this world while standing against its cruelties will join together on that journey. It is a path all of us want to walk every day, no matter how difficult its steps may be. It will shape the world we pass on to each other, and become the legacy we leave for those who follow.

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Too Busy with the Husks and Flotsam of Life

Psychologists use clever new methods to plumb our unconscious mind. Their high-vigor, step-by-step study let us see the basic but often invisible building blocks of our opinions, bias, and neurosis. Yet, they also reveal an unconscious far more bright, in some ways, than our conscious mind.

This current scientific look into our mind's shadow regions allows experts to move beyond decades of dogged worry with the search for solid empirical proof that our unconscious mind does in truth exist. These experts take its being for granted. They ask a better question. Just how astute are these unconscious mental gifts?

Ultra Bright Power

These studies draw a distinction among our various kinds of mental skills beyond the limits of our awareness. What occurs in our "cognitive" unconscious are the non-emotive, mechanical parts of percepts and activity. These skills, for example, allow us to speak a sentence while we keep the rules of syntax we cannot explain! Or, we deftly move our hand with no knowledge of how we do so. Our unconscious, long thought by most experts in this area, to be simpleminded, could have ultra bright power.

In a major study, various people sat at a computer screen to push one of four buttons. They went with each corner on the screen in which an "X" appeared. Did the "X" move at random?

In fact, the X did follow a complex pattern set by 10 simultaneous rules; for example, the X would slide twice side ways, then it would move up or down.

Though the experts made the rules very complex, the people unconsciously learned them. The study proved this. Their choices became quicker and quicker. Then, the game got much worse after the experts shut down the rules and the X started to truly move at random.

We Did It!!

The rules were very complex. Even if they told them to us, we would need a flow chart to predict the next move with any accuracy. The experts offered $100 to anyone who could figure out the system. No one, not even a group of psychology professors, was ever able to guess them. Yet, our unconscious did. We did master the rules.

Such studies suggest ultra bright intuitive skills. We also find, in the "psycho dynamic" or "affective" unconscious, our pattern of habits bend and shift the way we see our world and thus the way we react.

In these studies, the people learned the "rules." They had a pattern taught to them. Still, they were unable to tell the experts what rules they did follow. They had no idea they had learned any system at all.

The Wrong Rules

In the same way, we learn layers of values and guide lines to form our angelic and our self-ruinous emotional web. We learn a certain pattern. We strive to grasp what rules we follow. We seek therapy in this effort. These habits are the subject of intense research to bring clear focus detail to a map of neurosis. The quality of our most basic relations with our earliest care takers does form an imprint. It becomes the seed of our emotional pattern or web.

As we go through these early designs over and over, our schema grows stronger. We develop our unique style to form the basis for our main conflicts in later life.

We Learn New Rules

In the same way, we learn layers of values and guide lines to form our self growing emotional web. We shift and grow all the time. We find that 90% of people, in general, made at least one big shift in their life. Further, these shifts were in the recent past. These growth spurts ran the range of human possibility. Some had made shifts in their personality, others in behavior. These took in altered diet or alcohol habits or not smoking. Some had changed careers. Others had taken up new hobbies. Some had made major emotional shifts in close bonds or in attitudes about them. Over all, most of us tell of a broad array of personal changes both large and small.

We come into this world slated by genetics to act and think in certain ways. At the same time, our biology helps us grow? Sure, we get too scared to cope. We hope that we happen into a happy and love-filled place that nudges us toward even more faith in our self. As we try to change our selves or others we must realise what we can change and what we cannot. We begin with an open heart.