Jayni Bloch invites you to join her practice in your healing journey. Jayni is registered as a Psychologist with the College of Psychologists of Ontario
As of June 2021, I will only be doing ‘Creativity Circles’ once a month. This will be online group sessions, open to people who want to invest in their self-development and healing. Participants will be inspired by a theme that will be discussed which is meant to be investigated and worked on throughout the three weeks prior to the next Creativity Circle meeting. A week before the next Creativity Circle meeting, participants will e-mail me their thoughts, art, poetry, or any creative activity that emerged because of the creativity circle prompt, so that I can give feedback and guidance for follow-up actions. Payment will occur on the day of the meeting by e-transfer – no exceptions. Participants can commit to each session as it occurs but will have to inform me a week before a meeting happens, for me to send a Zoom link to them. Only participants who have played the fee will be admitted into the Zoom meeting. Only participants of my Creativity Circles will have access to individual sessions if they so require.
ART - Using Art to access deep transformational processes.
DREAMS - Using dreams to access your unconsious guidance, in the process of healing.
In psychotherapy there are six or more levels of human function that we need to consider. These functions influence everyone personally and interpersonally.
Emotion –Find Understanding, and love towards self and others; Connect to your feelings, fears, and needs, and know where they originate. Know how your defense mechanisms affect your behavior. Learn how to use song-trance-mindfulness-meditation-prayer and ancestral healing in daily living.
Intellect –Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - CBT. How to use your mind and thoughts constructively to tune your emotions. What are the stories you tell yourself? What are the concepts and principles you live by? Unlock the Archetypes that determine your behavior patterns.
Action – How to make constructive behavior choices. How to live creatively using Poetry and Creativity-Imagination.
Body –Honoring your Material world; Physical maintenance though exercise, healthy diet, movement, and sleep. Dance-Manifestation and Somatic Restoration (Yoga and exercise)
Divine Life-Force – Moving between worlds; Divination and Reflection on Images, Dreams and Synchronicities.
The power of the unconscious - should never be underestimated; this is why I work with Dreams and Symbol as well as Archetypes.
Working Individually - Only individuals who attend my creativity circles, will be eligible for individual sessions from June 2021.
Working in Creativity Circles Please visit the Workshop page Here
Working with Couples and Families will no longer be availible
Couples therapy consists of three stages: the evaluation stage, the feedback stage and finally the therapeutic intervention stage which gives the couple an opportunity to work on transforming their relationship.
During the evaluation stage, the couple’s first visit with to the therapist is together where they describe a brief history of their relationship and their concerns. The therapist has individual sessions with each partner to gather detail information about their individual family of origin and psychological histories.
The couple returns together for the feedback sessions where the therapist explores the main themes of difficulties and strengths in their relationship, conceptualizations that clarify the reason why difficulties occur and how psychotherapy can assist them. The couple is encouraged to participate actively in this session with their reactions, information and further concerns.
The couple evaluate if they are ready to actively engage in the couples therapy sessions and commit if they are.
When couples therapy sessions begin, the focus is usually on important positive and negative recent incidents that happened between them. The therapist uses these incidents the couple presents in the session to illustrate the important themes of their relationship that keeps them in conflict cycles and provides guidance and strategies to alleviate these cycles through practicing their new approach.
Themes can vary and are usually about the difficulty to achieve emotional and physical intimacy, decision–making conflicts, childrearing differences, family of origin conflicts, and other personality issues that causes emotional unhappiness. Patterns of abandonment, anger, distrust and dependence are identified, clarified and treated.
Typically a couple who are dedicated to improving their relationship through psychotherapy would have weekly sessions that gradually get spaced out more widely over twenty to twenty two sessions after the evaluation and feedback stage (6 –12 months.)
This therapy modality is for couples in marital distress, with bonding and attachment issues, who suffer conflict and relationship trauma.
The Emotionally Focused Therapy approuch with couples and families is a short- term structured therapy designed by Dr. Sue Johnson and Dr. Les Greenberg. The effectiveness of this therapy is demonstrated in research and prove to be effective over time.
To all Couples
Dear Clients,
This is an open letter to you about how Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy is done.
All couples experience stress from time to time in relating to each other.
Relationships trigger our deepest underlying fears and needs in terms of how we attach to important others.
Attachment is a universal and primary need in us all, but usually evoke fears, unspoken needs and unconscious defensive behaviors or reactions to others. These defensive behaviors and reactions are triggered unconsciously and automatically, because we respond unconsciously and automatically to our internal attachment patterns.
For instance we might tend to pull away from our loved one in order to protect ourselves form feeling rejected for what feels to us as a vulnerable need, despite our longing to be close to our partner. Or we might tend to become demanding and verbally judgmental or harsh towards our partner when we have an unconscious fear of being alone. The person reacting in these ways is not consciously aware of these underlying feelings, needs and fears that drive their defensive behavior.
One of the goals of therapy is to help the couple become aware of what underlying emotions that drive the defensive responses and in turn create the defensive emotional patterns.
These defensive emotional patterns are usually identified as the triggers of a predictable cycle or conflict-dance that “trap” the couple repeatedly when they feel vulnerable without knowing it. All they are aware of is their experience of lack of connection and the hurt or frustration because of this loss of connection. The automatic emotional responses of the conflict–dance, is what interferes with being able to connect and attach to each other.
The second important goal of the therapy is for the therapist to help the couple identify and understand this conflict-dance.
The therapist help each partner access unacknowledged feelings that underlies each partner's position in the problematic cycle.
The third goal of the therapy is to take the couple through to completion of the transformation process of their relationship, creating new ways of connecting. This is such an important process that the therapist needs to go slowly and precisely through the stages of therapy to help the couple move through the transformation process. The slower the tempo of therapy, the faster the emotional process of transformation. Moving faster does not help, but hinders the process. Like hiking up a mountain, one need to take each step with focus, keeping the summit in mind. But without taking the steps in careful progression one cannot reach the top.
A couple needs to dedicate at least 10 sessions on average to this kind of therapy to be able to move through the steps of the process. The therapist is taking the couple through a well researched and studied process (Susan M. Johnson Ph.D. et. all.) and assess the progress devotedly at every step to help the couple to move forward to the next step as soon as a milestone has been reached.
In order to do this efficiently, the therapist finds it helpful to analyze the videotape of the couple’s session after each session to confirm that she is on track with the process and did not miss any important issue during the session. This helps the therapist to monitor herself and give you the best service possible and be most efficient, during the time you as a couple allocated to guidance and transformation of your relationship into a healthier connection.
Best Regards,
Jayni Bloch© 7 March 2005
Reference to: Susan M. Johnson Ph.D. et. all. "Becoming an Emotionally Focused Couple Therapist, The Workbook." Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2005
See Lets Talk page of this website for more on Relationships.
See Booking a Session page of this website for information on how to go about getting help.
[ Back to top ]
Stress Management (no longer availible)
Stress is experienced in our minds as anxiety and in our bodies as psychosomatic symptoms as we adjust to our continually changing environment.
The physical and emotional effects stress have on us can coincide with positive or negative feelings. On the one hand, stress compels us to act, stimulates new awareness and excites new perspectives. On the other hand, stress creates feelings of distrust, rejection, anger and depression. Physical problems such as headaches, stomachaches, rashes, insomnia, ulcers, and blood pressure imbalances can occur under stress. Changes in our lives creates stress to activate an adjustment action. In adjusting to different circumstances, stress will help or hinder us, depending on how intense the emotional experience is we encounter. The amount of changes we deal with at any time and the availability of a support systems is a factor in coping with stress.
- Notice what causes your stress.
- Notice your body's reaction.
- Notice your emotional reactions.
- Recognize what makes the stress better and what makes it worse.
- Become conscious of what you can and cannot change about the stresses and circumstances.
- Learn practical, rational and spiritual ways to reduce the intensity of your emotional reactions to stress.
- Become conscious of internal beliefs or conditioned responses that complicate your reactions to stressors and learn how to change these beliefs with "self-talk'.
- Learn how to accept a support system and be part of one.
- Learn methods to building up your physical reserves.
- Learn methods to maintaining your emotional reserves.
The latest integrative approach in stress management is to use cognitive schema principles with emotional freedom technique, thought field therapy and hypnosis.
Psychotherapy can support you in understanding and processing the issues that stress brings forward for you to confront in your life. Stressful circumstances could give you an opportunity to grow.
Jayni Bloch © 7 March 2004
See Booking a Session page of this website for information on how to go about getting help.
[ Back to top ]
Coping with Change
Everyone experiences ongoing changes in our modern age, which promotes stress on emotional, physical, intellectual and spiritual levels.
Change can trigger stress experiences that manifest physically in our bodies in the form of tension, cramps and many other physical symptoms. Because our mind body and soul are interdependent the stress that effects one part of you will effect the other parts of you too. Address the healing on all these levels. Make sure that you have a competent physician to take care of your body's symptoms in times of stress.
Change triggers stress experiences that manifest emotionally. Feelings of depression, mania, irritability, anger and low self-worth can occur.
Change can trigger stress experiences that manifest as disturbing or obsessive thoughts, and negative or idealistic perceptions.
Change can trigger stress that effects our communication with people so that we experience misunderstandings and confusion in our relationships.
Change and stress may result in us losing our trust in life. Spiritually we may experience feelings of pessimism and doom, or just a feelings of fear or hopelessness or even dissociation.
Change affects families, friendships, work environments and communities as well as the complex internal life of the individual.
Although change seems to cause such unhappy results, it is actually a normal process of evolvement. Life is all about change. If there's no change there's no progress. Everyone can benefit from understanding the processes of change and learning how to adjust to it. Information, guidance and healing procedures can help you use your changes as positive and transformative experiences that enhances your life.
Change can happen at any age and at any time. People do tend to experience internal and external change around their early teens, twenties, around the age of thirty, and then again around the ages of forty, fifty and sixty. It seems like each decade has its own set of life challenges. These challenges, even though difficult at times, are associated with normal growth stages in human development.
Change happens in many forms. Whenever we experience a new aspect of life, there is change.- When our age change.
- When we add or lose skills.
- When our health improves or fails.
- When our financial position changes.
- When our knowledge increase or decrease.
- When our physical or emotional environment change.
- When our status or circumstances change.
- When we lose or gain people in our life.
Psychotherapy supports you with expert information and emotional guidance in ways to approaching change in your life and helps you with the transformation process.
Some of the characteristics of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual development cause stress provoked by change that can be confused with symptoms of mental illness. With the knowledge of developmental and abnormal psychology, as well as transpersonal psychology, symptoms can be recognized and discriminated appropriately to come to the correct diagnosis. Therapy is advised, planned and implemented or the appropriate referrals are made to serve you, the client.
Jayni Bloch © 7 March 2004
See Booking a Session page of this website for information on how to go about getting help.
[ Back to top ]
Schema Therapy
People need people. Sometimes it is the quality of our relationships that determine how happy and successful we feel.
Our relationships to partners, children, family and friends are a reflection of our relationship with our own deepest selves.
A partner plays an important role in our life. Sometimes people call this person a soul mate, a word that describes the need for intimacy and closeness. Closeness and acceptance is one of the most important needs but sometimes the most difficult to achieve.
External circumstances and events are usually blamed for conflicts in relationships. Mostly, external events and sources of conflict are symbols of deeper dynamics.
The best way to learn about ourselves is through our relationships with others. And the best way to understand others is to know ourselves. Our partners are usually those mirrors that reflects our deepest fears, needs and issues that we need to confront. We attract to us the people who reflects some parts of ourselves. Some parts we like and accept and others we do not want to know about. When we courageously confront our shadow parts with acceptance, we experience self love. Psychotherapy is designed to assist in this process.
Our relationships might indicate to us the need to be more assertive or more loving and forgiving. It might indicate a need to overcome family and cultural prejudice and behavior patterns. It might indicate a need to communicate with healthier skills. Whatever the indication, we always benefit from observing our communication patterns objectively with the help of psychotherapy.
It is through relationships that we learn most about our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual selves.
Jayni Bloch © 15 May 2006
Schema Therapy for Difficult Relationships is the latest integrated approach for couples therapy, developed by Jeffery Young, Ph.D. Cognitive Therapy Center of New York. the principles of this approach is used in this practice. Read more about this approach on the website www.schematherapy.com
See Booking a Session Page of this website for information on how to go about getting help.
[ Back to top ]
Communication Issues
Communication issues are usually closely related to relationship issues. Few of us have been taught how to communicate effectively. Our interaction with others is mostly based on what we observe from our sometimes fallible role models, resulting in conflicts and misunderstandings in our closest relationships. Our communication and interaction patterns affect all our relationships.
- Marital or partner relationships
- Parent child relationships
- Parent adolescent relationships
- Friendship relationships
- Professional relationships
- Cross cultural relationships
There are certain practical communication principles that can help improve our relationships with others. Crises in social relationships can be dramatically improved with the right professional guidance and feedback.
It is not easy to see our own communication errors, because conditioned patterns can be blinding. Objective counseling or psychotherapy can serve us well when we need to deal with issues of communication processes.
Jayni Bloch © 7 March 2004
See Schedule and Procedures Page of this website for information on how to go about getting help.
[ Back to top ]
Life Turning Points
There are certain times in one's life that we are urged to make profound choices and changes. We call these dramatic turn-around times, turning points.
A turning point happens when external changes and simultaneous internal emotional turmoil gives new meaning to issues.
External changes occur when one is confronted with loss or changes on material, physical, emotional, intellectual and or spiritual levels.
The nature of a turning point is usually associated with a dramatic re-assessment of values and attitudes that triggers dramatic changes in life circumstances.
Jayni Bloch © 7 March 2004
See Booking a Session page of this website for information on how to go about getting help.
[ Back to top ]
Spiritual Understanding
Some of the characteristics of spiritual development can be confused with symptoms of mental illness. These symptoms and behavior are temporary and part of processes of normal growth . There are spiritual processes that are Archetypal in nature and when understood, can bring relief and enlightenment in the experience of the process itself. Understanding the science of psychological behavior as well as transpersonal psychology and spiritual traditions, symptoms and behavior can be identified and distinguished for what they are and treated as such.
Jayni Bloch © 7 March 2004
See Booking a Session page of this website for information on how to go about getting help.
[ Back to top ]
Dream Interpretation
Dream work is not for everybody. Some people will feel naturally inclined to working with their dreams and others not. Dreams is one way of connecting with the subconscious mind when it is necessary. If you are aware of your dreams and you feel that they are meaningful, write them down over time without trying to analyze them rationally or with the help of "cookbook" analysis. Your subconscious is usually more creative than giving you symbols that are recipe-like. Although there are archetypal or universal themes and symbols, your dreams are usually full of very personal symbols that correlates to your personal life processes. Psychotherapy can assist you to tap your own creative insights about your life.
There are many kinds of dreams and many reasons why we dream. Not all dreams are significant in psychotherapy. Some dreams are purely functional and the subconscious's need to process the days events. Other dreams are more meaningful in terms of their metaphor. Dreams cannot be interpreted in a literal or logical way. There are special techniques that I use to assist you to find your personal messages in the personal symbolism of your dreams. Some dreams are ways of the subconscious mind to bring suppressed material to consciousness. The domain of the subconscious mind needs to be understood and respected before one can work with it responsibly.
Our subconscious mind plays an essential role in our life. The subconscious mind works in conjunction with the rational mind towards our healing. Subconsciously conditioned rules and beliefs effect our behavior and it is these underlying beliefs that are challenged at times of change. the psychological challenge is about reaching into these sometimes hidden parts of ourselves to bring about healing of those pains. Healing means becoming whole which implies a balance between all the opposites within ourselves. This balance is not a permanent state but a constant adjustment process that happens when there is communication between the rational and the subconscious sides of ourselves.
Our subconscious speaks to us through symbols, therefore dreams communicate the metaphor of the processes that we experience in real time. Dreams is one of the tools that can be used to understanding our deeper processes. It provides us with symbolic directions towards awareness. It is through symbols that we connect to inner wisdom. Symbols are a pathway and bridge between the subconscious and the rational minds.
Our subconscious mind also expresses itself symbolically through our art, poetry and other creations like cooking or crafts.
Jayni Bloch © 7 March 2004
See Booking a Session page of this website for information on how to go about getting help.
[ Back to top ]
Personal Growth & Self Esteem
How we value ourselves determine our level of confidence and happiness in life. Many people of our era have a problem with self-worth.
Our self worth issues are sometimes linked to the kind of relationships we had as a child, that imprinted negative impressions of ourselves into our conscious and subconscious minds. So no matter how hard we work on a rational level to change these impressions, they persist on a deeper level, affecting all that we do.
How we value ourselves is intimately linked to self-acceptance and self-love. We can start steps in regaining self worth through affirmations, reframing and confirmations that we learn through Rational Emotive therapy. Sometimes acceptance of ourselves takes on a deeper meaning where we also need to know and discover all the different parts and sides of our personality and accept their function and contributions, even if we initially think it to be negative. We need to connect with our internal truth to be able to love ourselves. Self-love is not a rational activity alone but an experience of acceptance.
This process of healing requires us to become conscious of sides that are sometimes painful to recognize. It is easy to like the personality aspects of ourselves that are likable and desirable or socially acceptable. We are conditioned to do that. When we ignore, deny, judge or reject the parts of ourselves that we do not want, we perpetuate a low self-esteem. This is when we experience conflict and discomfort that serves as an inner urge to investigate the origin of the unrecognized or hidden sides that needs our attention and healing.
Hypnotherapy can help uncover the underlying reasons for our low self-esteem. Hypnotherapy can also assist in building up confidence again.
We might seem to be confident on the surface, and even seem to be successful, but the confidence and success could be a product of compensatory behavior to hide a deep hidden feeling of worthlessness. It is through working with the subconscious mind that we can reclaim our self-worth.
When the time is right to acknowledge underlying unrecognized parts of ourselves, they will surface and provoke a need to seek guidance to heal the wounds of worthlessness. Psychotherapy is a helpful way to get guidance in healing yourself.
Jayni Bloch © 7 March 2004
See Booking a Session page of this website for information on how to go about getting help.
[ Back to top ]
Transpersonal Psychology
Transpersonal psychology is an eclectic combination of knowledge where the psychotherapist draws on techniques and understandings from a wide variety of general-, Depth-psychological and spiritual sources.
Transpersonal psychotherapists deal with a full range of psychological problems and use a full range of Psychological techniques, including behavior modification, cognitive restructuring, gestalt practices, psychodynamic inquiry, dream-work, art and music therapy, and archetypal astrology. Processes derived from spiritual disciplines such as meditation, chanting, ritual, or visualization are also used.
Transpersonal psychology is not a religion but a perspective where psychology and spiritual experience interface with each other. A therapist could suggest that a client designs and carries out a ritual to mark the ending of a relationship or to grieve the death of a parent.
A therapist might recommend meditation or dream work and hypnotherapy, to a client as a means of opening to unconscious, repressed material that the client deals with during a specific life process, when ready.
A transpersonal context recognizes a transpersonal dimension to a client's suffering and healing as well as to the therapeutic process. I believe that as a healer I constantly need to be involved with healing myself. My work is meaningful when I live what I preach and assist others with doing.
Jayni Bloch © 7 March 2004
[ Back to top ]
Archetypal Psychology
Archetypes are defined as universal and recurring images, patterns or motifs representing not only typical human experiences but universal evolutional processes. Archetypes appears in human consciousness as images or symbols that exist in the collective unconscious and are the basic content of religions, mythologies, leg ends and art. They also emerge from the collective unconscious in individuals through dreams and visions. I believe that we observe the archetypal themes in our experiences in everyday life when we become observant to it. The encounter with an archetypal image evokes a strong emotional reaction, conveying a sense of divine or transpersonal power which transcends the ego.
The Archetypal patterns and processes can be recognized in studying your individual astrological natal and transitional charts. In conjunction with your life history and personal experiences, these charts represent SYMBOLIC indications of the archetypal/psychological processes at a particular time. The Astrological indications serve as a symbolic map that can be one of the useful tools in understanding your soul's journey towards consciousness and healing. Archetypal Psychology is one of the tools we can use to know and understand our inner selves.
Jayni Bloch © 7 March 2004
[ Back to top ]