Areas of Expertise: PTSD, Depression, Anxiety, Psychosomatic Disorders, Addiction, Relational Issues, Stress Management, Family Issues, Couple's Issues, Personal Growth, East/West Psychotherapy, Eating Disorders, Bipolar Disorders and Obsessive Compulsive Disorders. 7 years ago I created Psychosomatic Psychotherapy, a novel and highly effective treatment that integrates mind, body and emotion. This method targets blocked emotion and inflammation. Most Western therapies are essentially mind-oriented, but we are so much more than our thoughts. My approach includes elements of Emotion Focused Therapy, Short Term Psychodynamic Therapy, Somatic Therapy and Zen Buddhism. Psychosomatic Psychotherapy treats all mental health conditions, many chronic medical conditions and is quickly effective at helping people and their problems. We begin by telling our story. We go at a slower pace than usual and we pay special attention to the emotionally important parts of the story, e.g., talking to our mother, worrying about work, conflict in a relationship, etc. Here we pause and direct our attention to our abdomen and ask, “How do/did I feel about this or that or him or her?” Then we wait. We don’t rush to answer the question with our heads, we wait for an answer to slowly arise from our bodies. We are bypassing our intellectual defenses and asking our bodies what’s really going on. When discover our feelings we express them in a full-throated and wholehearted way! Then we just feel (not analyze!) that feeling in our bodies until the feeling dissolves or almost completely dissolves, usually within a few minutes. Last, we scan our bodies for any lingering areas of tightness or tension in places like the stomach, chest, throat, head, jaw, neck, or face. When we discover where we’re holding stress and somaticized emotions, we feel these areas until the tension/tightness/emotion dissolves, usually within a few minutes. Developing a greater capacity to feel also provides critical and deeper insight into our issues. The overall goal is to unblock emotions and reduce dangerous inflammation by metabolizing and processing emotions and somatic constrictions in the body. Along the way, we are also challenging old, disempowering stories and replacing them with more accurate, empowering narratives. When treatment integrates the cognitive, emotional, and somatic dimensions of our conditions, mental and physical symptoms are significantly reduced.
What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?
Understanding, compassion, problem solving, insight, emotion management skills, warmth, stress management skills, and assignment of exercises for study and practice between sessions.
Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.
Studies have been conducted to examine which elements of therapy are the most important. The clear answer is the therapist-client relationship. Creating a connection with the client, developing an accepting, non-judgmental space and creating a deeply compassionate atmosphere are some of Dr. Takakjian's strongest skills. Phil is very active in therapy but he's also effective at creating a safe space in which client's can discover their own truths. Dr. Takakjian trained at UC Berkeley and Stanford where he was an Intern and then a Post-Doc Fellow at the Palo Alto/Menlo Park, Stanford, VA.
About Philip Martin Takakjian
Specializes in
Licensed in
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VirtualMy treatment methods
Mind-body approach
Psychosomatic Self-Care is a Mind-Body, East/West treatment helping clients to process their issues cognitively, emotionally and somatically. This therapy is very experiential, solution oriented and emotion focused. Most traditional therapies focus just on talk, thoughts, ideas, analysis, interpretations, behavior and, occassionally, feelings. These treatments fail to fully process emotions, completely disregard the role of the body and mostly just reinforce the client's defenses of repression and avoidance. In contrast, my approach uses emotional catharsis to fully process the client's painful experiences in the present and from the past. Our end goal is liberation from suffering, the discovery of our True Self and ultimately, the realization of our True Nature as described in Eastern Wisdom Traditions.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
Josef Breuer's & Sigmund Freud's Cathartic Method (1895), invited the client to describe a painful experience and the associated feelings from a past trauma. In Psychosomatic Self-Care the therapist facilitates the discovery of current feelings or long-buried emotions from the past. Once revealed, the painful emotions are processed by expressing them cathartically (emotionally) and then fully feeling the emotional and physical energy in the body until these energies dissolve completely. There simply is no more effective, comprehensive and lasting treatment for our suffering.
Couples Counseling
Focus on empathy, compassion, communication, conflict management, emotional regulation, emotional development, focusing on the other, assertiveness and the influence of the past. Clients are taught about The Third Body, focusing on the larger relationship and less on themselves.
Child Parent Psychotherapy
Adolescent Specialist - PhD in Adolescent Development. Emphasis on teaching emotional intelligence, social skills, emotional regulation and improved parent-child communication. I usually bring in the parents at some point. One of the goals of my treatment is to help the adolescent along the path of Separation-Individuation.
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