Impact therapy the brain trauma and addiction
Founded by Ed Jacobs, Ph.D., Impact Therapy is a theory driven, multi-sensory approach to counseling which recognizes that change or impact comes from not only verbal, but also visual and kinesthetic exchanges. Impact Therapy is an active, brief form of counseling that is often helpful for school counselors, mental health counselors, social workers, psychologists, and other helping professionals.
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Impact Therapy is an approach to counseling that shows respect for the way clients learn, change, and develop. The emphasis is on making counseling clear, concrete and thought-provoking, rather than vague, abstract, and emotional. Impact Therapy is a multi-sensory approach which recognizes that change or impact comes from not only verbal, but also visual and kinesthetic exchanges. It is a type of brief therapy, although it is different from the work of Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch who have developed a school of therapy called “Brief Therapy.” Impact Therapy is a form of therapy that combines creative counseling techniques and certain counseling theories. It provides the counselor with ways to frame the counseling process as well as ways to assess the progress of a session. This approach is action and insight oriented and often resolution oriented. We call the approach Impact Therapy because it emphasizes helping the client as much as possible in each session. The therapist tries to get to the core of the problem by cutting off unnecessary details, irrelevant stories, and unfocused discussions. The impact therapist sees the goal of any therapy session as creating change or setting in motion the process for change.
Impact Therapy is a unique approach to counseling, integrating concepts from existing theories. Much is drawn from the theories of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), Transactional Analysis (TA), Gestalt, and the creative counseling techniques that were was first presented in Creative Counseling Techniques: An Illustrated Guide (Jacobs, 1992). The impact therapist combines REBT with creative props, drawings, analogies, and Gestalt therapy in a very different manner than the way this theory is traditionally taught. The impact therapist uses the ego states from TA with chairs, drawings, movement, and in combination with REBT in clear, concrete, and effective ways. Therapists who subscribe to Systems theory, Adlerian counseling, Reality Therapy, and most other theories can find Impact Therapy to be compatible. Impact Therapy can serve as a bridge between theories and techniques and provide a clear way to understand the process and progress of a therapy session
Impact Therapy calls for the client to be active, thinking, seeing, and experiencing during the session. Impact therapists try to help clients help themselves by getting the clients to think rationally about their issues. Challenging clients’ self-talk and using analogies, props, movement, and additional chairs can help make Impact Therapy sessions engaging and beneficial. Dependent relationships are rare in Impact Therapy since the counselor is always involving the client in many different ways.