My Approach to Helping
John Funk is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 37 years of doing social work. He has worked with many different groups of people, including folks experiencing homelessness, folks experiencing major mental health issues, active-duty soldiers and veteran soldiers, and folks experiencing anxiety, depression, and PTSD. In more recent years when working as a therapist, he has mostly worked with couples doing couples therapy, and primarily using attachment theory and therapy, in addition to cognitive-behavioral therapies, and a PTSD treatment called gentle reprocessing therapy. John often uses information from attachment therapy authors including John Bowlby, Sue Johnson, Robert Karen, Stan Tatkin, Daniel J. Siegel, Amir Levine, Rachel Heller. Today, he is most interested in doing couples therapy. John believes the development of attachment therapy over the years has been very significant in helping couples work through their issues successfully. Attachment theory and therapy allow for couples to non-judgmentally look at how the dynamics of their attachment relationships as children with their primary caregiver(s) affect how they are in a relationship as adults with their now new primary attachment figures — each other. As the couples gain a greater understanding of why and how they respond to each other in times of stress, and to stress in general, they allow for much greater empathy in understanding each other's situation, and they allow themselves the opportunity to learn more effective coping strategies, and ultimately to develop their own attachment relationship, unique to them. "I believe the client(s) are the ultimate experts regarding their situations, and they have many perspectives on how to understand and intervene when they struggle," says John. "What the therapist brings is a few more perspectives with a new understanding that often allows the client(s) to see his/her/their situation in a different light, and the therapist helps as a guide to utilizing new perspectives so as to allow for more successful interventions."