Our Diagnostic, Assessment and Therapeutic Approach

Our assessments have two components: the cognitive behavioral component and the psychodynamic component.

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The Cognitive Behavioral Component

• Identifies the conscious cognitive aspect of problems such as:

  • Underachievement

  • Self destructive behavior

  • Procrastination

  • Perfectionism.

• Misperceptions and negative thinking associated with these problems are reality tested. Distortions in thinking are systematically corrected.

• Specific actions and behaviors are established to address the problems.

• The emotional component is assumed to be only a reaction to the problem-never a primary cause.

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The Psychodynamic Component

• Identifying the context in which the problem arose: a careful personal history establishes a past and current context.

  • This dimension has been virtually eliminated by psycho educational and neuropsychological assessments.

  • Consequently these types of assessments are done outside the context of a person’s life and consider emotional factors as always secondary.

• Contextual factors themselves do not cause symptoms or problems but emotional reactions to them may.

• Contextual factors include:

  • Life circumstances

  • Early educational experiences

  • Trauma

  • Family dynamics

  • Peer relationships.

• Emotional reactions to these and other contextual factors often persist in the form of unresolved emotional conflicts such as:

  • The “inner experience” of having a superior endowment.

  • The way family, peers and teachers have reacted to giftedness.

• These can often be summarized as a central dynamic conflict.

• A psychodynamic formulation has three functions:

  • It describes how the central emotional conflict became detracted from its original context ( i.e.giftedness and it’s development) and was then displaced and expressed as dysfunctional behavior, a cognitive dysfunction or a physical problem.

  • It is a method for distinguishing between:
          Emotional reactions to a problem
          Emotional causes or the problem

  • The formulation focuses the therapeutic process toward resolution of the central conflict about giftedness and a restoration of full gifted potential.