The Integrative Therapy Centre (ITC) is a body-oriented expressive arts therapy center.  Our approaches place great importance on the therapeutic relationship.  As psychotherapists we aim to provide individualized, group, workshops and intensive treatment that helps on a deeper level.   Our goal is to treat a person/s holistically with respect and in a collaborative manner.  We offer both conventional talk therapy and body-oriented expressive arts approaches.

The ITC focuses on creativity, the arts and the crucial role of the body in the structure and process of the psyche.  Through the use of expressive arts, repressed thoughts, feelings and behaviours are discovered and illuminated through images, body awareness, movement and writing.  By incorporating creative possibilities and the body, one’s true self becomes more visible, and this can be used to clarify personal values and to live those values, bringing more vitality and meaning to day to day life.

Specialities Include:

Eating disorders, Addictions, Stress and Anxiety, Psychosomatic Issues, Depression, Grief and Loss, Trauma, Life Transitions, Personal Growth and Relationships.

Groups currently being offered:

Awaken to Embodiment

Spring is just around the corner.  Winter is a time of inward turning and physical dormancy.  We feel out of touch with our bodies, often feeling the winter girth grow.  This workshop will provide a variety of ways to connect deeply to your body’s natural intelligence exploring creative processes that will enrich your movement and life.

This is a non threatening workshop that is relaxed and allows for us to play and move, draw, reflect and write.  No artistic or dance experience is necessary.

Please call to register for Saturday, March 30th from 2-5pm.  $30.00 per person.

Lost for Words

An Arts-based Workshop for Body Image and Eating Issues

March 27th, 9-4pm and March 28th, 9-3, 2011

Often individuals with issues related to body image and eating find words to be an inadequate or even hostile way to express the chaotic and unbearable nature of their inner worlds.  The use of expressive arts provides ways to explore obsession with food and weight.  In this way, images, body centered practices, movement and writing provide an alternative vocabulary for what was previously unspoken.

In this workshop participants will be gently guided in exploring and expressing emotional issues and reconnecting to inner sources of strength with others who share similar challenges.  It is open to anyone who identifies difficulties with healthy body image and eating.

Absolutely no skills or experience with the arts if necessary-only a curiosity about how expressing yourself creatively can lead to understanding yourself better, and enriching your life.

For more information or to register, contact me.

Cost is $250.00 (including taxes and materials). Cost may sometimes be reimbursed by extended health plans)

Facilitators:Dorit Osher,MA, MSW, RSW and Deborah Windell, MSc, MSW (Cand.)

A Path to an Enriched Life

We all go through difficult periods in our life, whether it be a life transition, extreme stress, a loss, earlier life traumas or difficult family dynamics, and so on. These difficult periods bring up intense, painful feelings and we suffer. We want these emotional states and thoughts to go away so we can feel good. However, our intuitive way of doing this gets us into an even more messy and complicated situation. We usually use our minds to problem solve and we get caught in the mind chatter creating  a trapped system within ourselves. These distressing emotional states become the focus of our lives which we only intensify through trying to make them go away .

This three day intensive is based on Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) with Stephen Hayes, Kirk Strosahl, and Kelly Wilson are the founder of this experiential approach to behavioural change.  The use of expressive arts will also be incorporated.  Art as an emotional projective device and free associative journalling as a projective mind chatter device.  Movement and mindfulness practices will also be used to enact the art and writing.

Three change of perspective need to happen:

  • Accept our emotional state and find strategies to allow us to ride the wave of the feeling state.  Once our emotional states moves to a feeling state which is less intense we can think more analytically and so we can then express and develop self awareness.

  • Mindfulness is a practice of noticing our experiences. In mindfulness we observe our thoughts, emotions and body sensations and movement without necessarily getting lost in them so that they define our self concept. Such as, “I am anxious, I am sad, “ rather than I am a person who feels anxious at the moment.” Our mind chatter can be the biggest destructive force that we get lost in and we believe every thought as the ultimate truth. Mindful is the practice whereby we notice our thoughts as just a thought, a set of words that our mind will continually produce because that is what it does. However, we can choose whether to engage in this mind chatter or not when we can notice the thoughts as separate from ourselves.   We can then have the power to live our lives in a more present and open ways to have direct experiences.   Mindfulness also helps to change our attitude and perspective to our inner private experience by being curious, using descriptive self talk, being non-judgmental, open and flexible.

  • Living a life filled with our values gives us direction, even while going through a difficult  life phase. When we have got lost in our pain we turn inwards and believe we first need to “fix” ourselves before living. Some of us get caught in a holding place as in eating disorders, “my body is my enemy and the behavior is the solution, “ or get caught in an alternative life of escapism and numbing through drugs, alcohol, materialism and food.  By identifying what is truly important to each one of us as individuals, we can then take the steps to living each day a life that is full and meaninful.

This three day intensive will allow for a deeper experience.   The intensive will take place  from Saturday June 15th and 16th, 2012 from 9-4:30pm each day.  No art or dance experience is necessary.

If anyone is coming from out of London, Ontario please contact me about accommodation.

Cost: $250.00 (including taxes and material fees).  Many extended health benefits will cover this intensive.

This intensive will be helpful to anyone who struggles with an addiction, eating disorder, depression, anxiety and stress.

Living Life from the Inside Out

A 3 hour workshop that focuses on body image.

When one thinks of body image, we usually have a sense of some “perfect” body that is imprinted on our minds from the constant media and cultural images that bombard us.  This only creates dissatisfaction with our, of course,  imperfect body images/shape.

This experiential workshop will provide an embodied experience of the being in direct experience with ourselves while developing a fully, more realistic sense of our body image and sense of self.

Please call to register or organize a workshop for a group of friends, clients or employees.  The cost is $50.00 per person.  Four people are required per group.  This group can also be modified to use with pre-teens and teens.


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