Our Mission Statement:
To develop evidence based psychological interventions that promote healthy approaches to conflict and facilitate growth.

Psychological Restorative Solutions, P.C. is based on the concepts which underlie Restorative Justice Principles. Restorative Justice is based on the premise that conflict is an opportunity to repair relationships and promote positive change through the use of interventions that create accountability, competency and facilitate empathy.

When using a restorative dialogue, an individual learns to understand their own needs, they can communicate desires and responsibility, in the end moving toward increased self-awareness, becoming more open, and accepting.  Those positive outcomes shift a person from one path to another ultimately giving that person the ability to employ empathy and positively have their feelings heard. 

What is conflict?  Conflict is a disagreement through which the parties involved perceive a threat to their needs, interests or concerns.

What are Needs?  Abraham Maslow developed a theory of Motivation based on a hierarchy of needs that the individual must satisfy at each level before they move onto the next. There are five hierarchical levels. These are
·    Physiological needs: Food, shelter, sexual satisfaction i.e those needs needed for basic survival.
·    Safety needs: The need to feel safe within your environment. Also refers to emotional and physical safety.
·    Social Needs: The need for love, friendship and belongingness
·    Esteem needs: The need for self respect, status and recognition from others.
·    Self actualization: The point of reaching ones full potential. Are you capable at excelling yourself?

Some of these needs are dependent on relationships. When these needs and/or expectations are not being met within a relationship, a conflict can develop.

The first and most common path is to avoid conflict at all costs.  In this case, individual needs interests or concerns are not heard until hostility and possibly aggression result. 

On the second and enlightened path, conflict is seen as an opportunity for growth and change.  Individuals are able to express their needs and others are able to reciprocate while listening compassionately.  Conflict is essential to strengthen the fabric of relationships.  No fabric can be woven from threads that all go the same way.  The function of a loom is to hold in equal tension threads that go in counter or opposing directions.  The strength of a fabric comes from the quality of the intersections where the threads actually cross each other.

Why is the First Path the most common one taken?

In our culture, conflict is viewed as something to avoid because it is seen as unhealthy. However, the approach taken to conflict is more dependent on whether or not the outcome is healthy. If conflict is avoided or postponed without constructive dialogue, then the parties engage in thinking errors. Constructive dialogue can only take place when there is mutual respect for each other.

Thinking errors are blockers to constructive communication.  Some popular thinking errors include: excuse making, blaming, justifying, minimizing, and mind reading.  These distortions are used while in conflict usually because persons feel the need to react defensively and in doing so make broad and negative generalizations about each other. 
These thoughts inadvertently transfer any responsibility away from the individual and onto others such as the legal system or other systems. 

Anger, like conflict, can be utilized as an opportunity to develop better understanding about individual needs.  Through an individual’s exploration about what triggers his/her anger, he can begin to acknowledge what needs are not being met.  When angry, an individual can seize the opportunity to ask him/herself what basic need is inspiring the anger.  For an example, a statement such as “Why didn’t you call?” The need could be one of trust.

Social Skills can be enhanced to express individual needs.  These skills can be facilitated through role-play, modeling and feedback while in conflict situations. Once these needs can be expressed, the skill to listening empathically can be developed.

Empathy is essentially the skill of imagining what another person is feeling and thinking at a certain moment, most people have heard the saying, take a walk in another mans shoes, but how often is that walk taken, especially while feeling defensive?  Ones ability to portray empathy can be blocked by a need to resolve, educate or story tell to others when they truly need only to be listened to with genuine compassion and interest. Practicing listening empathically makes open communication, clarification of misunderstandings and cooperative behavior possible. 


How do we Re-direct your path?
Evidence based interventions demonstrate positive outcomes in repetitive studies.  Cognitive-behavioral therapy is based on the idea that our thoughts cause our behaviors, the benefit of this fact is that we can change the way we feel and act when we change the way we think.