Multimodal Therapy

A practical framework for your Personal Recovery Program.

The term Multimodal Therapy can be a bit misleading. Rather than being a therapeutic method in and of itself, it provides a flexible framework wherein many different approaches may be employed.

Originally developed in 1972 by Arnold Lazarus, a pioneer in the field of cognitive behavior therapy, the approach's framework and its techniques have become widely used by therapists during counseling sessions and interventions.

For interesting PowerPoint presentations on various other therapy methods & approaches, see this page at HumanServices101.

This, by the way, is a very informative site. If you wish to learn more about Helping Theory and how it can help you to help yourself, start at this page.

In the context of your Personal Recovery Program, it can provide you with an extremely useful, yet simple-to-follow guideline. Along with Harm Reduction and other therapeutic approaches in this section, using Multimodal Therapy as a guide can help you identify and target areas of your life that you believe require attention.

Fundamentals of Multimodal Therapy

Although geared towards therapists as a counseling guideline, the framework provided by this approach can easily serve as a kind of checklist as you build and work on your Personal Recovery Program. The items in your checklist are actually various aspects of your personality and psychological makeup.

Here's how it works. Assessment and treatment (i.e. your Personal Recovery Program) is built around the idea of seven interactive dimensions of your personality/psychological makeup.

These dimensions are called modalities. The seven modalities are represented by the acronym BASIC ID, and they are:

Within each modality, any therapeutic technique or strategy may be employed to achieve change. Below is a brief description of each modality.

Behavior

Behavior refers to any overt, observable and measurable action. These actions could be anything from routinely oversleeping and getting berated for repetitive tardiness at work, to lashing out at friends, family & co-workers after a too-stressful day.

Affect

Affect is any mood, emotion or feeling that you may experience on a day-to-day basis with which you have a degree of difficulty.

Sensation

Sensation is seeing, hearing, touch, taste & smell. If stress-related lashing out is associated with poor communication due to hearing difficulty, well...

Imagery

Imagery refers as much to memory - and the distortions we create - as is does to the mental pictures we conjure with respect to future actions or situations we anticipate, or to the image we have of ourselves and others.

Cognition

Cognition is in reference to our ideas, values, beliefs, etc. Clarity in this modality is essential to your Personal Recovery Program. You will find that the strategies in the Strategies section of this site often refer to belief & value systems.

Interpersonal relationships

Interpersonal relationships is the interaction we have with others, the mannerisms we use to initiate contact, how we maintain or sabotage relationships, the types of people we frequent, etc.

Drugs/biology

Drugs/biology concerns everything with respect to your physical self including, but not limited to, substance abuse. It could refer to exercise, diet, medication, physical limitations, etc.

As you plan, build and execute your Personal Recovery Program, I recommend you use a Multimodal Therapy framework to guide your efforts. You can plan weekly commitments and actions within each Monthly Plan of your program that reflect specific modalities.

Using this method will help make targeting problem areas in your life all that much easier. And making your recovery process easier isn't such a bad thing, now is it?

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