If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.

- Gail Sheehy

Treatment Approach

 

Evidence-Based

I have specialized training in evidence-based treatments including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP), and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that can help you change the way you interact with your thoughts, emotions, and urges so you can do something different, get unstuck, and build a full and meaningful life.

 

Compassionate

We are all doing the best that we can and we we want to do better. Treatment begins by understanding the patterns of behaviors that are not helping us build the lives we want to be living. Often, we continue ineffective behaviors because they worked for us in the past. Being able to understand how that came about can help us change what we do.

Collaborative

The cornerstone of treatment is identifying the goals and values that are important to you and working together to achieve them. We will establish a treatment plan and check in often to make sure we stay on track.

 

Skills Based

We will work together to build concrete tools, strategies, and steps you can take with you to utilize in difficult situations. Treatment will involve practice outside of session to generalize new skills and make them easier to use.

 
 

My Treatment Approach

 

  • Dialectical Behavior Therapy

    Dialectical Behavior Therapy is a specific and concrete skills-focused therapy. It helps people learn specific skills to help get through an intense situation or emotion without making it worse, understanding more about their emotions and how to manage them, and tools to manage relationships.


    Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

    Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people change the way they relate to their emotions, thoughts, and sensations. What if a thought is just a thought (and not a fact)? What if we can just let an emotion pass (rather than trying to do something to get rid of it)? ACT helps us take a look at all the places we can interact with what we do, how we think, and the story we tell ourselves about who we are in a different way.

    Functional Analytic Psychotherapy

    Functional Analytic Psychotherapy helps focus on the relationships in your life and how to improve them for greater genuineness, authenticity, and vulnerability. Integrating FAP into our sessions, we’ll focus on how the small exchanges we have with others help us build the relationships we want or move further away… and how to change them.

    Behavioral Activation

    Behavioral Activation is the cornerstone of treatment for depression; it means getting up and doing the things you need to be doing to live the life that you want. We will work together to break down what gets in the way and stops you. We’ll work together to learn new skills to get you moving again.

    Values-Based Work

    Values-based work isn’t necessarily a therapy approach but a core idea I work from in all my therapy approaches. Our values define who we want to be and what’s important to us. The ultimate goal of therapy is to get us closer to living a life that is more genuine to us and that we are proud of.

  • My Therapy Approach:

    Each therapist will have a different approach to therapy and what interventions they believe help people get better. I focus on balancing and integrating the following areas:

    Awareness. In order for us to start noticing what’s happening and what to do about it, we first have to really increase our ability to notice by increasing mindfulness skills.

    Acceptance. For us to be able to identify what we need to do to change, we first have to figure out what we are doing, why are we doing it, how it works for us, and why it stays around.

    Change. Change can be achieved through a few different ways. Pulling from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT’s) 4 Ways to Solve a Problem we can:

    1. Problem solve or change the situation causing the uncomfortable situation

    2. Feel differently about the situation by changing our thinking (or interpretations) about the problem

    3. Learn skills to get through difficult situations if you know they are temporary and eventually going to over.

    4. Do nothing, stay miserable.

    Emotional exposure. The core of any treatment is talking about the uncomfortable stuff. It teaches us that we can experience painful emotions and survive them. This often helps us feel like we have the knowledge, freedom, and skills to move around more freely in our lives.

    Goal oriented. Unlike traditional process-based talk therapy, we are constantly building skills and taking steps toward building a life we want to be living.

  • I believe in time-limited treatment. I want our time together to be helpful so that you can get back to the things your life that matter to you!

    Therapy is really effective for helping us learn skills, practice them, and move forward in our lives. I don’t believe people need to be in therapy for ever. Much of our growth happens between our therapy session and beyond. We need the opportunity to put into practice what we’ve learned and that takes time.

    You might notice it’s time to graduate from treatment or take a break if the same conversations keep happening, you’re noticing that you don’t have much to talk about, or you just start to feel better. We can talk about this and make a plan to get you back to your life.