Services

Treatment and Service Offerings

I imagine it has probably taken you some consideration if you really need therapy, and the situation that's affecting you at work, in your relationships, and even your health, is not getting any better on its own.  Whether you need it or not, the fact that you're here might be telling you something.  I'll tell you the same thing I tell my friends.  You deserve to have an unbiased and caring person tending to your thoughts and feelings where others might not get you or where you're coming from.  

The Services I offer to all of my clients are dependent on their conditions and their unique situations.  The beauty of working with a licensed professional is that I will work with you in ways that are specific to your needs, including your history, your distinct story, if you will.  No two clients are ever given the same clinical treatment; however, it is important to me that I treat you with both dignity and respect, but even more, I will  treat you kindly.  Therapy is hard work already - a therapist who doesn't seem to support you helps nobody and could only cause more harm and confusion. 

In Individual Therapy : I leverage multiple modalities.  Nowadays, the one most commonly employed by therapists is Cognitive Behavior Therapy, or CBT.  Along with CBT, I include Person-Centered Therapy (PCT).  PCT is a bit more gentle and passive than CBT.  I'll explain more below.  Another form of therapy I involve with the other two  is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

In CBT, the therapists addresses first your line of thinking about the events and relationships in your life.  When these things have happened what did you think?  What meaning did you attribute to the thing that happened to you or that you saw happen?  That's the cognitive part.  Our interpretation of what happened to us gives way to emotions - how we feel about those experiences.  Happy, irritated, disgusted, disappointed?  There are many more emotions to explore, subtle nuance even between annoyed, irritated, vexed, frustrated, and rageful.  So, thoughts give way to emotions.  And then...  emotions give way to behaviors.  

A former supervisor would consistently remind all of us clinicians, "All behavior has meaning."  It's true.  Sometimes it's a reflex.  Sometimes an instinct.  Sometimes, even, extremely intentional and well-considered.  So, ultimately, we can advance through thoughts/cognitions to behaviors within a split-second.  And then, there's a response to that behavior.  Someone else gets to respond back.  Are they happy with the outcome?  But what if you didn't mean to cause them hurt?  Now we explore healing our relationships.  And cycles continue until we take those thoughts captive and consider just the option of seeing them differently - it's not always possible, but what if we could see life happening to us in such a way as to feel empowered to have more control over it?

In PCT, the therapist accepts you in your rightful place as the expert of your life, the driver of your car - as it were - and is merely a passenger siting beside you.  As the expert, the one behind the wheel, you decide where we go, what you will talk about and what you won't.  However, the passenger may well share what is seen outside the window while you're focusing on the road.  Are you open to exploring that event?  Remembering that all behavior has meaning, why not?  Is there something you're avoiding?  Shame?  Guilt?  Grief?  If we don't explore the thing I see outside the car, then we explore why you hesitate to engage.  Because that thing you're avoiding may well be an obstacle to your healing.

And, finally, in ACT, we examine the acceptance of our emotions.  Even the ones we believe are bad emotions.  Remember when I said "all behavior has meaning"?  Even emotions tell us something - generally about the thoughts we have.  So, we take a gander at those as well.  We consider why we try to avoid certain emotions.  Yes, even anger and sadness are healthy emotions.  Not because of how we behave while we experience them, but because they tell us what we believe about ourselves and the world around us.  Our responses to emotions may be healthy or unhealthy, productive or unproductive.  Perhaps you want to learn to feel your emotions with healthier results. 

In Couples' Therapy : More couples seek out therapy after a considerable amount of damage has been done to both parties by their respective partners than by couples simply looking to make their already healthy relationship even healthier.  That said, I offer two different forms of couples' therapy. The first is more based on observation through interactions, and in conjunction with you and your partner also working with your own respective therapists to do your own healing work.  Then we can work as the three (3) of us to integrate your own healing work into the relationship.  While not Internal Family System certified, I leave the individual therapy in these cases to the respective therapists.  Oftentimes, couples working with their therapists still feel stuck when it comes to their communication of emotions and how they struggle with fostering teamwork in their relationships.  That's where we work more on skills development and the idea of positive intention/regard.  Couples generally don't want to be at odds with each other, and sometimes someone gets to choose to not be upset.  If they do, it's often an issue for one or both individual therapists because it may not be a relationship problem, but more likely a one-partner problem that has entered the dynamic.

The second form of couples' therapy I leverage is called The Gottman Method.  This is a series of three (3) therapy sessions that are intended to evaluate the couple together, again separately, invite the couple to separately complete the Gottman Relationship Checkup, and a follow-up session to review the results as well as offer helpful instructions on how to  improve on the relationship in several of the core areas tested.    Please note that Gottman Therapy is best done with the couple in shared space and not connecting from different locations. 

*Note: email to me is NOT HIPAA compliant, so please do not include specifics about your needs, but do include at least your first name and a callback number.  Email FROM me is HIPAA-compliant through Paubox.com and Google Workspace via Business Associate Agreements with both.

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