I draw from proven treatment models to provide a robust therapeutic experience.
ACT helps you:
- Develop resilience and flexibility when difficulties arise
- Reduce impulsive reactivity
- Tap into what you truly value
- Choose actions that help you to create the life you truly want
- Break through barriers that keep you stuck
Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (I-CBT) provides profound relief for those suffering from OCD and related disorders, such as hoarding. Research reveals that I-CBT is an excellent alternative to Exposure Response Prevention (ERP).
I-CBT targets obsessive doubt, the engine that drives the entire OCD process. You learn how to resolve obsessive doubt by:
- Exploring how OCD’s faulty reasoning highjacks your thinking
- Discovering how OCD creates a “feared self” that drives compulsions
- Pinpointing how OCD tricks you into distrusting your five senses, your innate wisdom, and what’s truly important to you
As you learn to trust your perceptions and gain confidence in your judgments, obsessive doubts lose their power and you are freed from using compulsions to feel better. I-CBT effectively treats all of the OCD themes. I have found it’s a particularly helpful approach for obsessive doubts involving emotionally-charged themes including harm, sexuality, pedophilia, relationships, religious/moral and existential issues.
ERP is a collaboration between you and the therapist. Together, we design and sequence activities to incrementally expose you to a thought, object, image, and/or situation you find distressing. Through this strategic process, you “retrain” your brain and body to no longer perceive the obsessive doubt as a threat. You also learn how to handle distress without engaging in compulsions.
ERP helps you:
- Interrupt the cycle of obsessive doubts and compulsions
- Learn how to navigate the urge to avoid situations, seek reassurance and/or engage in compulsions, so that, over time, obsessive doubts hold less power
- Cope better with uncertainty by increasing your tolerance of distress
- Develop increased confidence
Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD is an evidence-based form of cognitive behavioral therapy for adults seeking to overcome trauma, whether from a single incident or a series of adverse experiences.
The effects of trauma may persist far beyond the event(s) by creating or reinforcing thoughts that prevent you from feeling safe, happy and confident and thwart healthy connections with others. CPT for PTSD helps you discover and question beliefs which are not helpful or true for you, referred to as “stuck points.”
This structured therapy has been shown to improve:
• Ability to place trust in self and others
• Sense of safety
• Relationships and intimacy
• Self-esteem
• Sense of personal power
• Tolerance of stressful emotions.
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) TF-CBT is considered the gold standard of trauma treatment for children and adolescents (up to age 18).
Whether your child has had one trauma or multiple adverse experiences, TF-CBT can help. TF-CBT is a short-term treatment (from approximately 12 – 24 weekly sessions) that enables young people and their parents/caregivers to overcome common emotional and behavioral responses to adversity, including
• Guilt
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Behavioral outbursts
• PTSD symptoms of sleeplessness, agitation, flashbacks, nightmares, anger, poor concentration, hypervigilance, emotional numbness and low self-worth
• Somatic responses of bed-wetting, stomachaches, headaches, night terrors, self-harm
“Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
-Brene Brown