Guide to Therapy

I routinely employ the following therapeutic approaches, depending on the specific needs of my clients:

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
Emotionally-Focused Therapy
Family Systems Therapy

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

MBSR, a form of psychoeducational training for those with emotional or psychological distress due to medical conditions, physical pain, or life events, is designed to reduce stress and anxiety symptoms, negative mood-related feelings, and depression symptoms; increase self-esteem; and improve general mental health and functioning. The program is based on the core principle of "mindfulness" - a mental state whereby one attends to and purposefully manages one's awareness of what is happening in the moment. MBSR helps participants to develop a mindful cognitive state and incorporate it into everyday life as a coping resource to deal with intense physical, emotional, and situational stressors.

MBSR is structured, manual-driven program that typically is offered in group setting in eight weeks. The program is theoretically grounded in secularized Buddhist meditation practices, mind-body medicine, and the transactional model of stress, which suggests that people can be taught to manage their stress by adjusting their cognitive perspective and increasing their coping skills to build self-confidence in handling external, stressful situations. MBSR teaches participants in learning to exercise increased self-regulation, empowerment, and choice in their mental and physical health states by developing insight into the conditioned, automatic reactions and habits that underlie and support their negative cognitive and physical health behaviors. MBSR also incorporates different meditation practices in program delivery, including three primary forms:

• Mindfulness meditation, a formal daily practice of introspection and self-observation without judgment. In the most common forms of this meditation, the participant mentally focuses on the process of breathing or on the movement of the feet while slowly walking without looking down.
• Body scan, which focuses one's awareness on his or her body. While lying down or sitting, the participant directs attention to each part of the body, noticing any pain, tension, lack of sensation, or sense of comfort, becoming more at ease by focusing on the body instead of the mind.
• Gentle yoga, a mental focusing through movement that creates a calming of the mind's continuous and ruminative thinking. Participants use yoga postures to quiet the mind and strengthen concentration.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

CBT is a skill-building therapeutic approach that teaches people how to adapt to stress, mood symptoms and life events in a manner that reduces stress and enhances effective coping. Clients are taught to develop a specific skill set for use during active treatment and later in daily life. Research demonstrates that CBT not only can significantly reduce current symptoms, but also has been credited with lasting, positive effects and preventative components.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT is a third wave behavioral therapy (along with Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy) that uses mindfulness skills to develop psychological flexibility and helps clarify and direct values-guided behavior. ACT, pronounced “act,” is an experiential form of therapy. The aim of ACT is to experience the fullness and vitality of life, which includes a wide spectrum of human experience, including the pain that inevitably goes with it. Acceptance (not the same as approval) of how things are, without evaluation or attempts at change, is a skill that is developed through mindfulness exercises in and out of session. ACT does not attempt to directly change or stop unwanted thoughts or feelings (as in cognitive behavioral therapy), but to develop a new mindful relationship with those experiences that can free a person up to be open to take action that is consistent with their chosen values.

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)

MBCT is designed to help people who suffer repeated bouts of depression and chronic unhappiness. It combines the ideas of cognitive therapy with meditative practices and attitudes based on the cultivation of mindfulness. The heart of this work lies in becoming acquainted with the modes of mind that often characterize mood disorders while simultaneously learning to develop a new relationship to them.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

DBT is a research-based, cognitive-behavioral treatment originally developed by Marsha Linehan, PhD, at the University of Washington, to help clients with the suicidal and self-harm behaviors often seen in Borderline Personality Disorder. DBT has since been modified as a treatment for other complex and challenging mental disorders that involve emotional dysregulation, craving disorders, anxiety disorders, PTSD, eating disorders and severe mood disorders. Using both acceptance and change strategies, DBT asks both patient and therapist to find a balance between accepting reality as it is, and maintaining a strong commitment to change. The treatment is offered in an environment that is warm and validating, while attempting to offer the challenge and guidance needed to effect behavioral change and reduction of harmful behaviors. The goal is to help clients create “a life worth living.”

Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)

EFT is a unique empirically-based approach, based on methods designed to help people accept, express, regulate, understand and transform emotion. Recent years have seen a growth of EFT in individual and couples therapy, because it is an evidence-based treatment and because the EFT approach focuses on the development of emotional intelligence and on the importance of secure relationships.

Family Systems Therapy

A family system perspective holds that individuals are best understood through assessing the interactions between and among family members.  The development and behavior of one family member is inextricably interconnected with others in the family.  Symptoms are often viewed as an expression of a set of habits and patterns within a family.  The client’s issues are assessed from the perspective that they may be symptoms of how the system functions, as opposed to symptoms of the client’s maladjustment, history and psychosocial development.