Individual Therapy

Psychotherapy is often called "talk therapy", because that’s essentially what it is; an ongoing therapeutic conversation between therapist and client. Throughout this "conversation", we will discuss matters that you find to be troubling, focus on your inherent strengths to help you find solutions, and explore how various factors may be affecting your current difficulties. Psychotherapy is a process that's a lot like learning. Through therapy, people learn about themselves. They discover ways to overcome troubling feelings or behaviors, develop inner strengths or skills, or make changes in themselves or their situations. Our work together can also focus on improving your self esteem, learning how your thoughts control your mood, decreasing anxiety and depression, improving self-esteem, and addressing adjustment disorders.

Interpersonal therapy focuses on your current relationships with other people. The goal is to improve your interpersonal skills — how you relate to others, including family, friends and colleagues. You learn how to evaluate the way you interact with others and develop strategies for dealing with relationship and communication problems.

Below are a few of the specific theories/techniques I may employ during our work together:

Behavioral Therapy

Behavioral therapies use learning principles (examples given below) to eliminate or reduce unwanted reactions to external situations, one’s one thoughts and feelings, and bodily sensations or functions. Rather than dealing with unconscious conflicts, this therapeutic approach deals with events of which people are aware or can readily become aware. The therapist teaches the client to replace undesirable responses (groundless fears, for example) in their day-to-day living. Learning-based techniques include the following:

Exposure Therapy

Instead of trying to avoid or escape upsetting experiences — which can bring short-term relief, but in the longer run usually prolong or worsen one’s vulnerability — clients voluntarily expose themselves to the experiences while in a relaxed state. Exposures may be to the actual situation (in vivo exposure) or to an imagined version of it (in vitro exposure). As a result they form associations between the formerly upsetting experiences and feeling relatively untroubled, which leads to clearer thinking and better decisions. With practice, the new associations progressively take over from the old ones that were causing difficulty.

Behavioral Activation

This is a method commonly used in treating depression. It involves developing a list of activities the client is likely to enjoy, or needs to engage in as part of a normal and satisfying life. Then, beginning with the easiest (or sometimes, the most indispensable) activities on the list, the client agrees to carry them out in an organized manner. This reinstates contact with the naturally-occurring rewards of the chosen activities, which in turn helps overcome the depressed mood.

Cognitive Therapy

Cognitive therapies rely on other, largely verbal, learning principles —namely, those that involve cognition (perception, thinking, reasoning, attention and judgment). The basic strategy is to change the thoughts, beliefs, assumptions and attitudes that are contributing to the client’s emotional or behavioral problems. Two of the best known cognitive therapies are:

Cognitive Therapy

This approach assumes that people who are suffering — for example, from depression — view themselves and the world around them negatively because of distortions in thinking. Some of these distortions include all-or-none thinking (a tendency to see events or situations as either entirely good or entirely bad), overgeneralization (allowing one unfortunate event to support a negative interpretation of all events), and selective perception (focusing only on discouraging events). The therapist helps the client to first recognize and then change these maladaptive cognitive behaviors.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is based on the belief that the most effective point of intervention is at the level of the person's thoughts, and that if changes are made in thinking (automatic thoughts, assumptions and core beliefs), changes in emotions and behavior will follow. Furthermore, behavioral techniques and strategies are employed as needed to enhance the treatment outcome (i.e., anger management, relaxation training, graduated exposure to feared situations, assertiveness training). The course of treatment is typically brief, and people usually experience relatively rapid relief and enduring progress.