What types of therapy do you offer?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a specific model of psychotherapy that uses the tool of mindfulness to support your ability to make choices more consistent with your values. One of the main principles behind ACT is that your natural urge to get away from painful thoughts, feelings or other internal experiences in the moment actually gets in the way of you living a life actively out of your values. Those habitual choices to try to overcome, distract from, or escape those internal experiences are generally out of your conscious awareness.

In ACT we explore your values and you learn some simple mindfulness practices and other concepts and practices that help you relate differently to the thoughts and feelings that you have been trying to overcome or get rid of. You learn ways to steady yourself so you can choose to take action on your values, building a life you actually want.

Being successful in professional careers requires a strong and agile mind. That gift also carries its own challenges when it comes to therapy. For women with strong minds, allowing the thinking, problem-solving mind to take a back seat while the more intuitive, holistic parts of your system take the floor for awhile can be challenging.

To help support you in connecting with yourself in this way we commonly use a mix of simple body awareness (for example, just noticing the felt sense of what’s happening inside, under your skin) and mindfulness practices (a way of relating differently to the mind’s constant narratives about what is happening versus actually directly experiencing in the moment what is happening) in sessions or as home practices. As you relate to and attend to yourself in this way, that internal, sensory and body-based wisdom is more readily available to inform and be integrated with your strong mind.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a broad category of therapy approaches that work by first identifying the habitual and automatic thoughts or behaviors that feed depression, anxiety and trauma reactions as well as problems like insomnia or phobias. In the cognitive part of the treatment, we identify thoughts or beliefs that aren’t helpful and, in your estimation, are not 100% accurate. We then work together to find a more nuanced and accurate way of thinking. This can help you respond more effectively to what is actually happening in the moment, rather than simply reacting to these thoughts and beliefs. The behavioral piece of CBT is focused on practicing new ways of acting so that you have the opportunity to have new experiences. This develops steadiness in acting on your goals and values and gives you more accurate information about what actually happens if you do things differently, rather than just depending on what your thoughts tell you will happen.

Although this is not my primary approach in therapy, it is something that I integrate in a more informal way. into other approaches.

Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) is often part of treatment when you are navigating a big life transition and your life roles are changing. Common examples of these events are coming out, marriages, divorces, graduations, retirement, having children, promotions, becoming disabled, or deaths family members that mean you have either more or fewer life responsibilities.

In these situations, you’re navigating not just what it means to you, but also figurin out new ways to relate to others as a result of this change. IPT focuses on those interactions with others and with developing any new skills that you need to successfully navigate the impact of the change on your relationships. This may include things like more assertive communication and boundary-setting, or developing better overall communication with important others.