My Approach

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) focuses on how our thoughts, beliefs and attitudes impact and drive our emotions and behavior. We all develop habits in our thinking that left unchecked reinforce negative beliefs about ourselves and the world around us.

The specific cognitive and/or behavioral treatment I use is generally determined by what you are hoping to get from your therapy and what symptoms or distress you are experiencing. For patients with symptoms related to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, for example, I most often use an approach called Exposure Response Prevention, since this is considered the gold standard for treating OCD. In some cases though, when ExRP is not a good fit, I work with Inference-based CBT, which approaches OCD from a completely different angle. Between these two, I find one or both is successful with achieving significant improvement in OCD.

Internal Family Systems

Internal Family Systems, also known as IFS, is an approach to therapy that considers the mind to be naturally made up of “parts”. With IFS, our parts are understood in the ways they take on different roles (such as an inner critic or as an addiction) and also consist of wounded parts and painful feelings like anger and shame. The goal of IFS is to help us access “Self” in order to heal wounded parts and bring the mind back into balance.

IFS is a non-pathologizing approach to therapy that helps to generate both inner and outer connectedness. I often use this approach in combination with EMDR (see description below).

EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy approach designed for working with distressing or traumatic life events. The theory behind EMDR is that many psychological difficulties are the result of distressing life experiences that have not been stored in our memory properly and are said to be unprocessed or blocked.

Normal memories are stored by a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which catalogues (processes) events and stores them in the right place. However, some traumatic events are so overwhelming that the hippocampus doesn’t do its job properly. When this happens, memories are stored in their raw, unprocessed form. These trauma memories are easily triggered, leading them to replay and cause distress over and over again.

With EMDR, and through an action referred to as “bi-lateral stimulation”, we reprocess traumatic memories so they no longer have an emotional charge for us. This also helps relieve symptoms associated with the emotional charge, such as anxiety, panic attacks, depression, nightmares, avoidant behavior and flashbacks.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)