My Approach

 ACT is an evidence-based therapy that focuses on helping clients behave and engage more consistently with their own values and have more meaningful experiences. Clients are taught to apply mindfulness and acceptance skills to troubling thoughts and emotions. Emotions and thoughts are considered as internal experiences. ACT works to enhance psychological flexibility through six core processes:  contacting the present moment, defusion from troubling thoughts and feelings, acceptance, self-as-context, values, and committed action.

Based on solid behavioral science, exposure therapy takes several forms for different purposes. All forms involve the concept that the avoidance of what causes anxiety makes it more debilitating and distressing in the long-term. By starting easy and working up to more difficult tasks, clients are empowered to willingly approach fear in situations that they hopelessly avoid. Approaching and opening to the experience of fear enables a process called inhibitory learning and may also result in habituation. The key mechanism, Inhibitory learning, helps the body recognize false alarms of danger and to shut down an over active fight or flight response. This reduces the severity and interference of symptoms in daily life. I provide the following types of Exposure therapies: Exposure and Response Prevention for OCD, Interoceptive Cue Exposure for Panic, Prolonged Exposure for PTSD, Social Exposures for Social Anxiety Disorder, and Exposures for phobias. 

Trauma does not always need to be revisited, but sometimes discussing the details of such an event in therapy is necessary. This is especially true for clients suffering from nightmares, flashbacks, and intrusive memories. If we think about disturbing traumatic memories as objects we stuff in a closet. Sometimes the closet is too full and cluttered that the door cannot be fully closed. Whenever we are reminded of trauma the door gets bumped and clothes and objects spill out. This leads to frantically trying to stuff the objects back in, and hopelessly guarding the door to make sure they do not spill out again. With PE, we do not try to get rid of these objects. Instead, we work organize the closet so the objects do not spill out. In addition to this, we learn calming techniques and start doing the activities and goals we used to care about.

Instead of digging up trauma, sometimes we need to work on what it means to us.  Specifically, the beliefs about ourselves, the world, and others that are formed following a traumatic event may need to be examined. Some of these beliefs may be helpful, but often there are some beliefs that prevent recovery, these are called stuck points. What this can look like are beliefs such as “I am broken and too damaged to recover,” “no one can be trusted,” and many others. With CPT we work to identify stuck points like these in different aspects of life such as safety, trust, power, control, esteem, and intimacy. We then work to challenge these stuck points and rework them into beliefs that are more helpful and less rigid.