Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a highly effective and powerful approach that helps you break free from negative thinking patterns and limiting beliefs that are keeping you stuck feeling anxious or bad about yourself. It is one of the most well researched and scientifically supported therapeutic approaches of our time. You will leave having newfound perspectives and concrete, practical tools you can use in your day-to-day life to conquer anxiety, worry, overthinking, panic attacks, negative self-talk, low self-esteem, body image, or eating concerns.

Schema Therapy allows us to go deeper. It incorporates therapeutic work surrounding impactful past experiences and unmet emotional needs. It helps us uncover deeply ingrained emotional patterns and self-beliefs that have developed as a result of your past experiences and may be strongly impacting you on a daily basis without your awareness. It also helps us detect and recognize unhelpful coping patterns you may be unknowingly using in response to underlying emotions and self-beliefs, such as being overly self-critical, detaching emotionally, avoiding people or activities, punishing yourself, overcompensating, or suppressing your own emotional needs in order to please or satisfy others. Schema Therapy helps us process the experiences that led to the origin of these self-beliefs and coping patterns on a deep level that helps you heal from within. In my experience, Schema Therapy can be even more profoundly effective than traditional CBT alone.

In contrast to CBT, which focuses on restructuring the negative thinking patterns that give rise to distressing emotions, mindfulness approaches take a completely different route – they help you become more aware of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the present moment without judgment. They help you learn to notice, observe, and accept your inner experiences without getting overwhelmed or caught up in them. By cultivating this awareness and acceptance of your emotional experiences, you can better manage stress, anxiety, and difficult emotions, leading to greater well-being, self-understanding, and inner peace. Mindfulness based interventions also have a solid backing of scientific support, and for some clients mindfulness techniques can be a better fit and a more effective approach.

Attachment Theory helps us address relational aspects of your concerns. Attachment Theory is not a therapy approach in and of itself but rather a theory that helps us understand how our early childhood experiences set a blueprint for our later relationships, and how these early experiences impact our current relationships with others. Early experiences also impact the extent to which we are aware of and able to express our emotions and emotional needs, the extent to which we trust that our emotional needs will be met by others, as well as our ability to be attuned and responsive to the emotions and emotional needs of others. As we work through how attachment aspects manifest in your current relationships, you’ll be able to fine tune ways to build more secure attachments and stronger relationships.

CPT is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy that was developed specifically for the treatment of trauma. When you experience traumatic events, it can leave you feeling powerless, unsafe, and make it difficult to trust or connect with others. You may feel constantly on edge and like there’s danger all around you (called hypervigilence). CPT helps you process the damaging effect that the trauma has had on you and on how you see and feel about yourself, others, and the world around you. One of the reasons I stand by this approach is that in addition to being highly effective, it minimizes as much as possible the amount that you’ll have to talk about details of the trauma to avoid re-traumatization.

Trauma-Informed Care is an approach that recognizes the impact of trauma, and emphasizes creating an environment of safety, trust, and empowerment. This approach involves us being sensitive to your unique experiences, prioritizing open communication, having a collaborative approach, and involving you in making decisions about your care so you feel in control. Trauma-Informed Care seeks to create a supportive atmosphere that empowers you to rebuild a sense of control, safety, and security.