Cognitive-Behavioral

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy 

At the foundation of CBT is the idea that there is a reciprocal relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The things we think affect what we do and what we feel. The things we do affect what we think and what we feel. The things we feel affect what we think and what we do. You can't change your feelings, but you can change how you respond to them. You can change how you behave in response to your feelings. You may feel like you're too exhausted to go to the grocery store, but you can choose to go anyway. You can also change how you think about your feelings. You may notice that your body feels heavy and depleted, but you know that you've been getting enough sleep. You can remind yourself that feeling fatigued is not the opposite of having energy and that sometimes it is more revitalizing to engage in actions than to rest. 

I take these principles of CBT and allow them to inform my practice, but I don't operate like a CBT therapist (impersonal and active) and I don't adhere to the strict guidelines of manualized CBT in which each session is structured. Also in contrast to traditional CBT, which is a present-oriented therapy, I help you to identify the origins of your thought-feeling-behavior patterns. I want to know why you think what you think. I want to know how interactions within your family has informed your system of beliefs about yourself, others, and the world. I will help you to separate rational from irrational ways of thinking. We will work together to correct the distortions in your thinking that reinforce destructive responses to emotions and self-defeating behavioral patterns. 

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy 

I apply Mindfulness-Based strategies to CBT. Mindfulness is the inherent human ability to become fully present and aware in real time of one's own thoughts, emotions, urges, and behaviors without being reactive. Achieving mindfulness involves the following steps: 1) identify your thoughts/feelings. Give a name to the feeling; 2) welcome the thought/feeling into your awareness. Trust that attempting to "fight" a feeling or a thought, either by avoiding or dismissing/invalidating, will just make it more unmanageable in time; 3) Ask yourself, have I had this thought/feeling before? Do I have this thought/feeling a lot? 4) Separate yourself from the thought/feeling. This is different from dissociation. When you are separating the thought/feeling, you are allowing it to exist on the edges of your awareness, or you are allowing it to "pass through" you, but you are not blocking it out completely.