About

My Approach

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT):

You may have heard of CBT. In case you haven’t, CBT stands for cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive is just a fancy way of saying “pertaining to your thoughts”. So in CBT, therapy is focused on looking into how your thoughts influence your feelings and your feelings influence your behaviors. Once we’ve identified the impact your thoughts have on your feelings and behaviors, we then work towards learning ways you could either shift your way of thinking, if it is in fact causing you to feel unpleasant emotions, and/or manage your unpleasant feelings by using various coping skills.

Exposure Response Prevention (ERP):

Simply put, ERP is a type of therapy where, under the therapist’s guidance, the clients gradually and repetitiously exposes themselves to things that they fear or things that cause them distress all while abstaining from engaging in distractions or compulsive behaviors. There’s much more to it than that, but much of the therapy is focused on engaging in exposure exercises with the belief that thoughtfully and systematically exposing you to things that make you feel distressed could lead to a reduction in OCD, social anxiety, and/or general anxiety related symptoms.

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT):

You may have heard of EMDR but that isn’t the only type of therapy you could use to address trauma. In CPT, therapy focuses on exploring, identifying, and challenging the beliefs a client has formed as a result of their traumatic experience(s). The goal is to challenge the beliefs, which could be significantly impacting how you behave. And since your beliefs and behaviors may be the thing(s) keeping you from experiencing the life you want to live, challenging beliefs, in the specific way that CPT does, could lead to a reduction in triggering trauma symptoms and could also lead to an increase in overall life satisfaction.

Written Exposure Therapy (WET):

It doesn’t stop there; CPT and EMDR aren’t the only types of therapy used to address trauma. WET has also been shown to be effective for some people experiencing trauma symptoms. The things that set WET apart from other trauma therapies is that it is approximately five sessions in length, a good majority of the session is spent writing [rather than talking], and there usually isn’t any homework to be completed in-between sessions. The way WET usually works is that you write about the vividly descriptive details of your traumatic event repetitively over five sessions. But that’s not all, some time is spent writing about how you feel the trauma event has impacted you and changed your life. And besides from writing, time will be spent educating you on how WET works, how you’ll be asked to approach it, all while receiving feedback from your therapist and them checking in with you to see how things have went or how they’re going.