Treatment Approach

You may be wondering what “Wise Mind” means and the importance of moving closer to it in your everyday living. Wise Mind is a concept from Dialectical Behavior Therapy that essentially describes the place where one’s “reasonable mind” and “emotional mind” overlap. It is the part of each individual that can know and experience truth and is more difficult to achieve than one might think! Although it is easy to naturally operate from either a place of reason or emotion, we often miss the forest for the trees and fail to take into account the bigger picture. Tapping into Wise Mind or finding the “middle path” is often challenging because we often tend to over-function in either mind depending on our personality traits and the problems we are experiencing. The good news is we can all learn to live a more balanced and meaningful life with daily practice and a commitment to making decisions based on our values. 

I consider myself to be a “Third Wave Cognitive Behavioral Therapist” who conceptualizes from a humanistic and relational perspective to understand an individual’s unique experience. This essentially means that while I take a goal-oriented approach in treatment, instead of focusing strictly on challenging one’s maladaptive thought patterns that lead to emotional distress, I work to help clients relate differently to their internal experiences and psychological symptoms. In other words, instead of focusing on simply “eliminating symptoms”, I am more interested in helping individuals feel more at ease with both themselves and the world in which they live leading to a more meaningful existence.

I work from the perspective that experiencing both emotional and physical pain is inevitable in life; however, suffering in one’s pain can be optional if we choose to change our relationship with it. My aim in therapy is to guide individuals in learning how to cope more effectively with life’s struggles by taking a “present-focused approach” and help them develop a repertoire of acceptance and changed based skills and strategies.

I also recognize that no two people are the same and not all clients respond the same way to a specific approach. I am trained in the following treatment modalities:

  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

  • Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy (IBCT)

  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

  • Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT)

  • Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

  • Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)

  • Interpersonal Psychotherapy (ITP)

  • Mindfulness-Based Therapies

  • Motivational Interviewing & Motivational Enhancement (MI, MET)

  • Trauma Focused Therapies