Individual Therapy (CBT)

Are you feeling…

Are you struggling with constant work stress? Does it feel like you can never be enough for your partner or family? Do you have chest tightness or sometimes feel like it is difficult to get a full breath? Have you noticed that you often feel

irritated, angry, or sad?

Do you want…

Do you want to learn how to reprioritize yourself? Do you want to feel calmer within yourself? To no longer feel that familiar tightness in your chest? To learn how to set healthy boundaries with yourself and others? To feel more understood by your partner and/or family?

CBT is an empirically validated form of individual therapy that focuses on how your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are interconnected. The key components to this approach in our sessions will consist of Cognitive Restructuring, Emotional Activation, and Skill-building.

You may be experiencing anxiety, anger outbursts, or difficulties in relationships and our beliefs, feelings, and behaviors affect your current experiences. If you want relief, cognitive restructuring is a very useful tool to provide you with support, new perspective, and a growth mindset. If you’re noticing that the majority of your patterns are in relation to your partner, it may be more effective to instead being couples therapy.

My approach to skill-building emphasizes the importance of learning how to apply skills during emotional activation. You may have tried box-breathing, 5-senses technique, and other generalized forms of skill-based therapy with little benefit. Your frustration with this is valid, because an important step in this process may be missing— learning how to use skills while in the actual emotional experience. We will learn how to de-acitivate the amygdala during emotional activation, so that your prefrontal cortex can begin to work as it is designed.

Maladaptive behavioral patterns

Have you ever had good intentions with yourself or a relationship and only later realized that it had a negative effect? This is a common phenomenon that creates patterns of feeling misunderstood, disappointed, and confused. When these tough feelings come about you either react with distancing or pursuing the goal, the relationship, or the feelings themselves. In the short-term, this is a highly effective strategy to not having to feel uncomfortable. However, you may have noticed that this short-term strategy causes long-term discomfort and dissatisfaction. Although you feel trapped in this ongoing cycle, there is a way to make effective changes so that you can lead the life you want to live.

Emotional Regulation Difficulties

You may currently being framing your experience with broad terms (e.g., anxiety, depression, panic attacks, infidelity, stomach ulcers) which may actually be unintentional perpetuating the cycle of your discomfort. When you have a broad label for complex feelings, it can create a sense of helplessness and that this feeling is happening to you as opposed to something you’re experiencing. The common first step in adjusting this tendency is to become more effective identifiers of the feeling continuum. Are you feelings frustrated or enraged? Are you feeling tension in your chest or are you actually experiencing a panic attack? Are you never happy or do you have some tough days that feel hopeless.

You may feel unsafe when experiencing intense or overwhelming emotions. Herein lies the challenge in being able to effectively apply skill-learning to our lives. Your experiences may have taught you that exposing emotions to self or others is unwise or even dangerous. The trust that we build in our time working together will allow for you to restructure this belief and minimize the way in which you may generalize this belief about others. There may be people in your life that it is wise to continue maintain emotional distance with, but you’ve realized this adaptation has negative impacts on relationships that you’d like to feel more connected to.

Emotional safety is of upmost importance to improve emotional regulation so that you can take back control of your own life. You will be able to dive into foreign feelings and restructure your assumptions about them and your experiences of them (e.g., they’re dangerous, no one cares about them, I will stay stuck in these feelings and something bad will happen). Whatever feelings that are keeping you stuck in cycles can be restructured and de-activated with persistence, vulnerability, and trust.

It’s time to redefine your experiences with your own emotions, improve your sense of self, and the relationships in your life.

What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?