My General Approach
I work with adults 18 and older who are seeking to be in good relationship with their emotions.
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In my experiences as a therapist, I find that being out of sorts with our emotions can lead to a lot of dissatisfaction in life. A lack of emotions can lead to depression, lack of motivation, feeling stuck, difficulty connecting to loved ones, and overall dissatisfaction. Large overwhelming emotions can manifest as anxiety, emotional outbursts, anger, feeling overwhelmed, difficulty concentrating, sleep disturbances, engaging in an eating disorder, OCD, panic attacks, and many more.
Our emotions are a wonderful part of our human experience when we interact with them well. They can tell us what is happening in our environment and give us insight to respond to our situations. Emotions are also the key to processing and understanding our past.
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​My goal with you, my client, is to give you the skills and insights to interact with and manage your emotions. You can be fully integrated with yourself and, with a now whole heart, get to live a more full life.
Anxiety
When someone is anxious, they enter their fight or flight response due to a perceived threat. This could be coming from their environment or their own thoughts/past experiences. If the anxiety is intense enough, the first tool to use is coping and grounding skills. After that, the focus turns to interacting with the anxiety to see what it is trying to tell you. Then, we can choose how to interact with it.
This approach works for anxiety due to work, relationships, self-confidence, beliefs due to past experiences, and all other forms of seemingly random anxiety
Depression
When addressing depression, it is important to assess its severity. At its more intense levels, a person can not out-think depression, they have to outdo it. So we work on ways to get the body jump-started back into doing enjoyable activities, valued activities, and routine activities.
Depression is usually a coping skill for anxiety. When our body is too tired from experiencing anxiety, it turns off our emotions and we enter depression. We first need to be able to rest and recover from the anxiety and then address the anxiety.
PTSD/Trauma
There are two goals for PTSD. The first is to receive the tools to reduce and eventually stop dissociations when a person relives their trauma. The second goal is to process the emotions/thoughts tied to the trauma that are still impacting a person, leading to continued emotional distress. This sometimes means talking about the trauma directly. Most of the time, it's looking at the emotions in daily life that don’t make sense or are out of proportion. Then, we see how the trauma has impacted those experiences and emotions. And then, we address the emotional impacts on their lives.
Couples Therapy
Couples therapy focuses on two simple but not easy concepts: the couple's ability to communicate effectively and apologize.
A lot goes into communicating effectively, including knowing your partner's love languages, calling a time out, being able to actively listen, and being curious about your partner's emotions, to name a few.
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The reality is that no one is perfect at communicating, especially with their partner. That is where the second concept of apologizing comes in.
Couples therapy can be difficult and uncomfortable, but the relationship can grow if both people are willing to put in the work.
OCD
OCD and anxiety can frequently get mixed up. For a person to be diagnosed with OCD, they need to both have obsessions (thoughts that are there more times than not) and compulsions (actions or thoughts that are done to reduce the emotional distress connected to the obsessions). The need to do the compulsion creates a feedback loop that confirms the emotional distress response from the obsession. By using an intervention called Exposure Response Prevention (ERP), we can retrain the brain to not do the compulsion to find relief from the obsession.
Eating Disorders
Eating disorder behaviors are ways to cope with intense emotions. When a client can work with a dietitian to nourish their body, and with me to address their emotions, they can find relief from eating disorder behaviors.
Eating disorders need to be taken seriously as they are the second leading cause of death in the mental health field after opioid use. Whether the behavior is restricting or purging, if the body does not receive enough energy from food, there can be many health complications, including cardiac arrest.
It can be a long journey to find relief from eating disorder behaviors. Eating disorders are two sides of the same coin, where appropriate nutrition is necessary for cognitive function, but also receiving appropriate nutrition leads to emotional distress due to the fear of weight gain.