Our Approach

When life gets harder, you can become disconnected from the things that matter most, even the most meaningful aspects of yourself. Maybe you feel stuck. The tools and coping strategies that have worked in the past don’t seem to be enough for this difficult situation with which you are now faced. We view challenges and hardships as opportunities – for growth, development, and insight.

We start by getting an understanding of the challenges you face in the context of your unique situation, priorities, and values. With this insight, we work together to develop a plan to help you reach your goals for therapy. We draw upon your strengths to help you move through life with a sense of purpose, fulfillment, and authenticity.

We believe in making the most of each session to help you evolve into the greatest version of yourself. Our approach to therapy is individualized and integrative, and may draw from the following types of therapy:

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT aims not to eliminate difficult feelings, but to be present with what life brings and to move toward valued behavior. ACT invites you to open up to unpleasant feelings, learn not to overreact to them, and not avoid situations where they are invoked. ACT helps you clarify personal values and to take action on them, bringing more vitality and meaning to your life in the process.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

CBT is based on the belief that thoughts, rather than people or events, cause negative feelings. CBT assists you in identifying, testing the reality of, and correcting dysfunctional beliefs underlying your thinking. CBT helps to modify those thoughts and the behaviors that flow from them.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

DBT helps to increase your interpersonal effectiveness and emotional and cognitive regulation by learning about the triggers that lead to reactive states, and by helping to assess which coping skills to apply in the sequence of events, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to help avoid undesired reactions.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)

EFT helps to identify emotions, learn to explore and experience them, to understand them and then to manage them. EFT embraces the idea that emotions can be changed, first by arriving at or ‘living’ the maladaptive emotion (e.g., loss, fear or shame) in session, and then learning to transform it.

Gestalt Therapy (GT)

GT seeks to integrate behaviors, feelings, and thinking, so your intentions and actions may be aligned for optimal mental health. GT helps you become more self-aware, to live more in the present, and to assume more responsibility for taking care of yourself.

Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy (MCP)

MCP is designed to diminish feelings of despair that can be associated with cancer and other life-altering illnesses by helping to focus on the importance of creating, reconnecting with, experiencing, and sustaining meaning in the face of illness and the reality of mortality.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

MBSR uses non-judgmental acceptance and investigation of present experience, including body sensations, internal mental states, thoughts, emotions, impulses and memories, in order to reduce stress and suffering, manage pain, and increase well-being. Through MBSR, attention skills are cultivated, emotional regulation is developed, and rumination and worry are significantly reduced.