Mental Health Counseling

If you are struggling with common mental health issues like depression or anxiety, mental health counseling can help you find strategies to address these conditions and improve your energy, hope, confidence and vitality.

Counseling can also help you deal with relationship challenges such as difficulties with trust, intimacy, guilt, forgiveness, or abandonment, or healing from a divorce or break-up. Talking with a counselor is especially helpful if you are trying to decide whether to end a relationship or to work to save it.

Counseling is also helpful when you need support during a difficult life transition. You might not have a true mental health “disorder”, but you may feel overwhelmed by life problems, and as a result, you experience worry, anxiety, depression or confusion. Mental health counseling can provide you with a safe supportive environment to work through these challenges, help you to clarify your options and goals, and make decisions about your future direction.

You can benefit from counseling if you are:

• Facing an important life decision, such as whether to relocate or change jobs
• Experiencing high levels of stress in your personal life or in your job
• Struggling in relationships with family members, friends or coworkers
• Adjusting to unwelcome life changes, such as a new medical condition or job loss
• Coping with challenging life circumstances, such as caregiving for family members or dealing with ongoing health issues
• Overwhelmed with grief or loss of any kind

Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is mental health treatment that goes deeper than counseling. Psychotherapy is helpful when you want to work on the core issues, long-standing problems, and painful recurring life themes that interfere with your wellbeing and your relationships.

Psychotherapy is the go-to treatment for trauma and abuse, and for resolving problematic interpersonal patterns like co-dependence, attachment disorders, and issues related to childhood maltreatment, abandonment and neglect.

Psychotherapy is also the most effective treatment for complex interwoven mental health conditions – for example, ADHD with co-occuring anxiety; complex-PTSD with ongoing attachment struggles while coping with health problems; or depression triggered by a job loss or divorce while caregiving for an aging parent who was emotionally abusive in our childhood.

I have specialized in this type of psychotherapy for the past 20 years. While my therapeutic approach to psychotherapy is informed by many theories and modalities, most often I use Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT), Emotion-Focused Therapy for Complex Trauma (C-EFT), and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), as well as weaving in other techniques such as narrative therapy, schema therapy, and attachment therapy when appropriate. The approach that I select depends on your specific problems, your goals, and your personality style.

If you are using alcohol or another substance (or behavior) to cope with the difficulties in your life, we can explore the impact of the substance use on your life and whether you want to make changes in this area. Motivational Interviewing and Cognitive-Behavioral therapy (CBT), both evidence-based practices, are the treatment approaches I use to help clients with substance use issues, and I integrate the principles of 12-step recovery for clients who are benefiting from 12-step recovery communities.