What to Expect From Counseling
Guiding You On the Path of Self-Healing
The overall goal of psychological therapy is to decrease troubling symptoms (like anxiety, depression or addictive behaviors) and cultivate skills that will help you manage your thoughts, emotions and relationships. We would also love to help you increase your self-awareness, self-understanding and self-compassion if that is within your treatment goals.
The first appointment is a 60-minute semi-structured initial consultation for the purpose of assessing your presenting concerns, making a diagnosis of your symptoms and working collaboratively to develop a treatment plan. The assessment and treatment planning process will continue for about 2-4 sessions and will often include your own self-monitoring of symptoms, feelings and thoughts. Once target concerns and appropriate interventions are identified, we can begin working toward treatment goals in a semi-structured way.
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​What might your therapy goals be? Initial goals of counseling are often focused on learning a variety of techniques specifically tailored to you that can help you respond to and decrease troubling symptoms. Another goal is to increase your self-awareness, including awareness of what’s triggering your symptoms and why, so that you can be empowered to develop your own inner psychologist. As you get really good at this with the help of your personal therapeutic ally - your therapist - awareness of relationship and behavior patterns that affect your life will start to become clear.
Once you are aware of your triggers and patterns, we can begin to work on them with our empirically validated treatment interventions. Our favorite interventions include Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Interpersonal Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy, Mindfulness/Meditation strategies and various forms of trauma therapy.
If traumatic events or dysfunctional family dynamics in a client's history are identified as a source of problematic patterns, trauma therapy can be employed to help resolve these issues. Many effective treatments exist for this, including Cognitive Processing Therapy, Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Somatic Experiencing and EMDR Therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).
You always have the option to select and/or refuse any aspects of treatment based on your own interests and preferences. Our psychologists encourage open dialogue and active client participation in the formation of treatment goals. Regardless of the particular path you choose, we are so happy to accompany you on this journey to wellness!