Anxiety and Depression

Times of severe anxiety and depression are a normal part of the human experience. Every single one of us will go through these difficult seasons. If this is where you’re at right now, know that you’re not alone. It can be very frightening to find yourself overwhelmingly anxious or in a very dark place. Therapy is there to help. We will work together to bring you to a place where you can feel like yourself again.

So, whether you have been anxious for most of your life or find yourself in a season of acute anxiety; have always run on the more “down” side of things or feel stuck and recognize you cannot engage in the things that once gave you joy, therapy can help.

I use evidence based therapy modalities of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) to help you change the way you are thinking about your thoughts. How we think about our thoughts impacts everything that flows out of that immediate, split-second thought: our following emotions and then our actions. I use Acceptance, Commitment Therapy (ACT, a type of CBT) to help you explore your thoughts and reactions that, when thoughtfully considered, you may not agree with. These automatic thoughts can feel very powerful and it’s important to honor where they came from- your brain learned to think this way somewhere, most likely in your formative relationships. We may spend some time exploring the broken ways you began to understand yourself and the world based on these early relationships. The goal is to rewire these negative, automatic thoughts— to make the new automatic thoughts both more true and generally positive. Lastly, we then get to explore your values so you can begin to make decisions in line with what is most important to you- not your incorrect automatic thoughts.

In our work together we will move toward:

  • decreasing the intensity of these feelings through acceptance, mindfulness and understanding of yourself and/or the situation that brought you here

  • developing tools that you want to use outside of session

  • understanding yourself and what may have caused this difficult season

  • building a sense of self-awareness and self-compassion that enables you to be larger than the feeling, not for the feeling to be larger than you