top of page

Services

I believe in working in a collaborative manner with my clients to enable positive outcomes, taking a person-centered and solution-focused approach to understand which treatment options will be best for you. I work therapeutically with clients of all ages, including adults and adolescents with mood disorders and behavioural issues, and use a blend of evidence-based interventions with mindfulness therapy to not just treat symptoms, but help my clients take control of their lives. 

Issues Treated

  • Eating disorders

  • Disordered Eating

  • Anxiety Disorders

  • Mood Disorders

  • Depression

  • Low Self-Esteem

  • Relationship Issues

  • Challenges with Stress

  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

  • Panic Disorder

  • Addictive Behaviors

  • Emotional Regulation Problems

Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT is a revolutionary behaviorally based psychotherapy that helps us to step out of harmful patterns of action and entanglement with painful thoughts, so that we might move forward with courage towards lives of meaning, purpose and vitality. It has been widely studied and has a strong evidence base for the treatment of depression, anxiety and a host of other problems.

​

Developed within a coherent theoretical and philosophical framework, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a unique empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility means contacting the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values.

​

ACT illuminates the ways that language entangles us in futile attempts to wage war against our own inner lives.

​

Through metaphor, paradox, and experiential exercises we can learn how to make healthy contact with thoughts, feelings, memories, and physical sensations that have been feared and avoided. We can gain the skills to recontextualize and accept these private events, develop greater clarity about personal values, and commit to needed behavior change.

​

(Adapted from the website of ACBS, the Association For Contextual Behavioral Science)

Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT)

Shame and self-criticism make things difficult for people with a range of different problems. People who intensely experience them may struggle to feel relieved, reassured or safe. This lack of emotional safeness can cause difficulty in living rewarding lives.

​

Research suggests that a specialized emotion regulation system underpins feelings of reassurance, safeness and well-being. It is believed to have evolved with human attachment systems and, in particular, with the ability to register and respond with calming and a sense of well-being to being cared for. We experience this emotion system as a felt sense of compassion. This compassion can be directed at others, but it also can be aimed towards ourselves.

In CFT it is hypothesized that this emotion regulation system is poorly accessible in people with high shame and self-criticism, in whom the ‘threat detection’ based emotion regulation system dominates their orientation to their inner and outer worlds.

​

CFT is an integrated and multimodal approach that draws from evolutionary, social, developmental and Buddhist psychology, and neuroscience. One of its key concerns is to use compassionate mind training to help people develop and work with experiences of inner warmth, safeness and soothing, via compassion and self-compassion.

​

(Above adapted from the writings of CFT founder, Paul Gilbert)

Mindfulness In Therapy

In therapy, it is useful to develop our capacity to observe but not be overwhelmed by our experience, be that thoughts, feelings or bodily sensations (for example clenched fists, butterflies in your stomach, or hunched and tense shoulders). This capacity to observe is like building specific muscles at the gym - it doesn't happen straightaway, but benefits accrue from consistent practice.

​

Mindfulness in therapy is finding a balance between being physically relaxed on the one hand, and paying close and careful attention to experience on the other. Your therapist is there with you in this relaxed observing so you can notice what's going on and not be all alone with it. With acceptance and compassion you observe from some distance. This means the raw data is being clearly seen, without being censored it or filtering it out.

 

This experience can be restful and helps gain peace of mind. It can also help to listen to yourself - your real self. It is invaluable to escape all the passing influences and reconnect with one's true thoughts and feelings.

Ready to begin?

Contact me to discuss how we can begin your therapeutic journey.

bottom of page