Therapies I Practice

Evidence-based therapy means using therapeutic approaches that have been carefully studied and shown to be effective for the concerns you’re experiencing. This provides a foundation for treatment while allowing therapy to be tailored to your individual needs, goals, and experiences. Together, we can use approaches that are supported by research while creating a compassionate, collaborative space where you feel understood and supported.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a comprehensive, evidence-based psychotherapy originally developed for people struggling with suicidality, self-harm, and other impulsive or destructive behaviors. In my practice, I use DBT to treat emotion dysregulation, PMDD, and Borderline Personality Disorder.

For a comprehensive overview of DBT, please visit the Behavioral Tech website.

Comprehensive DBT

I offer Comprehensive DBT, which means that treatment includes four components:

  1. Weekly individual therapy
    Weekly individual psychotherapy sessions focused on helping you manage intense emotions, build effective coping strategies, and apply DBT skills to the challenges you are facing in your everyday life.

  2. Weekly DBT skills group
    DBT skills groups provide an opportunity to learn and practice skills alongside other people participating in DBT. The group covers four core areas of DBT: Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, Interpersonal Effectiveness, and Mindfulness. These skills can help you tolerate distress and navigate emotional crises, manage painful or difficult emotions, strengthen relationships, and increase awareness and mindfulness. When you join my practice, I will help you identify a DBT skills group in the community to attend for the duration of your treatment.

  3. As-needed phone coaching
    Phone coaching provides in-the-moment support to help you use DBT skills in your day-to-day life when you are struggling with a problem or navigating a difficult situation. The goal is to help you apply what you are learning in therapy when you need it most.

  4. Weekly DBT consultation team
    I participate in a weekly DBT consultation team with other DBT therapists. This helps me stay adherent to the DBT model, continue developing my clinical skills, and make sure I am able to provide you with the highest-quality treatment possible.

Starting DBT

If you are interested in DBT, we will first meet for 3–4 pretreatment sessions. These sessions give us an opportunity to determine whether DBT is a good fit for you, establish your treatment goals, discuss expectations and commitments involved in DBT, and develop a treatment plan. The length of treatment is individualized, but typically ranges from 6 months to 1 year.

Individual DBT Skills Coaching

For clients who already have an outside individual therapist, I offer 1-on-1 DBT skills coaching as an alternative to participating in a DBT skills group.

Individual skills coaching follows a similar structure to a DBT skills group. We work through the four core DBT skills modules—Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, Interpersonal Effectiveness, and Mindfulness—with an emphasis on learning, practicing, and applying these skills to your everyday life.

This option allows you to receive structured DBT skills training while continuing your individual therapy with your existing therapist.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a structured, evidence-based psychotherapy that focuses on the relationship between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. CBT can help you understand patterns that may be contributing to emotional distress and develop practical strategies for making meaningful changes in your everyday life. In my practice, I tend to take a behavioral approach to CBT, with added cognitive components when appropriate and helpful.

What does CBT look like in session?

CBT is collaborative and practical. Together, we will identify patterns that may be maintaining or worsening your symptoms and work toward changing those patterns. Depending on your needs and goals, treatment may include:

  • Behavioral activation: Increasing engagement in activities that provide a sense of pleasure, accomplishment, connection, or meaning, particularly when your mental health has made it difficult to do the things that usually matter to you.

  • Reducing avoidance: Identifying ways that avoidance, withdrawal, or other behaviors may provide short-term relief while unintentionally maintaining anxiety or low mood over time.

  • Exposure and approaching instead of avoiding: Gradually practicing ways of facing situations, thoughts, or experiences that have become associated with anxiety or fear.

  • Behavioral strategies for anxiety: Learning skills to respond differently to worry and anxiety rather than allowing them to dictate your behavior.

  • Cognitive strategies: Identifying unhelpful thinking patterns and developing more flexible and balanced ways of responding to difficult thoughts.

  • Problem-solving and coping: Developing practical strategies for navigating the real-life challenges that can accompany life transitions.

Starting CBT

We will begin by getting to know you, understanding what brings you to therapy, and identifying the patterns that may be contributing to your current difficulties. Together, we will establish treatment goals and develop a plan that is tailored to your needs.

The length and structure of CBT will depend on your goals, concerns, and progress in treatment. Throughout therapy, we will regularly evaluate what is working and make adjustments as needed.

Prolonged Exposure

Prolonged Exposure (PE) is an evidence-based treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other trauma-related difficulties. PE is based on the understanding that, after a traumatic experience, it is natural to want to avoid reminders of what happened. While avoidance can provide relief in the short term, it can also keep trauma-related fear, anxiety, and distress going over time.

PE helps you gradually and safely approach memories, situations, and feelings that you have been avoiding because they are connected to a traumatic experience. Through repeated practice, you can learn that trauma reminders are not necessarily dangerous in the present and develop greater confidence in your ability to tolerate difficult emotions and memories.

What does Prolonged Exposure look like in therapy?

PE is a structured treatment that typically includes two primary forms of exposure:

  1. In vivo exposure
    Together, we identify situations, places, activities, or experiences that you have been avoiding because they remind you of the trauma or trigger fear and anxiety. We develop a gradual plan for approaching these situations safely and intentionally, rather than continuing to avoid them.

  2. Imaginal exposure
    During sessions, you will be guided to revisit and describe the traumatic memory in detail. This process allows you to practice staying present with the memory and the emotions it brings up rather than relying on avoidance. Over time, repeated processing of the memory can help reduce its emotional intensity and the sense of current threat associated with it.

PE also includes psychoeducation, breathing and grounding strategies, and ongoing assessment of your symptoms and progress. Throughout treatment, we will work collaboratively and at a pace that allows you to engage meaningfully with the treatment while maintaining a sense of safety and control.

Starting Prolonged Exposure

We will begin with an assessment to understand your symptoms, your history, and your goals for treatment and to determine whether PE is an appropriate treatment for you. We will also discuss what PE involves and what you can expect from treatment before beginning exposure exercises.

PE is an active treatment that requires your participation both during and between sessions. Although approaching trauma-related memories and situations can be difficult, you will not be asked to simply “get over” what happened or face everything at once. We will work collaboratively to identify appropriate treatment targets and develop a gradual plan for addressing the avoidance that is keeping you stuck.

The goal of PE is not to erase your memories or make you forget what happened. Instead, treatment aims to help you regain a greater sense of freedom and choice in your life, so that your past experiences no longer have to determine what you can do, where you can go, or how you respond to reminders of what happened.

Cognitive Processing Therapy

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is an evidence-based treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other trauma-related difficulties. CPT is based on the understanding that after a traumatic experience, it is common to develop beliefs about yourself, other people, or the world that can contribute to ongoing distress.

For some people, trauma can change the way they understand safety, trust, control, self-worth, or relationships. You may find yourself thinking things like, “I should have known,” “I should have done something differently,” “I can't trust anyone,” or “The world isn't safe.” These thoughts can feel like facts, particularly after something traumatic has happened.

CPT helps you examine these beliefs, understand how they developed, and determine whether they are still serving you. The goal is not to convince you that what happened was okay or to replace difficult thoughts with artificially positive ones. Instead, treatment helps you develop a more balanced and flexible understanding of what happened and how it affects your life today.

What does Cognitive Processing Therapy look like?

CPT is a structured, skills-based treatment that typically takes place over approximately 12 sessions. In therapy, we will work together to:

  • Understand your trauma response: Learn how PTSD symptoms can develop and how avoidance and unhelpful beliefs can keep symptoms going.

  • Identify stuck points: Recognize thoughts and beliefs related to the trauma that are contributing to ongoing distress or making it difficult to move forward.

  • Examine your beliefs: Evaluate whether your thoughts are based on the available evidence and consider alternative ways of understanding what happened.

  • Address common trauma-related themes: We may explore beliefs related to safety, trust, power and control, esteem, and intimacy, depending on your experience.

  • Develop more balanced perspectives: Practice thinking about the trauma and its aftermath in ways that acknowledge what happened while allowing for greater flexibility, self-compassion, and engagement in your present life.

CPT involves active participation both in and outside of sessions. You will have opportunities to practice the skills you are learning and apply them to situations in your everyday life.

Starting CPT

We will begin with an assessment to understand your symptoms, history, and goals for treatment and to determine whether CPT is a good fit for you. We will also discuss what treatment involves and what you can expect before beginning.

CPT is an active and collaborative treatment. You will be asked to practice the skills and strategies we develop together between sessions, and we will regularly assess your progress throughout treatment.

The goal of CPT is not to change the facts of what happened or tell yourself that the trauma “wasn't that bad.” Instead, treatment helps you develop a more flexible understanding of the experience so that you can move forward without being as constrained by the beliefs and patterns that developed in response to it.

Exposure and Response Prevention

Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is an evidence-based treatment for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). ERP is particularly effective for perinatal OCD, a form of OCD that occurs during pregnancy or the postpartum period and often involves intrusive, unwanted thoughts or images related to the baby, pregnancy, childbirth, or the possibility of something going wrong.

Perinatal OCD can be especially distressing because the thoughts often focus on things that matter deeply to you. You may experience frightening thoughts or images about accidentally or intentionally harming your baby, your baby becoming ill or dying, making a mistake that causes harm, contamination, childbirth, or whether you are a “good enough” parent.

What does ERP look like?

ERP focuses on helping you change your relationship with unwanted thoughts, feelings, and uncertainty rather than trying to eliminate the thoughts themselves.

Together, we will identify the situations, thoughts, sensations, or uncertainties that trigger your OCD and the behaviors you use to reduce the anxiety they create. These behaviors—called compulsions—can be obvious, such as checking, researching, avoiding, or repeatedly seeking reassurance. They can also be less visible, such as mentally reviewing an event, analyzing whether a thought “means something,” trying to replace a thought with a better one, or repeatedly checking how you feel.

Treatment involves two interconnected components:

  1. Exposure
    We gradually and intentionally practice approaching situations, thoughts, or uncertainties that trigger your OCD. Exposures are individualized to your symptoms and treatment goals and are designed to help you learn that you can experience uncertainty and anxiety without needing to respond to them with compulsive behaviors.

  2. Response prevention
    During and after exposure, we practice resisting the compulsive behaviors that OCD tells you will make you feel safer. This might mean reducing reassurance seeking, checking, avoidance, mental review, or other rituals. Over time, you can learn that anxiety and uncertainty are tolerable and that you do not need to perform compulsions to cope with them.

Starting ERP

We will begin with an assessment to understand your symptoms, history, and goals and to determine whether ERP is an appropriate treatment for you. We will also identify the specific obsessions and compulsions that are maintaining your OCD cycle.

ERP is an active, collaborative treatment, and much of the progress comes from practicing between sessions. We will develop an individualized treatment plan and work through exposures gradually and intentionally. You will never be asked to do an exposure simply because it is difficult; each exercise will have a specific purpose related to breaking the OCD cycle.

The goal of ERP is not to get rid of every intrusive thought or guarantee that nothing bad will happen. Instead, treatment helps you become less controlled by OCD so that you can spend less time checking, avoiding, analyzing, and seeking reassurance—and more time being present for the people and experiences that matter to you.