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Individual Therapy
Individual therapy can empower you and lead you toward increased growth and overall well-being.
“The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of now.”
— Shannon L. Alder
What is Individual Therapy?
Individual therapy is one-on-one dialogue between therapist and client. Because of this format, these sessions are usually very personal and individualized. Through this supportive relationship, you can identify unhelpful thought patterns and behaviors that have kept you stuck, and discover your own strengths and internal resiliency to overcome them.
Isn’t Therapy Difficult?
Therapy can be difficult at times, especially when dealing with sensitive issues like trauma or abuse. However, it’s not good to ignore the issues you are having. By ignoring them, you are creating patterns that make it more difficult in the long-term. Therapy is not always easy but the reward is often freeing and life-changing.
What’s the Purpose?
Individual therapy sessions are where you have the opportunity to express your inner thoughts and concerns. You can talk openly about your fears and other feelings. An effective therapist will help you understand yourself better in order to conquer the difficulties you face and experience greater connection in life.
How Therapy Can Help
Therapy can help you achieve your goals, better understand yourself, build stronger relationships, improve your health, and find your path in life. In therapy, you’ll learn the skills you’ll need to find success in your everyday life.
Why Therapy?
There are many reasons why individual therapy might help you. Here are a few of the best ones.
Achieve Your Goals
For some people, mental distress and a lack of confidence keeps them from achieving their goals. You might feel scared to look for a new job, or take the needed steps to follow your dreams. Therapy can help you clarify your goals and set realistic steps to meet them.
Find Your Path
You might feel like something is holding you back from living the life you want. There may be something within you that’s keeping you from making a change, a fear of what the future holds, or anxiety about the unknown. Therapy can help you address this, and reconnect with your passion.
Understand Yourself
Your therapist’s job is to help you develop awareness of the patterns and themes that emerge in the stories you tell. They might offer guidance or recommendations, but it is not the role of a therapist to tell you what to do. Rather, we empower you to take action on your own.
Build Stronger Relationships
If you’re single or in a relationship, therapy can help you feel more connected to others and address areas where problems tend to arise by focusing on your role. Therapy can help you move past your insecurities and engage in more trusting relationships with others.
Improve Your Health
The link between mental and physical health is well-supported by research. How you act can determine how you feel, just as much as the other way around. This often occurs beneath your level of awareness, although bringing it to your attention can help you to take positive steps.
Receive Guidance & Direction
Therapists are trained to listen to you and to help you develop the tools and skills you’ll need for future success. By internalizing the skills you learn in therapy, you’ll be able to implement these tools when you need them most—especially after therapy ends.
Common Symptoms of Mental Distress
If any of the following symptoms prevent you from enjoying your daily life, you might benefit from therapy to address these issues.
Overwhelming Stress
Stress is a normal part of life, but if you find yourself overwhelmed by stress, or you feel like you have too many things to do or to cope with, therapy might help you. In some cases, you might find it difficult to breathe or impossible to rest. If untreated, these issues can lead to serious physical health concerns.
Addiction
Many times, an outward addiction—be it to substances, food, pornography, sex, gambling, etc.—is a symptom of an internal difficulty regulating emotions. Many people turn to their addictions as a way to distract or dissociate from the difficulties they face, or from the feeling of discomfort. This takes a toll on the entire family.
Anger
Anger, too, is a normal emotion. However, if you feel anger too intensely, too often, and act aggressively out of that feeling, you likely could use some support to better manage your irritation and rage. Especially when anger leads you to take violent or potentially harmful actions.
Intrusive Thoughts
Without paying too much attention to them, our thoughts have a way of taking over, shaping the way we see the world, and informing every action we take. It’s important to create change at the level of thought, so that we are not at the mercy of our thoughts, and we can learn to dispel unhelpful and untrue core beliefs.
Loss of Interest
Apathy is a common symptom of mental distress. While it may result in lethargy and a seeming sense of relaxation, the underlying truth might be more complicated and hurtful. If you’ve found you don’t have the same interest in the activities you like to do, that may be an indication of anxiety or depression.
Fatigue & Withdrawal
Fatigue is a common indicator of depression. It can cause you to sleep more than usual or have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. In addition, social withdrawal from other people is a key indicator for anxiety or other mood disorders. Therapy can help you better understand those feelings and deal with them confidently.
When your therapist works from a treatment perspective that is individualized to fit your needs, you’ll develop the confidence to find success in your daily life.
Our Paths Toward Healing:
Strengths-Based & Person-Centered Therapy
What is It?
This type of therapy focuses more on a person’s strengths rather than their issues or problems and practices unconditional positive regard. This is a much more individualized approach, helping to motivate you for change.
How It Works
Through emphasizing personal strengths and abilities, de-emphasizing past mistakes, recognizing personal efforts to improve, and goal-setting for the future, this type of therapy aims to inspire you to achieve more.
How It Can Help
By developing more confidence in yourself to create meaningful change & experience yourself as capable and ‘good’ you can replace old narratives of yourself as defective, worthless or stuck, & see yourself in a new light.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
What is CBT?
CBT is an approach to therapy that focuses on the connection between thoughts, feelings and behaviors. From this model, we talk about how powerful our thoughts and our behaviors are in affecting our emotional state. In CBT clients are encouraged to target both their negative automatic thoughts, and to move their body in ways that increase their mood.
How It Works
First, you identify the negative or unhelpful thoughts in order to understand your thought process. Once you have discovered a negative thought, the next step is to challenge that thought by evaluating it—often, the thoughts are not based in reality. Finally, the goal is to replace negative and unhelpful thoughts with more realistic ones.
How CBT Can Help
Working with a therapist, you can identify problematic negative thoughts and their power to shape our reality, and work to replace them with more realistic and adaptive ones.
In the future, you’ll be able to use this skill on your own, slowly changing your negative thoughts to positive ones, and giving yourself a much more positive outlook on life.
Motivational Enhancement Therapy (MET)
What is MET?
MET is a therapy approach that helps individuals access their internal motivation for change. MET is built on the principle that humans don’t do things unless it is benefitting them in some way. All behavior, including substance use, can be thought of in this way. Therapy of this kind works to explore and reorganize those benefits.
How It Works
After raising awareness about a problem and the ways that it is no longer benefiting you, we can help you decide to do something different, and feel confident. MET therapists continue to rely on your agency to create change in your own life, and see their role as one of encouragement and pointing you in the right direction.
How MET Can Help
Understanding the challenges you face from a different perspective, one that is understanding and nonjudgemental, can help you to move forward more aligned with the goals you actually want for yourself. You will feel less fearful of the process of change, and confident that your actions are representative of your values.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
What is DBT?
DBT is a comprehensive and evidenced-based treatment that integrates mindfulness and skills training that can create profound and lasting change. It helps those struggling with managing their emotions, feelings of emptiness, impulsive and self-harm behaviors, among others.
How It Works
In DBT, we learn how to embrace seemingly opposite ideas together, beginning with balancing our efforts to change things as well as accepting things as they are. In DBT, you will learn skills in emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, mindfulness and distress tolerance.
How DBT Can Help
The overall goal in DBT is to create a “life worth living”, a life you really want. This involves learning and refining skills that change behavioral, emotional, and thinking patterns associated with problems that cause misery and distress. DBT is a powerful tool for those who learn to use it.
Solution-Focused Therapy
What is It?
Solution focused therapy is primarily focused on finding solutions to problems rather than dragging up old wounds from the past. It’s a short-term intervention that aims to quickly generate workable solutions and relieve clients of their current distress.
How It Works
Solution focused therapy tends not to involve pulling apart the details of the problem, or understanding the underlying issues that led to the formation of the problem. Solutions tend to be related to your personal strengths or skills that you already have.
How It Can Help
Solution-focused therapy can provide hope and a respite from a distressful situation. As you begin to see changes in your life, this often gives you the clarity you need to move forward, rather than to stay trapped in the past.