Many people experience traumatic events, but for some, that trauma significantly affects their stress levels and overall quality of life long after the danger has subsided. We refer to this as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. When you experience PTSD, the effects of a prior negative experience may overwhelm your body, mind, and emotions, often wreaking havoc in your nervous system. Traumatic experiences are stored in the body, resulting in changes in the brain and cascading down to changes on a cellular and chemical level. The traumatic event might have passed, but your body and mind still behave as if the traumatic event is happening now.

PTSD is very common; in fact, post-traumatic stress is a natural response to a negative experience that was too intense to be processed at the time it occurred. During the traumatic event, your fight-or-flight response kicked in to cope with the immediate situation, but your brain could not make sense of the event at the time. As a result, it stores the event as a fragmented and unfinished record that keeps reemerging because it is begging to be reprocessed and understood.

Your body and mind can heal and recover from PTSD. With the help of a trauma therapist, the traumatic event can be processed and contextualized, allowing PTSD symptoms to be alleviated. The haunting memories can lose their intensity and grip over your present life.

WHAT IS PTSD?

PTSD can be caused by any intensely negative experience that could not be properly processed at the time. PTSD is an anxiety disorder. It often comes with feelings of stress triggered even in the absence of a present danger. Although it is common among soldiers, PTSD may occur in many other situations, including:

The loss of a loved one • An accident • Witnessing harm done to a loved one • A terrorist attack • A pandemic (like COVID-19) • A recession • Being victimized by rape, domestic violence, or some other violent crime

SYMPTOMS OF PTSD MAY INCLUDE:

• Intrusive memories that sometimes seem as real as life
• Anxiety
• Recurring distressing memories
• Intense nightmares
• Unpredictable emotions
• Flashes of anger, extreme moodiness, or irritability
• Strained relationships
• Physical symptoms such as chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, or fibromyalgia
• Depression
• Feeling of helplessness
• Guilt, shame or self-blame
• Jumpiness (quick to startle)
• Difficulty with short-term memory (poor concentration and attention)
• Extreme alertness (as if on the look-out for danger)
• Paranoia
• Isolation
• Feeling of unease

FACING YOUR FEAR WITH TRAUMA THERAPY

With PTSD, there is often an urge to deny and push the traumatic event away when it resurfaces. Unfortunately, this approach rarely succeeds in truly getting rid of PTSD. Suppressing, denying, or distracting ourselves with other activities might work for a moment, but these are temporary fixes at best. PTSD and the anxiety that comes with it inevitably returns, often with even greater intensity. This dynamic is referred to as the cycle of avoidance.

You cannot do away with PTSD by avoiding it, but reprocessing the incident in PTSD therapy can help you integrate it into your mind in a healthier way. PTSD therapy can help break the cycle of avoidance by changing how your mind and body relate to the traumatic event.

PTSD TREATMENT APPROACHES

While it may seem impossible to feel better, there are actually very effective approaches in PTSD therapy. There are a variety of treatment approaches for PTSD. The two primary trauma approaches I use are:

• MINDFULNESS-BASED THERAPY
  a type of therapy focusing on paying attention to the present moment, accepting thoughts and emotions as they are, and allowing them to exist without judgment. This therapy is gaining increasing support among mental health professionals for the treatment of PTSD.
• COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (CBT)
  a type of therapy that helps you learn skills to replace negative, incorrect, or irrational thoughts with more accurate, positive, and healthy thoughts.

We all feel sad from time to time. It is after all a healthy human emotion. However, when sadness becomes sticky and is accompanied by feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, or numbness, the sadness has likely morphed into depression. Depression often affects how you feel, think, and behave, which can lead to many emotional and physical problems.

Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders in the United States. Over 16 million adults have experienced a major depressive episode in the past year. 

I want to support you in regaining clarity and awareness and empower you to treat your depression and enjoy life again.

COMMON SYMPTOMS AND SIGNS OF DEPRESSION

Depression is associated with mental, physical, and behavioral effects. People who are depressed may experience the following:

• Feelings of sadness, hopelessness, or emptiness
• Feelings of guilt or worthlessness
• Anxiety, agitation, or restlessness
• Lethargy, fatigue, or loss of energy
• Apathy, disconnectedness, or loss of interest in activities
• Lack of motivation
• Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness
• Lack of pleasure
• Hypersomnia or increased need for sleep
• Weight loss or weight gain not due to dieting or exercise
• Increased or decreased appetite
• Angry outbursts, irritability, or frustration over small matters
• Thoughts of death or suicide
• Thoughts of hurting yourself or self-injurious behaviors (e.g. cutting)
• Social isolation
• Agitation

LEARN COPING SKILLS WITH DEPRESSION THERAPY

One of the great challenges of depression therapy is that getting out of it requires engaging in activities that while depressed will likely feel impossible. It takes a tremendous dose of perseverance to get moving when we feel apathy and low energy.

During the course of therapy, you’ll learn skills to manage your depression. You will learn to disengage from negative thoughts and treat them as information, rather than absolute truths, so they have less influence over your behavior. Depression is often associated with seeing things from a dark perspective. We develop a negative bias towards our own lives. When we feel worthless, useless, or unlovable, we pay attention to cues that confirm those feelings to the detriment of all other cues. This skewed perspective often reinforces feelings of sadness and prolongs depression. Recognizing those blind spots where our perspective is darker than reality calls for is a big step toward living a healthier life.

As part of depression therapy, you will learn coping skills to help you withstand your triggers – when the feelings associated with depression are at their apex. You will also learn how to become mindful of how others affect your mood and emotions and what to do about it.

Anxiety is the most prevalent mental illness in our modern world. In the U.S. alone, more than 40 million American adults struggle with anxiety of some sort. Anxiety often accompanies mental worry or emotional pain. As we focus on the worry or pain we are experiencing, the feelings can become so overwhelming that they hijack our senses, preventing us from enjoying the present moment. Anxiety amplifies our fears and makes us more paranoid or irritable than situations warrant.

Let’s work together to help you free yourself from the burdens of overthinking, over-worrying, and overreacting to anxiety, empowering you to regain peace of mind.

COMMON SYMPTOMS AND SIGNS OF ANXIETY

Anxiety often feels awful. You might experience one or more of these symptoms:

• Shortness of breath 

• Heart palpitation or chest pain

• Sweating

• Trembling or shaking

• Ruminating or obsessing

• Muscle tensions

• Fatigue or weakness

BREAKING THE CYCLE OF AVOIDANCE

As humans, we naturally wish not to suffer. We typically try to escape anxious feelings as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, we rarely succeed at truly getting rid of those awful feelings. Suppressing them, denying them, or distracting ourselves with other activities might work for a moment, but these are temporary fixes at best. The anxiety inevitably returns, often with even greater intensity. We refer to this dynamic as the cycle of avoidance.

You cannot fix the problem of anxiety by avoiding it; you must instead learn how to change your relationship with it. Chronic or intense anxiety can end when properly addressed with the help of a therapist. Anxiety therapy helps break the cycle of avoidance by teaching you how to face anxiety head-on.

LEARN COPING SKILLS WITH ANXIETY THERAPY

During the course of therapy, you’ll learn skills to manage your anxiety. You will learn to recognize your triggers and identify your internal warning signs that the anxiety cycle has started. You will learn to disengage from negative thoughts and treat them as information, rather than absolute truths, so they have less influence over your behavior. You will also learn acceptance skills that allow you to feel the physical symptoms of anxiety as they occur in your body without trying to change them or run from them.

The mind wanders by nature. It revisits the past, it explores, and it plans for the future. When we can’t make sense of what’s going on, the mind represses, distracts, or fixates. With anxiety therapy, you will learn to step outside these thinking patterns. You can reach beyond the regrets of the past and the worries of the future and focus on the present moment where you can take meaningful action. As you learn these skills, you’ll watch your relationship with anxiety begin to change. Those anxious feelings will become less intense and less frequent, allowing you to lead a more fulfilling, balanced, and peaceful life.

GETTING TO THE ROOT CAUSES OF ANXIETY

We will go deep beneath the surface to help you confront the root causes of anxiety in your life. So much of what we do is dictated by our subconscious and our habits. I will strive to help you understand why certain fears, places, or situations induce anxiety and how to overcome them. You can then examine the situation with a renewed perspective and consciously design a life after your own heart and values.

AS PART OF ANXIETY THERAPY, YOU WILL LEARN TO:

• Identify your triggers and learn how to calm yourself and disengage from negative thoughts and behaviors.
• Apply strategies for minimizing stress and anxiety.
• Accept reality as it is, feel the physical symptoms of anxiety, and recognize their impermanence.
• Prevent stress from escalating.
• Focus on the present moment and take decisive action.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF ANXIETY

Anxiety manifests itself in a variety of ways. The most common types are:

• CHRONIC STRESS (GENERALIZED ANXIETY DISORDER)
  characterized by high-frequency and high-intensity anxiety, exaggerated worry, and tension. Generalized anxiety disorder consists of realistic but excessive worry about everyday things like work, family, health money, or school. The worry is out of proportion to the stressor, causing you to feel regularly on edge.
• PANIC ATTACKS (PANIC DISORDER)
  acute episodes of intense panic and fear. A panic attack is an intense, sudden episode of anxiety and fear that often includes heart palpitation. A panic disorder is defined by repeated panic attacks. Learn more about how to stop a panic attack when you feel it coming on.
• SOCIAL ANXIETY
  characterized by emotional discomfort in group settings, often accompanied by the fear of being embarrassed or judged by others.
• POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD)
  results from experiencing a traumatic or life-threatening event. Symptoms include flashbacks or nightmares about the traumatic event, overactive startle response, hypervigilance, and avoiding people or situations that might remind you of the event.
• OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER (OCD)
  characterized by uncontrollable intrusive thoughts that are alleviated by some behavior. The thoughts are the obsessions and the behaviors are the compulsions. A compulsion is meant to reduce the anxiety caused by obsessive thoughts. 
• PHOBIAS

unrealistic and exaggerated fears of specific things, places, or people. Phobic individuals usually know how unrealistic their fears are but cannot help their reactions.

Many of us have developed unhealthy relationships with our body and use food to deal with difficult feelings. My goal is to help those struggling with eating disorders overcome disruptive eating behaviors and understand how food is used to manage their emotions and stress. We will explore the root cause of the eating disorders and can help you gain control over your eating behaviors.

Eating disorders are best treated with a multi-disciplinary treatment team composed of a primary care physician, a psychotherapist, a dietitian, and a psychiatrist. As a psychotherapist, I can join your treatment team, or help you assemble one.

IDENTIFY THE EMOTIONS THAT FOOD STIRS UP

By examining our own particular relationship with eating, weight, exercise, and the emotions that show up around those activities, you can learn to identify your triggers and bring awareness to the pattern of disordered eating habits. As an eating disorder therapist, I can help you identify how the destructive patterns start, what emotions come up for you and what false narratives you may be telling yourself. Therapy can also teach you how to identify and tolerate painful feelings without turning to food or restrictive behaviors.

USE TOOLS LEARNED IN THE SESSION TO END THE CYCLE

Eating is a daily activity; it shows up every day. Accordingly, we take a practical approach and teach you concrete tools to help you deal with immediate challenges. You will learn coping skills and strategies to help you manage overwhelming emotions, negative thoughts, and detrimental eating behaviors.

EXPLORE EATING DISORDER ISSUES AT THEIR ROOT

Eating disorders are rarely about just food and physical appearance. Many people with eating disorders describe using their disorder as an attempt to compensate for problems in their lives that cause mental and emotional anguish. Eating disorders might be a way to gain control when one would otherwise feel a lack of control. Therapy can help you understand how your eating became such a complicated experience.

AS PART OF EATING DISORDER THERAPY, YOU WILL LEARN TO:

• Identify your own triggers and learn coping skills
• Identify the steps and feelings associated with the pattern of disorderly eating behavior
• Connect to feelings underneath the obsessions and compulsions
• Experiment with intuitive eating, mindful eating, moderation, and letting go of black-and-white thinking
• Let go of limiting beliefs about body, weight, and dieting that no longer serve you
• Develop a more loving and compassionate relationship with yourself and your body