If you’re looking for therapy in Orlando – you’re in the right place. We’ve had clients start out in the lowest lows of depression and the scariest corners of anxiety. Through our work together, we help to take the mystery out of what you’re experiencing. Most importantly, we can help you uncover why it started and why it’s escalated over time. We teach our clients concrete tools to fight back – and win. We’ve had many clients tell us they’re surprised by the progress they’ve been able to make. With relapse prevention planning, you can feel confident in your ability to keep your progress going.
If you haven’t been in therapy or counseling before, you might feel a little bit nervous about your first appointment. It’s okay, most people do. For example, think back to some of the best things you’ve done for yourself so far. I’ll bet you were probably a little nervous then too. It’s normal to feel nervous about trying something new especially when it means facing difficult things.
Many clients come to therapy knowing what they need to do. They can’t seem to “just do it.” They want to stop caring what people think. They know they need to set better boundaries in their relationships. They know they need to stop relying on unhealthy coping to escape their feelings. They know all this. It’s not news to them. It’s probably not news to you either. Unfortunately, if change was as simple as knowing, we’d live in a much healthier world.
This conflict between what we know and what we do often leads to feeling even worse about ourselves. In therapy we call this ambivalence, which is just a fancy way of saying you’ve got mixed feelings. You want to set better boundaries, but you feel guilty. You want to not care what people think, but disapproval feels scary. You want to make changes, but other feelings and beliefs are getting in the way. In the beginning, our work together often focuses on resolving this very issue. Let us help you figure out what’s been getting in your way.
If you’re looking for cognitive behavioral therapy in Orlando or virtual counseling available throughout Florida, we’d be honored to help.
We offer outpatient individual therapy for adults and adolescents, ages 14 and older. Our clinicians specialize in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for the following concerns:
Individual Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can help to address a variety of issues and can be helpful for both exciting or difficult times in your life. You may be considering counseling because you are experiencing feelings of anxiety or depression or because you’re going through a particularly difficult transition in your life and looking for help to steady yourself and begin rebuilding. Counseling can be helpful by learning new ways of dealing with difficult situations or addressing these feelings as well as addressing any underlying causes that you may be struggling to put your finger on.
Or perhaps your life is going pretty well, but you feel like something is missing and you’re not sure what it is. Counseling can help with that too as we can sit down together and comb through the different areas of your life to find out what is most important to you, what areas are lacking, and come up with a concrete plan to build those areas up.
Anxiety is the most common mental health concern among Americans today. Maybe you’ve always felt overly anxious and didn’t think there was much you could do about it. Perhaps you’ve gone from feeling self-assured to worrying all the time. Anxiety is difficult to tolerate and can snowball if left untreated. Counseling can help you learn techniques to cope with the symptoms of anxiety, explore why you’ve been feeling this way, and reduce feelings of worry or tension by learning to ground yourself in the here and now. CBT works with many types of anxiety and can offer longer term relief than medications alone.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (also known as GAD) is essentially the inability to stop worrying about everything. With GAD, you may find yourself constantly worrying about literally everything – work, finances, your health, your family, your parenting, your social interactions. GAD is described as “generalized anxiety” because the anxiety isn’t specific to just one area of your life, as with other types of anxiety. GAD makes it feel impossible to shut your mind off, to stop imagining worst case scenarios. It makes it difficult to relax (even when you have the time and opportunity) making it even more frustrating. It can make you irritable and causes physical symptoms of anxiety that can be difficult to tolerate. We can help.
Social Anxiety Disorder (also known as SAD) is essentially the fear of social situations due to feeling extremely self-conscious and afraid of being judged. With Social Anxiety, you may find yourself overthinking everything in a social situation or just avoiding them altogether. Social anxiety typically leads to avoiding social situations because of the anxious thoughts and feelings you have when faced with interacting. This is different from simple shyness or being introverted because people with social anxiety typically long for a better social experience, if only it weren’t so nerve-racking. Social anxiety, including both anxious thoughts and physical symptoms, can be so distracting at times that it can actually make it more difficult to participate in social situations. We can help.
Panic attacks can be terrifying and life altering if we let them. Whether you’ve only recently had your first panic attack or you’ve been having them for years, there’s no time like the present to get them under control. Counseling can help to dispel some of the fears you may have about panic attacks, teach you techniques to identify your triggers, and help you retrain your mind and your body to stop panicking unnecessarily.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can effect everything including your mood, sleep, and relationships, and can also trigger unwanted physical reactions. PTSD is often associated with military personnel and combat situations, but in reality can be experienced by just about anybody. We become traumatized whenever our life or the life of someone we care about has been in jeopardy. PTSD causes us to experience flashbacks, anxiety, and irritability. It can cause us to start avoiding anything that reminds us of the trauma in an effort to ease the symptoms. For this reason, PTSD can make life extremely difficult if left untreated. PTSD Treatment is based on the approach of cognitive processing therapy or CPT, which was developed by one of the VA’s leading trauma researchers.
Sexual assault is perhaps the most intense form of abuse a person can experience as it affects every level of our being.I work with adults who have experienced sexual abuse as children as well as sexual assault as an adult. This type of trauma leads many survivors to experience symptoms of PTSD in addition to other common struggles including difficulty trusting others, low self-esteem, problems with intimacy, and feelings of powerlessness. As a result, sexual assault recovery therapy uses many of the same principles of therapy as PTSD Treatment. This particular form of counseling focuses on the impact of the experience on concepts such as trust, safety, self-esteem and power and control.
Many adults I work with have struggled with depression at one point or another in their lives.Whether you’ve struggled with feeling depressed for as long as you can remember or it’s been brought on more recently by a particularly difficult experience, the treatment is the same. We can help you piece together what’s been causing your depression, what’s been keeping it going, and help you come up with a plan to get unstuck. Even if you think there’s no hope, we have hope for you – we’ve seen people come back from the lowest lows to live fulfilling lives.
We do not currently have any providers specializing in treatment for the following concerns and conditions. As such, we would be glad to provide referrals for providers who would be better suited to assist with any of the following:
Medication Treatment (we do have several excellent psychiatrists we collaborate with)