How can therapy help me?
Depression
Have you ever experienced depression? This prolonged feeling of helplessness or sadness can feel overwhelming and lonely. Talk therapy can help alleviate some of those symptoms, and therapists are often willing to work with your doctors to help you find the right treatment for you. You don’t have to suffer in silence – therapy is a safe, confidential place where you can explore your feelings, find coping skills, and fill your support “tool box” in order to help you when you’re experiencing symptoms.
Anxiety
Anxiety is more than just “nervousness”. Anxiety can be debilitating and can negatively impact your emotional and physical health. Talking with a therapist can help you to find tools that work for you. In addition to talk therapy, EMDR can be a powerful treatment for anxiety as well.
Relationship problems
Do you have current relationship problems? Are you looking to strengthen your bond with your partner before getting married, buying a house, or getting a dog? Are you looking to divorce in the healthiest way possible, or to co-parent to the best of your abilities? Couples therapy can be a powerful way to accomplish all of these things and more. Marriage and family therapists receive extensive training in school to be able to provide therapy to family systems and couple systems. Additionally, PACT-trained clinicians offer a unique (and fun!) way to learn to support your partner, and be supported by your partner. PACT can help heal past traumas (“What is broken in a relationship is healed in a relationship”). Couples and therapists alike report that PACT can be a fun, invigorating, and effective therapy for any relationship.
Trauma
Trauma consists of any experience that is physically or emotionally painful or distressing. Our “caveman brains” store scary information and can remind us of these experiences when we least expect it. Talk therapy can help us to examine and work through these past experiences. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an empirically validated therapeutic technique that is so effective in treating trauma symptoms that the FBI and the US military endorse it for their agents and veterans.
Grief and loss
Everyone experiences grief and loss at some point in their lives, but our culture does not like to acknowledge it and many of us therefore do not know how to talk about this difficult experience. Therapy with a clinician who understands grief and loss can be an effective way to heal (but not “get over”) after the death of someone close. In addition to talk therapy, EMDR can be an effective way to change the way our brains store the trauma of a loss.