Specialty Areas
Exposure and Response Prevention (E/RP)
Exposure therapy involves systematically confronting your fears to reduce how much fear and anxiety restrict your life. Through repeatedly facing those situations you fear and avoid, you will gain a better understanding of the actual likelihood of your feared outcomes, whether you can survive these outcomes, and your ability to tolerate discomfort.
Since your anxiety affects you in real-life settings, we want to practice exposure exercises in real-life settings. This can take place in my office, in your homes, as well as throughout DC depending on the source of your anxiety. This is a collaborative process, and aimed at improving your ability to face the situations that are important to you. Exposure practice is like physical exercise, the more you do it the more of an impact you will see.
Perfectionism
Clinical perfectionism is not a diagnosis, but it is an underlying mechanism that can contribute to multiple psychological conditions. People who struggle with this tend to derive much of their worth from being successful, to the point that it become problematic in their lives. Typical characteristics of perfectionism include setting high, inflexible standards, going to great lengths to ensure performance standards are met, self-criticism, and procrastination.
My approach is to first determine whether this perfectionism is working for you. If it is, then it may be a matter of managing the consequences of this approach. If it isn’t, then we want to determine what changes you want to make to these ways of thinking and acting. That does not mean working towards being less successful, but rather considering how much that success defines you.
Mood Disorders
(Depression and Bipolar Disorders)
CBT was originally developed to treat depression, and offers a variety of tools to reduce depressive symptoms, improve mood stability, and work towards living a life worth living. If we are to work together, I want to understand what is contributing to your mood state so we can collaboratively decide how to work on it. Collaboration with psychiatrists or primary care physicians is often an important piece of treatment.
This work often involves identifying and responding to beliefs that maintain this mood state. Our goal here is to strive for more accuracy and flexibility in your thought patterns. I also want to make sure you are engaging in actions that allow for mastery, social connection, and enjoyment. If there are skill deficits that are contributing to your depression or bipolar disorder, we will want to work on developing these skills as well.
Insomnia
If you struggle with chronic sleep issues, I can provide cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), an empirically-supported treatment for sleep issues that is considered a first-line treatment by the American College Of Physicians. This is a durable, short-term treatment that can allow patients to improve sleep quality without relying on medications.
This treatment involves assessing your personal issues with sleep to ensure that CBT-I is a good fit and rule out conditions that may be better addressed in other settings. Psychoeducation is provided to help you understand sleep, and the ways in which your insomnia is being maintained. The focus of active treatment is developing consistent behavioral practices to promote sleep, addressing cognitions that interfere with sleep, and problem-solve for other challenges that might be playing a role.
I am comfortable treating a wide variety of issues that lead people to seek treatment. If you are interested in working together on another issue or treatment, I would be happy to set up an initial consult to understand what you are wanting to work on and whether I would be a good fit for your treatment needs.