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Intensive Treatment of Anxiety Disorders
Do you want to reclaim your life now?
I offer an intensive approach to the treatment of anxiety that can help you turn your life around in a matter of weeks, days, or even hours.
I employ cognitive-behavioral techniques that are evidence-based and highly effective. The intensive approach is quite different from weekly psychotherapy, in which momentum is often lost between sessions, and there is limited time for within-session practice and transformation.
When you work with me, I will collaborate with you to generate an individualized treatment plan that is tailored to the unique subtleties of how anxiety is showing up for you. I’ve found that relying on a single method or approach to treatment is rarely sufficient to facilitate deep and meaningful change. We will most likely need draw on multiple approaches. These approaches often include, but are not limited to, exposure therapy, in which you learn how to face your fears in a way that takes the power out of them; cognitive therapy, which involves identifying and challenging thoughts and beliefs that feed into or sustain anxiety; the motivational model, which is a process of bringing to light and honoring all the good reasons not to give up anxiety and the many ways you keep yourself and/or others safe; the relational model, which helps you uncover any rules you are following in interpersonal relationships that may be contributing to your experience of anxiety and gives you the agency to change them, if you choose to do so; and the hidden emotion model, which involves identifying feelings or desires that you might not be acknowledging, even to yourself, because they feel unacceptable to you–so they are showing up as anxiety instead. For individuals with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), treatment may also involve inference-based therapy, which involves shedding light on the reasoning processes behind OCD that trick us into believing that our obsessive doubts are true and relevant. It helps us become aware of the choice we face when we find ourselves on the bridge between the Land of Here and Now and the Land of Possibilities, where OCD exists. This approach is an alternative to Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) but can also be used to supplement ERP.
Throughout our work together, we may meet as frequently as twice daily, or we may spread out our sessions, depending on your individual needs. In most cases, I recommend that each of our meetings last at least two hours, so that we can take advantage of the momentum that tends to build up at the end of the first hour. An exception to this recommendation would be if the focus of our work is on processing trauma through Written Exposure Therapy, where one-hour sessions are preferable. If we’re not doing Written Exposure Therapy, yet two-hour sessions are not practical for you from a financial standpoint, I’ll let you know during your initial free consultation whether I think single-hour sessions could work for you. For single-hour sessions, I typically recommend daily sessions in order to keep up the momentum across sessions.
In order for the treatment to be effective, you will need to engage in homework between sessions. The only exception would be if our sole focus is on Written Exposure Therapy for PTSD, where the writing process during sessions is often sufficient for meaningful change. When I do ask you to complete homework between sessions, it is likely to involve a combination of written exercises and the practice of new behaviors. I may also ask you to monitor relevant thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors on a daily basis. Another crucial piece of our work together will be your completion of before- and after-session surveys, so that we can track our progress over time and fine-tune our work together to be as effective and as efficient as possible.
After completion of our time-limited work together, you may find it helpful to meet with a therapist on a regular basis for a period of time to help you stay accountable to putting what you’ve learned from our work together into practice and integrating it into your life. I’d be happy to provide you with appropriate referrals.
If you’d like to know more, feel free to watch this video, in which I explain more about my approach to treatment and how to determine whether it’s a good fit for you. If you’d prefer to read a transcript of the video, you can find one here.
Request a free 30-minute video screening here.
Please note that if I am on vacation when you send a request, I will not respond until I return from vacation, so you may not hear back from me for up to a couple weeks.