Services

Types of Therapy (“Modalities”) I Use

Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT): an approach that involves a mindfulness practice of staying in the present moment, observing thoughts, accepting unpleasant emotions without denying them or changing them, not allowing those negative emotions to define one’s sense of self, identifying personal values, and taking committed actions based on those values.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): an approach that involves identifying thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and behaviours that are perpetuating a client’s challenges. This therapy involves identifying & challenging negative thoughts, emotion regulation techniques to help with relaxation, and choosing new behaviours to alleviate symptoms.

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT): an attachment-based approach that involves focusing on identifying the client’s emotions and how their emotions are linked to their identity, thoughts and behaviours.

Schema Therapy: an integrative approach which involves a mix of mindfulness-based interventions, CBT, ACT, attachment theory, psychodynamic and experiential techniques to help address unhelpful core beliefs and problematic behavioural patterns. Schema therapy can also help process traumatic memories. It works by identifying core beliefs that clients have, identifying the behavioural patterns that perpetuate those beliefs, and building skills to break those unhelpful cycles.

Psychodynamic Therapy: also known as the “modern” version of Freud’s psychoanalytic approach, which focuses on unconscious processes. We take a deep dive into your past experiences and make connections on how it impacts your present challenges, emotional processing, relationship dynamics, belief systems, and behavioural patterns. Individuals who are highly self-reflective and looking to gain further self-insight tend to be good candidates for this approach.

Experiential Therapy: an approach that helps process negative emotions and memories using expressive tools and activities. It is similar to “inner child work” where we work on processing and releasing childhood wounds.

Brainspotting: a new approach that grew out of EMDR and helps alleviate anxiety, stress, process trauma, and improve performance. It is essentially mindfulness on blast, where clients engage in emotional processing and work through obstacles that cause anxiety, help them get unstuck and takes next steps towards their goals. I typically integrate other modalities during brainspotting, such as experiential therapy & somatic techniques to help release anxiety and stress from the body.

Mindfulness-based Interventions: are interventions that help clients stay in the present moment, in tune with their body, practice self-compassion, and promote relaxation and improve emotion regulation.

Essentially, these therapies are similar in that they help clients:

1. Identify, connect and realign with personal values.
2. Target emotions/feelings through improving emotion regulation and emotional awareness.
3. Increasing awareness of negative thoughts and challenging them.
4. Identifying core beliefs and changing unhelpful beliefs.
5. Identifying unhelpful actions and behavioural patterns while building new skills to break unhelpful cycles that keep clients stuck.
6. Reconnect us with our body through mindfulness (since there is a connection between the mind and body).

Generally, “best” kind of therapy is one that is customized to the client’s lifestyle & current capacity, and one that the client feels comfortable in collaborating and giving feedback to their therapist on what’s working and what’s not working for them. Essentially, it can be largely determined by the relationship the client has with the therapist and how competent the therapist is in helping with the client’s specific issues. I also take a measurement-based care (MBC) approach with my services. This means that clients can choose to complete measures to track their mental health progress, which can improve treatment outcomes. Using an MBC approach gives me important feedback on how clients are doing in treatment, allowing me to adjust our treatment approach for better mental health results.