Our counselors provide therapy in Austin, TX

My counseling approach for working with my clients is to truly listen to each client and help guide my clients to achieve their goals.

I teach the following tools in individual therapy:

• Cognitive behavioral therapy: Identifying negative thoughts and replace with positive and healthy thoughts.
• EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing): This treatment is quite helpful when working with people who have experienced traumatic events in their lives.
• Dialectical behavior therapy: Helping clients become mindful, live in the present, regulate emotions, and increase distress tolerance skills.

I strongly believe in using measurable tools. Each client will rate their mood, thoughts, or feelings of disturbance on a scale from 0 to 10. Level 10 will have tremendously disturbing thoughts/emotions/feelings, and 0 will have no disturbance at all. My goal is to have my clients rate their level of disturbance at 1 or less.

I encourage my clients to prepare a daily mood log that identifies negative thoughts and distortions to be replaced with positive thoughts. This exercise takes a few minutes a day. I ask my client to share their daily mood log during our session, exploring patterns of negative thoughts and reframing them with positive, healthier thoughts.

As a therapist, my goal is to help my client identify goals/values, which will allow me to develop an effective treatment plan for my clients to achieve their needs. For the first session, I would like my client to share with me what they want to achieve with counseling sessions.