Integrative CBT: REBT & Philosophical Counseling Approaches

• I use Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT): a directive, evidence-based approach that helps you identify and change unhelpful patterns of thinking and behavior that contribute to emotional distress, self-sabotaging habits, and the sense of powerlessness that often accompanies major life challenges. Adding to this basic frame, I draw on Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), which focuses on challenging the unexamined assumptions and self-limiting beliefs that often fuel anxiety, depression, and frustration. 

• My approach makes strong use of the Socratic Method on the basis that self-knowledge is central to recovery and that the will to change and overcome life obstacles comes from within the client, not the clinician. I am a member of the National Philosophical Counseling Association, whose material informs my perspective.

Psychodynamic Therapy

• I supplement the cognitive and philosophical counseling approach above — which works with thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the present — with a psychodynamic view concerned with the past and the roots of distress. Psychodynamic psychotherapy explores how your past experiences and unconscious patterns shape your current emotions, behaviors, and relationships. I use this lens and its accompanying techniques to examine recurring themes, defenses, and unbidden feelings that arise in everyday life, including how these patterns play out in the therapy relationship itself. 

• The goal is to increase your self-awareness, to ‘make the unconscious become conscious’ so you can understand the origins of your struggles rather than only address present symptoms and habits. Over time, this deeper insight often helps you respond more flexibly, form healthier connections, and experience lasting emotional relief. Compared to the more structured and directive cognitive approach, these elements typically involve open conversation guided by curiosity.

Couples Therapy

• With married or committed couples, I work from an Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy perspective, an evidenced-based theory based on experiential learning, emotional acceptance, and mindfulness. IBCT treatment is based on a few core elements:

  • Empathic Joining: Helping spouses or partners express the hidden, perhaps vulnerable, feelings that lie beneath hostility or distance, allowing them to join over pain rather than be pushed apart by it.

  • Unified Detachment: Aiding spouses or partners in stepping back to see their conflict in an intellectual, mindful, and non-blaming manner, so they might see that ‘the pattern is the enemy’ rather than one another. 

  • Combining Strategies for Change with Tolerance Building: Using communications training, problem-solving, and behavior exchange to shift everyday life interactions together, while also guiding couples to reduce friction by mindfully accepting and peacefully adapting to certain differences in basic personality traits or emotional sensitivities that are unlikely to dramatically change. Acceptance and change dialectically reinforce one another.

Psychospiritual Orientation

• My approach takes as given that questions of value, meaning, and purpose are inherent to human flourishing and thus to psychotherapy. Despite our more secular paradigm, human life is essentially spiritual, in the sense that questions of the transcendent can never be fully avoided. We all face quintessentially existential questions like, “How should I live? What does it mean to be a virtuous person? What are truth, beauty, or justice and why are they worth pursuing?” When we confront painful or difficult situations that shock us out of everyday life, we find these questions ineluctably emerge.

• Be advised that I do not introduce any particular spiritual, religious, or philosophical worldview as being true or worthy of living by unless these topics are of interest to a client.

Systems Theory

• My training in marriage and family therapy entails treating individual persons as parts of many systems. A system is defined as a set of interacting, interdependent parts that form a unified, complex whole. Within a given system, a change in any part affects all of the others, meaning the system behaves as a holistic unit rather than just a collection of separate pieces. 

• As human beings, we belong to such systems as families, workplaces, ethnocultural and religious groups, and civic and political organizations. Psychological health is always situated within and mediated by our systems, meaning we will consider both how your larger social systems influenced the origins and development of the problems bringing you to therapy as well as how your process of recovery both changes and is changed by your various social groups.