Services and Treatments

The following are some of the issues that prompt individuals, couples and families to seek psychological services:

Anxiety treatment

• Phobias, panic attacks, generalized anxiety
• Social anxiety
• OCD
• PTSD
• Depression, mood swings, bipolar conditions
• Military families, deployment stress and adjustment
• Eating disorders
• Relationships problems
• Self-esteem training

• Personality problems
• Drugs and alcohol Addiction
• Internet addiction
• Sexual addiction problems
• Grief responses to loss due to death, chronic illness or disability
• Stress management
• Midlife transitions
• Pre-surgical psychological assessments of bariatric surgery candidates

Specific Modalities

• Individual psychotherapy
• Couples therapy

• Family therapy
• Group therapy

Some interventions for anxiety problems

Relaxation Techniques:

You will be asked to practice breathing (called also diaphragmatic breathing), progressive muscle relaxation, ‘tense and release’, visualization exercises among other relaxation techniques. The purpose of these interventions is to teach you to master strategies you can use to control the physiological part of an anxiety attack.

Systematic Desensitization:

This is a behavioral intervention in which the therapist and client together develop a hierarchy of feared stimuli, with the most stressful or anxiety loaded at the top and the least feared stimuli on the bottom. You will be encouraged to start with the least anxiety provoking event that you can manage and then move upward towards the top of the hierarchy until you are able to work with the most anxiety provoking event in the hierarchy.

Research had found this technique highly effective to help people reduce anxiety and avoidance behaviors

Exposure Therapy and Response Prevention:

People are taught to tolerate discomfort/anxiety associated with Obsessive Compulsive disorder for brief periods of time while they are helped to reduce the urge leading to compulsions or rituals.

Cognitive Therapy:

Research on social anxiety consistently found that cognitive behavioral techniques (CBT)are the most effective treatments to reduce avoidance with social anxiety. CBT will target first the maladaptive thoughts patterns and feelings that lead to avoid social situations. The purpose of this intervention is to help the person identify how in a large extent he/she creates his/her own anxieties through irrational thinking.

Social Anxiety (Social Phobia):

It is the persistent fear of social or performance situations in which embarrassment may occur; exposure to the situation immediately provokes an anxiety response, resulting in avoidance or enduring the situation with great discomfort; furthermore, the anticipation of facing the social or performance situation interferes with the person daily routine, occupational, social life. You might have specific social anxiety if your discomfort is limited to one or more situations like public speaking or confronting someone in a position of authority. Generalized social anxiety is more pervasive, your fear is present in almost every situations where other people are present.