Hey, my name is Steal and I am a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) serving clients in Texas. I have helped people with various struggles for the past few years. I mostly help teenagers and young adults overcome fear and anxiety. I also have training in and experience with helping people overcome insomnia. Personally, I find the dreams we have during sleep fascinating and I am a huge movie buff.
What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?
Our first session can be rough in terms of gathering a lot of information in a short period of time. Sometimes this can feel like this will be all therapy has to offer. However, I can assure you that through years of providing therapy, it is normal for the first session or two to be more information heavy than others. Information is crucial for ensuring we are not only treating the right things but also to tailor treatments that may work best for you. This usually involves exploring what brought you to therapy, listing goals from this, and then exploring treatment options next session.
Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.
I have been told by others, including my past LPC-supervisors, that my greatest strengths are being able to somehow take everything a client tells me and find unique ways to tie them all together in a manner that often leads to more insight for clients and treatment progress. I have also been told that have great empathy, clients have told me that I actually care about my clients compared to others, and that they felt more comfortable with me than past mental health professionals.
About Steal Adcock
Specializes in
Serves ages
Licensed in
Accepts cash
Appointments
VirtualMy treatment methods
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
I have interwoven CBT throughout therapy sessions for the past 2-3 years. I interweave CBT as needed, and when targeting specific negative thoughts or core beliefs under negative thoughts to help clients escape the negative emotions they feel about themselves, the world, and others. We can use CBT to help challenge and change unhealthy thoughts into healthy thoughts to then change the emotions and behaviors caused by those thoughts. We may choose to use CBT to challenge negative thoughts in general or core beliefs (the inner beliefs about yourself) that drive those negative thoughts. This involves identifying the negative thought, causes of the negative thought, emotions caused by the negative thought, how behavior is affected by the negative thought, and then replacing the negative thought with a more realistic and balanced thought. We then check how the new healthy thought impacts emotions and behaviors.
Prolonged Exposure Therapy
For the past 2 years, I have let my clients choose if they want to try exposure therapy for specific conditions including: social anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), phobias, agoraphobia, panic attacks, and trauma. If you choose to try exposure therapy, we will first list out all your fears for the specific struggle you want to try exposure therapy for. For example, if you chose a specific phobia of spiders, we could list out various fear triggers related to spiders in the form of talking about spiders, looking at pictures of spiders, watching videos of spiders, and looking at a real spider in a container. We would then rank these levels of spider fears in order from least to greatest fear and start with the least scary levels first. You can choose which exposures to try first (usually the lowest level fears) and we will re-rate the fear levels each session to track progress. After a while, we may climb all the way to the most feared aspects of spiders and then the goal of conquering the phobia of spiders will be complete.
Acceptance and commitment (ACT)
I have incorporated ACT for the past 2 years, as needed, and when targeting specific conditions like anxiety, worry, insomnia, depression, interpersonal stress, general stress, and trauma. We can use this through various mental activities to go from the mindset of controlling emotions and thoughts to becoming comfortable with letting emotions and thoughts come and go naturally.
Motivational Interviewing
I have used motivational interviewing for the past 2-3 years and believe what motivational interviewing believes, that while I might be the expert in my field, the client is the expert in their life. The way this works is I let you choose the goals you want to work on first, I let you choose the treatment options you think may help you best, and I let you choose whether you want to change the focus of treatment in therapy. I see therapy as a collaboration between us. I use motivational interviewing to help draw out what you want to change in your life rather than what I want to change in your life, and we follow that change path together.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-i)
I was trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia almost 2 years ago virtually through the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. If you find yourself struggling with sleep problems including insomnia, hypersomnolence, nightmares, jet lag, shift work sleep problems, and struggling to get out of bed in the morning then we can work together to utilize the variety of CBT-I evidence-based methods together. Depending on your unique sleep struggles, this may include a sleep diary, a comprehensive sleep plan, sleep hygiene, sleep restriction, stimulus control for sleep, CBT for thoughts that disrupt sleep, relaxation and mindfulness skills to relax into sleep or manage nightmare stress, and psychoeducation on common myths about sleep problems.