Whatever challenge you face, you can overcome. This belief is core to my work, learned from a successful career in national and international development. Starting in 2017, I moved into individual and family counseling work to have a more direct impact on changing lives. As a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), I use a combination of thought and actions based skills to help my clients identify, understand, and make change in their lives. A great deal of my work focuses on tapping into the "Authentic Self" - who I am underneath and who I want to become - which naturally lends well to work with adolescents and adults facing periods of upset and change in their lives.
What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?
Our first sessions together focus on learning more about you, building trust, identifying what specific goals you have for our time together, and jointly developing a plan for how we're going to address these (our "treatment plan"). Honesty is most helpful, but that doesn't mean you need to tell me everything all at once. Trust takes time to develop, and I fully expect you to need time to evaluate if you feel you can trust me. Similarly, as a clinician I need to evaluate if I can be of service to you, or if another type of clinician may better meet your needs. If so, it's my ethical obligation to help you find a better match through referrals.
Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.
You are the expert on you (and your family). My job is to support you in finding what works best for you, and to ultimately reach a point when you no longer need me. While there are some overlaps, every plan, every journey, is unique because every client is unique. This, I feel, is a great strength in my practice as I am firmly opposed to the "mass production" style of therapy.
About Matt Burghdoff
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VirtualMy treatment methods
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapies focus on identifying thoughts and actions which may have been helpful at one time, but now are getting in the way of who we want to be. In therapy, we work together to identify, understand, and challenge these patterns. For example, a common anxiety provoking thought is, "I can't do it! I CAN'T DO IT!" Together, we might challenge and change this thought into, "I haven't learned to do it yet," or, "I haven't done it - YET."
Mindfulness-Based Therapy
Recognizing who we are and who we want to be starts with first understanding where we are today. Mindfulness is the process of grounding ourselves in the current moment, recognizing it and everything that comes with it. Those moments when you stop to really smell the coffee in your hands, listen to the birds chirping, or just watch puppies playing in the yard are mindful moments that help focus us on what is in front us. Mindfulness-Based therapy methods help to teach and improve upon these skills.
Gestalt
"Gestalt" means all of the parts coming together to form a whole. When appropriate, I use gestalt methods in therapy to examine all the different parts of who we are and the roles we play - boss, coworker, parent, spouse, child, sibling, friend, neighbor, and dozens of others. Each of these different roles impact our lives, so understanding them can help us understand both who we are and who we want to be.
Solution Focused Brief Treatment
In a nutshell, Solution Focused therapy looks for how we can make improvements, even if only slight, right now. I work a great deal with solution focused methods because of how it drives us forward, seeking out practical, useful methods of making change even while we're exploring other, deeper issues. For example, someone struggling with deep depression may begin immediately with Solution Focused change methods (find and add one thing that brings pleasure daily) to lessen the impact of depression while we longer-term explore and attempt to resolve the roots of what causes the depression.
Family Therapy
What happens to one member of a family happens to all members. This is especially true when working with children and adolescents, who are dependent on their families. In sessions, I utilize a Family Systems approach, looking at how all appropriate family members interact with and influence each other. Once we identify any barriers or patterns that aren't working as well as we might hope, we work together to find methods of improving and overcoming any obstacles.