New to Grow
My name is Kirt Baab, LCSW. I have been practicing psychotherapy and counseling since 1983. My practice focuses on using my training and experience to help people get out of the rut where they are stuck. In particular, I engage with people in ways that unlocks their greatest strengths and use those abilities to find relief. Most of us are unaware of how capable we are because we repeat what we know instead of learning something new. You'll find your meetings with me refreshing! I have helped patients change the way they look at themselves. They stop seeing themselves as a problem and grow their self-confidence ultimately acting differently and breaking the habits of criticizing themselves and anticipating failure. Those emotional blocks are just that us standing in our own way. The good news is that no matter what's happened in your life to keep you tied to a painful way of living, relief is possible in fact probable.
In our first session together, here's what you can expect
During the first session we'll get to know each other. I'll ask how you decided to come to therapy. We'll talk about your prior experience (if any) with therapy. We'll also talk about your work, your where you grew up, what your relationships with others are like, and what you'd like to get out of therapy. We can talk about my experience, my training, and how therapy works. We'll also talk about what you have done to change and why you feel stuck. Given time, I'll tell you what other patients have told me about how they have changed and I'll show you a couple strategies for bringing you some relief. Then we'll plan what to do next.
The biggest strengths that I bring into our sessions
My approach to therapy is actually many approaches. I have earned four Masters Degrees. One is in humanistic and positive psychology. Another is in Family Therapy for Chemical Dependency. My third is in Guidance and Agency Counseling (earned in a multicultural program). The fourth is in Clinical Social Work. I bring with me at least thirty years of experience providing counseling and psychotherapy which means I have a broad set of psychotherapy skills. This means, I am flexible and match treatment methods to individual clients. What works for one person might not work for another. So, my promise to you is to work with you to design a skills based method that brings you relief.
The clients I'm best positioned to serve
When you're looking for a way to get relief from carrying worries that repeat and keep you awake at night or stop you from doing what you want, you can benefit from from emotional support, acceptance, and guidance that helps you break the pattern of self-doubt and self-criticism, you know that internal voice that says "why does this keep happening to me? I've tried to change and end up doing the same thing as before. When you have anxiety attacks and have had them so often and so long you now worry about having anxiety in embarrassing situations, you're in the right mental space for therapy with me. So often people undermine themselves without knowing how to stop doing that: stop undermining yourself with worry about anxiety attacks or failing at recovering from a slump when failure feels inevitable. By the way, if you've been in therapy before and been disappointed because you felt better for awhile but then the improvement fades, you can still benefit from the time and work you put into change earlier in your life. We all learn from our mistakes even when we stop using something that worked at first. The challenge is learning how to modify what works. Therapy can help you benefit from reworking your relationship with your changing self.
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
When you're self critical, finding the source and gently removing the source changes the habits you use to treat yourself. We'll use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to give you the skills to identify the source of your painful thoughts and to pull the rug out from under that source and those thoughts so you can treat yourself better and get relief.
Integrative
You come with your own life experiences including behaviors you have tried to change, repeating painful emotions, and even frustrations or a sense of failure in trying to change. Often this happens in relationships. Your sense of who you are may differ dramatically from the ways other see you. Working together we identify what gets in your way in your private thoughts and in your relationships. Then you'll learn skills that help you get out of your own way and change the patterns of interacting with others. The goal is to build skills that give you self-confidence and relief from the suffering you have been enduring.
Motivational Interviewing
Often we want to change. We try hard to be different and discover that we backslide by repeating our mistakes from the past. Using Motivational Interviewing you'll learn how to prepare for inner and outer changes by working with your whole self including the parts of you that hold back out of anxiety, fear, or self-defeating self-criticism. This type of therapy is like getting out of your own way.
Positive Psychology
Often we have been using habits we learned by copying others including beliefs about ourselves. For example, important people in our lives influence for good or bad by telling us what they think of us. We complicate our lives by copying what they tell us when we talk with ourselves. This is not because we believe them. It's because we do not know what else to do. Positive Psychology helps us identify our strengths and build on them. In therapy, we'll use the guidance of positive psychology, treating ourselves with kindness and respect to build new types of relationships with ourselves and with others. We add skills to our way of thinking about possibilities by making them our realities.
Psychodynamic
During our therapy sessions, we'll identify our self-defeating patterns of living and shift out of the rut where we have been stuck into firm footing on solid ground. In therapy, we learn how to move from self-understanding into actions that make a difference in our private lives. We also find options and choices that make a difference in our public lives with family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. We learn what works for us and giving more of what works to ourselves.