I've lived and worked in the Washington DC Metro area for the past 12 years. Having served in hospital settings for much of my career, my expertise and interest lies at the intersection of physical health and mental health. This includes adaption to chronic illness or loss of function, caregiver burnout, life transitions, anxiety, depression, grief, and medical trauma experienced by both patients and first responders.
What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?
We'll start with the basics: what symptoms or circumstances led you to sign up for therapy? We'll talk about social, environmental, physical, and psychological factors in your life, which can be either assets or obstacles to your mental health. Together we'll identify some short term and/or long term goals and start formulating a plan to achieve them.
Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.
I pride myself on creating a calm, non judgmental atmosphere. Therapy is self care and it should feel that way.
About Dana Belongia
Appointments
Virtual
My treatment methods
Motivational Interviewing
Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a great first step in the therapeutic process and a technique that can be returned to over time to re-focus on goals. There are a multitude of opinions and influencers in our lives, even competing voices within ourselves, and MI can focus in on what it is you really want to change in your life. I'm the person you can have a conversation with that has no agenda other than helping you clarify your priorities and goals. Spoiler alert: it's not always what we think they are, and they change over time without us noticing.
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) approaches are popular for a reason, they work. CBT taps into our natural internal cycle of thought-feeling-behavior, identifying faulty thoughts to then change our feelings and behaviors.
Narrative
I find Narrative Therapy (NT) especially helpful for clients coping with grief and trauma. Precipitating events are often dramatic storylines to begin with. NT capitalizes on that story-like feel by exploring how the client sees themselves in the story, who or what is the villain, who or what is the hero, and how is this story going to move on to the next chapter. This approach can offer some distance from painful memories while still allowing for processing and resolution.
Solution Focused Brief Treatment
Don't want to explore the dysfunctional relationship with your parents or debrief on your traumatic experiences in a military/first responder role? Great, let's not. Long term analysis isn't right for everyone at any given time. That doesn't mean you can't benefit from counseling. Solution Focused Brief Treatments pick one or two areas of your life you'd like to improve on (stress, anger, communication) and we work on fixes.
Mindfulness-Based Therapy
Mindfulness-Based Therapy can be very useful for clients with mood disorders experiencing depressive or anxious symptoms. When these feelings overwhelm the body, Mindfulness practices can bring us back to a more neutral state of homeostasis, giving the body a "break" from it's emotion overload. These breaks add up over time and lower the body's readiness to flip into our fight or flight mode.
