Victoria Elkins
If you are struggling with relationship conflict, depression, anxiety or addiction and are committed to doing the hard work of inner change, I have a history of successful results achieved through evidence based interventions. TEAM therapy has been proven to be up to 8 times more effective than other therapies while reducing suffering an average of 28% in a session. Welcome. Today you are one step closer to a new you where you feel empowered and on a positive path to growth and well-being. I welcome you to my practice, which focuses on cutting edge holistic therapy. My practice philosophy focuses on TEAM CBT therapy, which is created by Dr. David Burns. Dr. Burns is considered one of the forefathers of CBT. He is a renowned psychiatrist and author of best-selling books including Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, When Panic Attacks, and Feeling Great: The Revolutionary New Treatment for Depression and Anxiety.
TEAM therapy has been proven to be up to 8 times more effective than other therapies while reducing suffering an average of 28% in a session.
First session
Our first session is a chance for us to get to know each other and talk about what brought you in, what’s been on your mind, and what you hope to gain from counseling. I’ll explain how sessions work and how your privacy is protected, including the limits of confidentiality. I’ll also ask about your health history, daily life, and the people you turn to for support. There’s no need to share everything at once—you can ask questions and open up at a pace that feels manageable for you. Together, we may explore some starting goals and next steps, perhaps including a coping strategy to try between sessions. Above all, our first visit is about beginning to build trust and helping me understand your needs, not having to figure everything out or reach a final diagnosis right away.
Strengths
I've been trained by one of the greatest minds in the industry, Dr. David Burns, and am dedicated to his weekly training group. I'm constantly seeking new cutting edge methods to help you connect with your inner peace.
Ideal clients
My passion for helping others live a life worth celebrating has lead me to be a Level 3 TEAM CBT therapist, as well as Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Licensed Clinical Alcohol and Drug Counselor. I am also a qualified supervisor for those pursing their LCSW license. I graduated from New York University with a Master's Degree in Social Work and Clarkson University/Mt. Sinai School of Medicine with a Master's Degree in Bioethics (specializing in medical and end-of-life counseling). In addition to being a prominent therapist, I contributed to The Center for Ethical Solutions published project The Advanced Directive Steward: Welcome to our Making End-of-Life Healthcare Decisions Count Tool: An Interactive Guide and currently collaborate with the Naples Community Hospital's Bioethics Committee. My goal is to help you uncover your true potential and lead a life worth celebrating. I believe their are multiple ways to reach inner peace, which is why I combine complementary therapies (such as yoga and meditation) with group and individual counseling. While we cannot change difficult situations of the past, we can work together to better understand and resolve challenges in your life. Together we will unearth behavioral patterns and negative perceptions that may be holding you back from experiencing a more fulfilling and meaningful life.
Ongoing work together
In our future sessions, we’ll build on that foundation and make space for what feels most important to you. I’ll invite you to share how things have been since we last met, including any challenges, changes, or small moments of progress. Together, we’ll explore your thoughts, feelings, and experiences, notice patterns, and work toward the goals we’ve chosen. Depending on your needs, we may practice coping skills, explore ways to communicate your needs, or talk through situations that have been difficult. We may also agree on something manageable for you to try or reflect on between visits, and we’ll talk about what felt helpful and what didn’t. You don’t need to arrive with everything prepared or know exactly what to say. I’ll check in with you about how our work feels, welcome your questions and feedback, and adjust our approach with you as your needs change. We’ll regularly revisit your goals and discuss the pace of our sessions, including when it may feel appropriate to meet less often or bring our work to a close.
Treatment methods
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
TEAM-CBT is a major development of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) created by Dr. David Burns . Dr. Burns is considered one of the forefathers of CBT. He is a renowned psychiatrist and author of best-selling books including Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, When Panic Attacks, and Feeling Great: The Revolutionary New Treatment for Depression and Anxiety. TEAM-CBT is not a new “school” of therapy, but rather is a framework for conducting measurement-based therapy that is proven to be more effective than traditional therapy. TEAM CBT, which is an advanced form of CBT, has been found to reduce depression symptoms 23% and anxiety symptoms 33% per therapy hour. Furthermore it has been shown to have a recovery rate at least 4 times as high as traditional CBT and of antidepressants. TEAM CBT addresses resistance from a different angle, focusing on what is beautiful and awesome about negative thoughts and behaviors. Emotions, which help form the negative thoughts and behaviors, are seen through a lens of balancing your values with the reality of the situation. For example, when your inner value of compassion for self and others is not being played out in real life you may feel depressed. Therapy helps to "turn down the volume" of the emotions while honoring our true self, leading to less distress and resistance to change. TEAM is an acronym for the four crucial ingredients of effective therapy known to improve treatment outcomes: Testing, Empathy, Agenda-Setting, and Methods. Testing at the beginning and end of every session is used to understand your improvement, identify stuck points, provide feedback, focus, and make modifications that accelerate your recovery. Empathy: I am specifically train in multiple empathy skills that help establish a warm therapeutic alliance with you. Most people benefit from having a place to talk freely and openly, knowing that they can just be themselves and that they will be accepted, valued, understood and respected. I believe that the empathic connection is a necessary ingredient for successful therapy. And that even the most sophisticated methods are more effective once the empathic connection has been established. Agenda-setting: using a five-step method to understand your goals, we create a collaborative agenda that increases motivation and helps you remove obstacles necessary to achieve the change you want. Methods: I have over 100 powerful cognitive, behavioral and interpersonal methods that will help you with depression, low self esteem, anxiety, stress and trauma, unwanted habits, relationship concerns and more.
Dialectical Behavior (DBT)
his therapy is based on Marsha M. Lineham's Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. DBT is a behavioral oriented therapy combines standard cognitive-behavioral techniques and reality-testing while focusing on: Increasing interpersonal effectiveness Decreasing crisis and mental health distress Teaching skills for managing distress and impulsiveness DBT combines four comprehensive models 1) Mindfulness--the capacity to pay attention, nonjudgementally, to the present moment 2) Distress Tolerance—the ability to accept, in a non-evaluative and nonjudgemental fashion, both oneself and the current situation 3) Interpersonal Effectiveness—the effective strategies for asking for what one needs, saying no, and coping with interpersonal conflict 4) E motional Regulation—the effective strategies for learning to regulate ones emotions: Identifying and labeling emotions Identifying obstacles to changing emotions Reducing vulnerability to emotion mind Increasing positive emotional events Increasing mindfulness to current emotions Taking opposite action Applying distress tolerance techniques For research showing the benefits of DBT please click here Importance of Meditation: "A Wondering Mind is an Unhappy Mind " Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert (2010) studied the effects "mind wandering" had on happiness. "Mind wandering" occurs when an individual thinks about past events, what might happen in the future or what will never happen at all. Past research suggests this is the brain's natural state. Their study concluded that: 1) People's mind wander frequently, regardless of what they were doing. 2) People were less happy when their minds wandered. 3) What people were thinking, rather than doing, was a better predictor of their happiness. This research suggests that "a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost". DBT incorporates mindfulness and improves an individual's ability to stay in the present and control "mind wandering", thus having the potential to increase happiness.
Family Therapy
Most family conflict comes down to effective communication and validating the other person's perspective. In my family counseling I utilize the 5 Secrets of Effective Communication in order to enhance inner connections. Practically all of us have a friend, colleague, client, customer or family member we aren’t getting along with very well. Perhaps the difficult person in your life is excessively critical of you, complains constantly, won’t express his or her feelings, always has to be right, or never listens to you. Does anyone come to mind? The 5 Secrets of Effective Communication are secrets that secrets that can rapidly transform conflict and misunderstanding into intimacy and trust. It can be remembered using the acronym EAR: E = Empathy The Disarming Technique: You find truth in what the other person is saying, even if it seems illogical, self-serving, distorted, or just plain “wrong.” Thought and Feeling Empathy: You summarize what the other person just said (Thought Empathy) and acknowledge how he or she is probably feeling, given what he or she just said (Feeling Empathy) Inquiry: You as gentle, probing questions to learn more about what the other person is thinking and feeling. A = Assertiveness “I Feel” Statements: You express your own feelings and ideas openly according to the formula, “I’m feeling X, Y, and Z right now,” where are X, Y and Z refer to any of a wide variety of feeling words, such as anxious, attacked, hurt, or sad. R = Respect Affirmation (formerly called Stroking): You convey warmth, caring and respect, even in the heat of battle
Group Therapy
When Panic Attacks: The New, Drug-Free Anxiety Therapy That Can Change Your Life by Dr. David Burns: We all know what it's like to feel anxious, worried, or panicky. What you may not realize is that these fears are almost never based on reality. When you're anxious, you're actually fooling yourself, telling yourself things that simply aren't true. The good news is the truth sets us free. In this group we will learn 40+ simple, effective CBT-based techniques to see the truth, helping us to overcome every conceivable kind of anxiety--without medication. While this book specifically targets anxiety the same techniques are applicable to many other mental health conditions: such as depression, addictions and borderline personality disorder.
Trauma-Focused CBT
TEAM-CBT is a major development of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) created by Dr. David Burns . Dr. Burns is considered one of the forefathers of CBT. He is a renowned psychiatrist and author of best-selling books including Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, When Panic Attacks, and Feeling Great: The Revolutionary New Treatment for Depression and Anxiety. TEAM-CBT is not a new “school” of therapy, but rather is a framework for conducting measurement-based therapy that is proven to be more effective than traditional therapy. TEAM CBT, which is an advanced form of CBT, has been found to reduce depression symptoms 23% and anxiety symptoms 33% per therapy hour. Furthermore it has been shown to have a recovery rate at least 4 times as high as traditional CBT and of antidepressants. TEAM CBT addresses resistance from a different angle, focusing on what is beautiful and awesome about negative thoughts and behaviors. Emotions, which help form the negative thoughts and behaviors, are seen through a lens of balancing your values with the reality of the situation. For example, when your inner value of compassion for self and others is not being played out in real life you may feel depressed. Therapy helps to "turn down the volume" of the emotions while honoring our true self, leading to less distress and resistance to change. TEAM is an acronym for the four crucial ingredients of effective therapy known to improve treatment outcomes: Testing, Empathy, Agenda-Setting, and Methods. Testing at the beginning and end of every session is used to understand your improvement, identify stuck points, provide feedback, focus, and make modifications that accelerate your recovery. Empathy: I am specifically train in multiple empathy skills that help establish a warm therapeutic alliance with you. Most people benefit from having a place to talk freely and openly, knowing that they can just be themselves and that they will be accepted, valued, understood and respected. I believe that the empathic connection is a necessary ingredient for successful therapy. And that even the most sophisticated methods are more effective once the empathic connection has been established. Agenda-setting: using a five-step method to understand your goals, we create a collaborative agenda that increases motivation and helps you remove obstacles necessary to achieve the change you want. Methods: I have over 100 powerful cognitive, behavioral and interpersonal methods that will help you with depression, low self esteem, anxiety, stress and trauma, unwanted habits, relationship concerns and more.
Location
Virtual sessions