Hello, I am a licensed clinical social worker in FL, AL, TN, and SC. I received my MSW degree from Barry University in Miami Shores, Miami, FL. and I have over 40 years of practice experience. I have extensive experience in community and emergency mental health, crisis intervention. I was in private practice for 21 years serving individuals, couples, families, community agencies and municipalities. While in private practice I also became a life coach and personal fitness trainer developing a unique approach to behavior and life style change. I combined my clinical experience with life coaching and personal fitness training and formed a program called Your Life in Focus. This paradigm became an extremely effective approach to help individuals make significant and sustained life-style changes. My experience, and creative approaches can have important and meaningful impact on your life.
In our first session we will have a brief time of introduction, I will share a little about my therapeutic style and then dive into the core issues that bring you into therapy at this time. By the end of the initial session you will have a "working" plan with some homework to jump start your journey of change and learning.
With my 40 plus years of extensive experience and training in treating a broad spectrum of counseling issues, you will find me creative, insightful, and dynamic in my approach to assessing the issues, and collaboratively arrive at a treatment plan and approach.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and it's associated sub or ancillary therapies have been the theoretical foundation and approach in addressing an array of counseling, mental health, and couple-relationship problems and issues. CBT is a highly effective system in surfacing problematic thinking, feeling and behavior. At the same time CBT is effective in bringing focused and clear solutions to the challenges in these three domains. I often pair CBT with psychodynamic approaches in order to address stuck points in a person's past and present interactional-relational experiences and attachments.
Christian counseling is specific to one who identifies as "Christian" or one who is actively exploring what it means to become and be a Christian. Christian Counseling utilizes the Bible as God's authoritative word, it's precepts and principles and faith experience. This counseling approach and process seeks to assist the person on their Christian spiritual journey for their life style to become more congruent and aligned with their spiritual expectations and hopes serving Christ effectively and others selflessly.
Solution Focused Brief Treatment is a highly effective approach to rapidly ameliorate faulty thinking patterns, feeling states, and behavior. The first 1-2 sessions are designed to assess thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns. Once assessed and identified, sessions 3-6 are designed to reorient the person to new paradigms of thinking which will produce a different and preferred management style of feeling and behavior.
In couples counseling I help the couple explore their communication styles, and relational attachment models. Once communication styles, and relational attachment models are assessed, the real work begins for the couple to explore and adopt new communication styles and to relinquish non-working attachment styles.
Emotions are experience physiologically, they influence our thinking and ultimately our behavior. Emotions are informative, debilitating and liberating all at the same time. In EFT individuals who are open to the learning become more emotionally intelligent and thereby more effective manages or regulators of their emotional "drivers" and experience. In doing so, individuals and couples can unlock cognitive tools to understand one's emotions and their partner. This process deepens self and other understanding fostering closer intimacy.