ABOUT ME

When I begin to apply for colleges in high school, being a counselor was the last thing on my mind. I would never have thought in a million years that I would be a therapist. In fact, I thought the whole mental health paradigm was kind of hokey and very suspect. I’m sure it surprised many of family members when I finally made the decision to pursue a masters degree in counseling.

Why did I go from being a skeptic of mental health to a full on mental health counselor? The truth was that I had been battling clinical levels of anxiety ever since was a child but I had no idea how much it was running the show. It made life incredibly difficult for me but I was in the dark about it. In short, I eventually was able to name it for what it was and to use tools and new ways of thinking about it largely based on cognitive behavioral therapy. I got better and life became more manageable. I was finally starting to act and be the person I thought I was deep down that was blocked by the anxiety. In short, there was something to all this mental health stuff after all.

For me what was most helpful was the CBT paradigm. CBT In a nut shell, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or CBT) is a specific model of therapy based on the premise that our dysfunctional or irrational beliefs/assumptions about ourself, the world or other people are sources of much of our suffering. CBT aims to help reevaluate these beliefs and adopt more helpful and realistic ones through techniques aimed at our emotions, thinking and behaviors.

Although CBT takes the past into consideration for how we got to where are now but it is largely based on the presence. From a CBT perspective, our past does not have to define us or keep us stuck. People are dynamic and capable of change.