FIND THE BEST THERAPISTS AND DIETITIANS
Evidence-Based Practice
The Clinical Psychology Division 12 of the American Psychological Association (APA) is dedicated, in part, to identifying the most effective treatments for psychological disorders. Our psychologists regularly keep up with this organization to understand how we can best use effective treatments for our clients.
As a consumer, there often is not a lot of guidance for learning how to pick a therapist that can best help you. Our psychologists at Mind Body Health are committed to evidence-based practice and were trained for a minimum of 5 years in programs that taught their doctoral level students to treat psychological conditions using scientific research and tailoring it to the individual.
All of our psychologists are trained in evidence-based practices for the treatment of specific disorders. Below is a summarized chart of what Division 12 has listed as effective treatments that our therapists are trained in that have STRONG research support. You can find more information on the Division 12 website as well:
As a consumer, there often is not a lot of guidance for learning how to pick a therapist that can best help you. Our psychologists at Mind Body Health are committed to evidence-based practice and were trained for a minimum of 5 years in programs that taught their doctoral level students to treat psychological conditions using scientific research and tailoring it to the individual.
All of our psychologists are trained in evidence-based practices for the treatment of specific disorders. Below is a summarized chart of what Division 12 has listed as effective treatments that our therapists are trained in that have STRONG research support. You can find more information on the Division 12 website as well:
PSYCHOLOGICAL TREATMENTS
Effective treatments our psychologists are trained in that have STRONG research support according to Division 12 of the American Psychological Association
Chronic and Persistent Pain
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy
Depression
Behavioral Activation
Cognitive Therapy
Anorexia
Family Based Treatment
Bulimia
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Binge Eating Disorder
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Weight Management
Behavioral Weight Loss Treatment
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Insomnia
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Sleep Restriction Therapy
Stimulus Control Therapy
Relaxation Training
Mixed Anxiety
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Exposure & Response Prevention
Cognitive Therapy
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Prolonged Exposure Cognitive Processing Therapy
Social Phobia
Public Speaking Anxiety
Cognitive & Behavioral Therapies
Specific Phobias
Exposure Therapies
Substance Use
Motivational Interviewing
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Seeking Safety
Contact us today to make an appointment with therapists who are committed to providing you effective treatments. To schedule an appointment, please call us today at 571.328.7408, Ext. 0 or for a quicker response, click the "Request an Appointment" button at the top of the page. We'll get back to you as quickly as possible.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Many of our therapists specialize in using Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT – pronounced like the word “act,” not the individual letters – a-c-t). Most often our psychologists use an approach based in ACT called Acceptance-Based Behavioral Therapy (ABBT).
What is ACT?
ACT is one of the “third wave” psychotherapies that has evolved to use mindfulness-based techniques in the course of treatment to help clients with whatever they may be struggling with.
ACT is comprised of six (6) core processes:
Defusion
The idea behind defusion is getting some distance from your thoughts, feelings, and emotions so that you’re not wrapped up in them and so that you don’t let them push you around so much. Clients will learn to see thoughts as just a bunch of words put together in a sentence. Clients learn that just because they have a thought doesn’t mean they need to do anything about it. Often clients are living their lives in reaction to thoughts, feelings, and emotions, instead of their values (see below). With defusion, you learn to observe thoughts and emotions come and go without reacting to them.
Acceptance
This core aspect of ACT focuses on helping clients become more tolerant of difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Clients learn that to be human is to feel a whole range of emotions. Typically we try to problem-solve away our emotions or difficult thoughts, but with ACT we learn to let them be. This is helpful in changing the brain’s response to problematic emotions and thoughts. We begin to feel calmer when certain thoughts, feelings or emotions arise as we become more accepting of them.
Contacting the Present Moment
This part of ACT focuses on helping clients stay focused on the here and now. Clients learn to become curious and aware of what their experience is moment to moment with interest and curiosity vs. judgement. This helps emotionally as our brains often are taking us into the past and future, two areas we don’t have much control over.
Self-As-Context
This is a principle of ACT that focuses on having clients learn and become aware that they are a vessel that carries thoughts, feelings, and emotions that come and go. Clients learn to tap into their “observing self” versus their “thinking self” using this principle of ACT.
Values
Clients spend time in therapy learning about what truly matters to them in their life. This is a beautiful aspect of ACT as it helps individuals learn how to connect with areas of their life that really matter to them. Dr. Doshi likes to refer to this as self-care. Clients begin to attend to what they’re really needing on a deeper level.
Committed Action
This is when clients take steps to move in the direction of their values in order to commit to living a life that they truly care about. This can be a scary step and our psychologists will be there to help with every step along the way.
To live a life you truly care about, do you need to have difficult conversations? Do you need to end a relationship? Do you need to try something again that you failed at in the past? Do you need to look for a new job? Sometimes to really feel fulfilled, we need to make big changes. Sometimes we just need to make small changes. No matter how big or small the change, Dr. Doshi will help you along the way.
ACT is comprised of six (6) core processes:
Defusion
The idea behind defusion is getting some distance from your thoughts, feelings, and emotions so that you’re not wrapped up in them and so that you don’t let them push you around so much. Clients will learn to see thoughts as just a bunch of words put together in a sentence. Clients learn that just because they have a thought doesn’t mean they need to do anything about it. Often clients are living their lives in reaction to thoughts, feelings, and emotions, instead of their values (see below). With defusion, you learn to observe thoughts and emotions come and go without reacting to them.
Acceptance
This core aspect of ACT focuses on helping clients become more tolerant of difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Clients learn that to be human is to feel a whole range of emotions. Typically we try to problem-solve away our emotions or difficult thoughts, but with ACT we learn to let them be. This is helpful in changing the brain’s response to problematic emotions and thoughts. We begin to feel calmer when certain thoughts, feelings or emotions arise as we become more accepting of them.
Contacting the Present Moment
This part of ACT focuses on helping clients stay focused on the here and now. Clients learn to become curious and aware of what their experience is moment to moment with interest and curiosity vs. judgement. This helps emotionally as our brains often are taking us into the past and future, two areas we don’t have much control over.
Self-As-Context
This is a principle of ACT that focuses on having clients learn and become aware that they are a vessel that carries thoughts, feelings, and emotions that come and go. Clients learn to tap into their “observing self” versus their “thinking self” using this principle of ACT.
Values
Clients spend time in therapy learning about what truly matters to them in their life. This is a beautiful aspect of ACT as it helps individuals learn how to connect with areas of their life that really matter to them. Dr. Doshi likes to refer to this as self-care. Clients begin to attend to what they’re really needing on a deeper level.
Committed Action
This is when clients take steps to move in the direction of their values in order to commit to living a life that they truly care about. This can be a scary step and our psychologists will be there to help with every step along the way.
To live a life you truly care about, do you need to have difficult conversations? Do you need to end a relationship? Do you need to try something again that you failed at in the past? Do you need to look for a new job? Sometimes to really feel fulfilled, we need to make big changes. Sometimes we just need to make small changes. No matter how big or small the change, Dr. Doshi will help you along the way.
To schedule an appointment, please call us today at 571.328.7408, Ext. 0 or for a quicker response, click the "Request an Appointment" button at the top of the page. We'll get back to you as quickly as possible.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
All of our psychologists are highly specialized in the use of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which is an evidence-based treatment for many psychological disorders.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?
CBT is a type of approach to therapy that helps clients understand that the way they are perceiving things can affect how one feels and affect how one behaves. Through the use of CBT, clients will learn to step outside of their mind and observe how their mind defaults to perceiving situations and the world around them. Through CBT, they’ll be able to learn how to have a different relationship with their thoughts such that it fosters better mood and functioning.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can take on many forms. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) are also considered cognitive and behavioral in nature because they help clients learn to manage thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a way that promotes psychological well-being.
Some core elements of cognitive therapy, specifically, include:
Cognitive therapy helps clients restructure unhelpful thought patterns in order to promote improved mood and functioning in the client’s day-to-day life and in their relationships.
Below are some examples of cognitive distortions. Do you ever fall into these types of thinking patterns? How does falling into these thought patterns typically make you feel? On a day-to-day basis, we often have automatic thoughts that pop up in our minds to make sense of our experiences. Sometimes they can be distorted and fall into the following patterns of thinking:
All or Nothing Thinking
Seeing things as either totally good or bad.
Overgeneralizing: Seeing a single event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
Negative Filtering
Filtering out all the positive aspects of a situation and fixating/magnifying the negative aspects.
Mind Reading
Assuming someone is thinking something negative about you without knowing for sure.
Fortune Telling
Predicting the worst will happen.
Below are examples of core beliefs. Do you have any of these beliefs?
Core beliefs are often formed at a young age through learned experiences or social or cultural environments. Core beliefs are beliefs that one holds about themselves and others.
In cognitive therapy, we often work on cognitive restructuring. This is the process of identifying automatic cognitive distortions or core beliefs, the situations that trigger them, the emotions that are felt, and then evaluating the evidence for and against the automatic thoughts and core beliefs. We practice creating alternative thought patterns or more helpful ways of thinking and then re-evaluate how the client feels emotionally once this process has been completed. We also evaluate how this change in thought pattern affects the client’s functioning.
The “behavioral” part of cognitive behavioral therapy:
Behavioral experiments are used in treatment to work on testing out situations that are tied to automatic thoughts, distorted thought patterns and core beliefs. For example, for someone who struggles with social anxiety and has the thought, “People will think I’m weird if I go up to them and start talking to them at the grocery store.” In the behavioral experiment, we practice having the client make small talk with employees and customers at the grocery store to see if it turns out to be just as bad as the client believes it to be. This is a form of exposure therapy which in essence is working towards engaging in behaviors that are typically avoided because of fear of the outcome or because of anxiety or negative experiences associated with the behavior in the past. Behavioral experiments and exposure therapy often help clients realize that their automatic assumptions, beliefs, and thoughts aren’t always true.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can take on many forms. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) are also considered cognitive and behavioral in nature because they help clients learn to manage thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a way that promotes psychological well-being.
Some core elements of cognitive therapy, specifically, include:
- Identifying core beliefs
- automatic thoughts, and
- Cognitive distortions
Cognitive therapy helps clients restructure unhelpful thought patterns in order to promote improved mood and functioning in the client’s day-to-day life and in their relationships.
Below are some examples of cognitive distortions. Do you ever fall into these types of thinking patterns? How does falling into these thought patterns typically make you feel? On a day-to-day basis, we often have automatic thoughts that pop up in our minds to make sense of our experiences. Sometimes they can be distorted and fall into the following patterns of thinking:
All or Nothing Thinking
Seeing things as either totally good or bad.
Overgeneralizing: Seeing a single event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
Negative Filtering
Filtering out all the positive aspects of a situation and fixating/magnifying the negative aspects.
Mind Reading
Assuming someone is thinking something negative about you without knowing for sure.
Fortune Telling
Predicting the worst will happen.
Below are examples of core beliefs. Do you have any of these beliefs?
Core beliefs are often formed at a young age through learned experiences or social or cultural environments. Core beliefs are beliefs that one holds about themselves and others.
- “I am unlovable”
- “People cannot be trusted”
- “I am not good enough”
- “I am a failure”
- “I am too needy”
In cognitive therapy, we often work on cognitive restructuring. This is the process of identifying automatic cognitive distortions or core beliefs, the situations that trigger them, the emotions that are felt, and then evaluating the evidence for and against the automatic thoughts and core beliefs. We practice creating alternative thought patterns or more helpful ways of thinking and then re-evaluate how the client feels emotionally once this process has been completed. We also evaluate how this change in thought pattern affects the client’s functioning.
The “behavioral” part of cognitive behavioral therapy:
Behavioral experiments are used in treatment to work on testing out situations that are tied to automatic thoughts, distorted thought patterns and core beliefs. For example, for someone who struggles with social anxiety and has the thought, “People will think I’m weird if I go up to them and start talking to them at the grocery store.” In the behavioral experiment, we practice having the client make small talk with employees and customers at the grocery store to see if it turns out to be just as bad as the client believes it to be. This is a form of exposure therapy which in essence is working towards engaging in behaviors that are typically avoided because of fear of the outcome or because of anxiety or negative experiences associated with the behavior in the past. Behavioral experiments and exposure therapy often help clients realize that their automatic assumptions, beliefs, and thoughts aren’t always true.
To schedule an appointment, please call us today at 571.328.7408, Ext. 0 or for a quicker response, click the "Request an Appointment" button at the top of the page. We'll get back to you as quickly as possible.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)
What is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)?
DBT is often used with clients who have more severe mental health symptoms. It has been shown to be an approach that is effective in treating substance use, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, depression, and borderline personality disorder.
At Mind Body Health, we do not specialize in providing a full DBT experience with phone coaching. Instead, we focus on helping clients learn and use DBT skills. Clients will work with their individual therapist to discuss situations that occur during the week and how they can practice using DBT skills.
There are four (4) main areas in which clients will begin developing coping skills:
Mindfulness
Being aware of what is happening in the present moment
Emotion Regulation
Learning how to manage emotion
Distress Tolerance
Learning how to tolerate painful thoughts, feelings or emotions in the moment
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Learning to effectively ask for things and saying no
At Mind Body Health, we do not specialize in providing a full DBT experience with phone coaching. Instead, we focus on helping clients learn and use DBT skills. Clients will work with their individual therapist to discuss situations that occur during the week and how they can practice using DBT skills.
There are four (4) main areas in which clients will begin developing coping skills:
Mindfulness
Being aware of what is happening in the present moment
Emotion Regulation
Learning how to manage emotion
Distress Tolerance
Learning how to tolerate painful thoughts, feelings or emotions in the moment
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Learning to effectively ask for things and saying no
To schedule an appointment, please call us today at 571.328.7408, Ext. 0 or for a quicker response, click the "Request an Appointment" button at the top of the page. We'll get back to you as quickly as possible.
Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP)
What is Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) Therapy?
Exposure and response prevention therapy falls under the umbrella of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
ERP is by far the most effective treatment we have to treat obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Patients suffering from OCD often have thoughts, images, objects, or situations that create great anxiety. There is often a desire to escape whatever might be triggering anxiety through compulsive behaviors. Compulsive behaviors often give patients a temporary sense of relief.
For instance, if someone has a great fear of getting sick because of germs, they may often engage in excessive hand washing to be able to escape the fear. This pattern of feeling anxious and engaging in compulsive behaviors to escape feeling anxious is reinforced over time and can result in psychological distress. Often OCD symptoms can be greatly life-interfering causing problems in relationships and work-related responsibilities.
In ERP treatment, our trained psychologists work with clients to confront that which they are avoiding (the exposure part of ERP) and help them to stop engaging in the compulsive behaviors (the response prevention part of ERP). For instance, a psychologist on our team may work with a patient who has germ-related OCD and have them touch door handles around our building without then washing their hands. With repeated exposure to doing this type of exercise, the mind begins to learn that you can be exposed to germs on a door handle everyday, not wash your hands, and nothing terrible happens. As the mind begins to learn this, psychological distress is reduced and OCD symptoms decrease.
OCD is complex and can take on many different forms. Many patients are apprehensive about engaging in this form of treatment. Our compassionate therapists are here to help. Call or email us today to get help from our psychologists who are experts in using Exposure & Response Prevention for OCD.
ERP is by far the most effective treatment we have to treat obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Patients suffering from OCD often have thoughts, images, objects, or situations that create great anxiety. There is often a desire to escape whatever might be triggering anxiety through compulsive behaviors. Compulsive behaviors often give patients a temporary sense of relief.
For instance, if someone has a great fear of getting sick because of germs, they may often engage in excessive hand washing to be able to escape the fear. This pattern of feeling anxious and engaging in compulsive behaviors to escape feeling anxious is reinforced over time and can result in psychological distress. Often OCD symptoms can be greatly life-interfering causing problems in relationships and work-related responsibilities.
In ERP treatment, our trained psychologists work with clients to confront that which they are avoiding (the exposure part of ERP) and help them to stop engaging in the compulsive behaviors (the response prevention part of ERP). For instance, a psychologist on our team may work with a patient who has germ-related OCD and have them touch door handles around our building without then washing their hands. With repeated exposure to doing this type of exercise, the mind begins to learn that you can be exposed to germs on a door handle everyday, not wash your hands, and nothing terrible happens. As the mind begins to learn this, psychological distress is reduced and OCD symptoms decrease.
OCD is complex and can take on many different forms. Many patients are apprehensive about engaging in this form of treatment. Our compassionate therapists are here to help. Call or email us today to get help from our psychologists who are experts in using Exposure & Response Prevention for OCD.
To schedule an appointment, please call us today at 571.328.7408, Ext. 0 or for a quicker response, click the "Request an Appointment" button at the top of the page. We'll get back to you as quickly as possible.
Intuitive & Mindful Eating
Our Registered Dietitians often use non-dieting models of eating competence, mindful eating and intuitive eating.
What is involved with these approaches?
It’s about ENJOYING FOOD once again and feeling good about the food choices you’re making. You can stop feeling guilty or deprived by the foods you feel you should or shouldn’t be eating.
It’s about learning to LISTEN TO YOUR BODY in understanding what types of food and amounts of food feel just right to your body. There are no rules about what you should and shouldn’t eat based on some fad diet. Instead, you’re listening to your own genetics, your own body’s feedback, to help you understand what to eat going forward.
It’s about finally giving yourself PERMISSION to eat food that may have been “forbidden” in your mind for many years and learning to free yourself from all the rules around food and dieting as you learn to TRUST yourself again around foods that might have been “off-limits” to you.
Learn to enjoy a VARIETY of foods. Your body needs different nutrients from different types of foods. Many diets today encourage cutting certain foods out. Psychologically and physically, this can lead to not fueling your body properly and also developing an unhealthy relationship with food. Through intuitive eating and eating competence, you can begin to enjoy a variety of food without have to refer to rules about what you should and shouldn’t eat.
TASTE your food. Really taste your food through mindfulness. Savor the flavors. Enjoy the taste. Understand if you truly enjoy the food or not. If so, eat until you notice your body has enjoyed enough and then learn to leave foods when your body is done with it.
MAKING MEAL TIMES SPECIAL. Instead of fitting it into your day, make meal times a special part of your day where you connect with food, relax, and enjoy the pleasures of eating the food in front of you.
DISCOVER. When you’re not following strict rules about what foods you should and shouldn’t eat, you can take time to truly discover different foods. EXPERIMENT with different foods, recipes, etc. and determine for yourself the types of foods you enjoy. Find fruits and veggies you like and eat them because you like them, not because some diet book says you have to.
Skeptical? There’s a lot of data backing up these approaches. Because we all have such different genetics and taste preferences, no single diet is going to work for everyone. Through eating competence and intuitive eating, you’ll discover what’s just right for your body.
It’s about learning to LISTEN TO YOUR BODY in understanding what types of food and amounts of food feel just right to your body. There are no rules about what you should and shouldn’t eat based on some fad diet. Instead, you’re listening to your own genetics, your own body’s feedback, to help you understand what to eat going forward.
It’s about finally giving yourself PERMISSION to eat food that may have been “forbidden” in your mind for many years and learning to free yourself from all the rules around food and dieting as you learn to TRUST yourself again around foods that might have been “off-limits” to you.
Learn to enjoy a VARIETY of foods. Your body needs different nutrients from different types of foods. Many diets today encourage cutting certain foods out. Psychologically and physically, this can lead to not fueling your body properly and also developing an unhealthy relationship with food. Through intuitive eating and eating competence, you can begin to enjoy a variety of food without have to refer to rules about what you should and shouldn’t eat.
TASTE your food. Really taste your food through mindfulness. Savor the flavors. Enjoy the taste. Understand if you truly enjoy the food or not. If so, eat until you notice your body has enjoyed enough and then learn to leave foods when your body is done with it.
MAKING MEAL TIMES SPECIAL. Instead of fitting it into your day, make meal times a special part of your day where you connect with food, relax, and enjoy the pleasures of eating the food in front of you.
DISCOVER. When you’re not following strict rules about what foods you should and shouldn’t eat, you can take time to truly discover different foods. EXPERIMENT with different foods, recipes, etc. and determine for yourself the types of foods you enjoy. Find fruits and veggies you like and eat them because you like them, not because some diet book says you have to.
Skeptical? There’s a lot of data backing up these approaches. Because we all have such different genetics and taste preferences, no single diet is going to work for everyone. Through eating competence and intuitive eating, you’ll discover what’s just right for your body.
Contact us today to start this new journey in learning how to love food again in a way that honors your body! To schedule an appointment, please call us today at 571.328.7408, Ext. 0 or for a quicker response, click the "Request an Appointment" button at the top of the page. We'll get back to you as quickly as possible.