When is it time to reach out to a professional?  

Worrying is part of the "normal" human experience.  However, it may be necessary to reach out to a professional if your anxiety begins to interfere with your ability to do the things you need to do or want to do in your daily life. Generalized Anxiety may look like excessive, uncontrollable worry about a number of things. It may involve intrusive, distressing thoughts, fatigue, irritability, muscle tension, difficulty relaxing, concentrating, or sleeping. In anxiety reduction treatment, I will use a combination of techniques to help you explore your responses to worries and work with you on identifying more effective ways of handling these worries, which can include implementing exposure techniques, relaxation techniques, and behavioral strategies. 

Depression:

Sadness is part of the lived human experience. However, depression can impact a person's ability to function at home or at work and can be extremely debilitating.  Some people's depression may look like "doom scrolling" or "bed rotting." For others, it may be feelings of worthlessness, low energy, appetite disturbances, excessive guilt, suicidal thoughts, or a combination of these symptoms. It might be time to seek outside help if your symptoms are impacting your ability to function in important areas of your life. Depending on your concerns and your goals, I will work with you to help you figure out strategies you need to employ to feel better, and explore all the causes  that might be exacerbating the current depressive state, which may include nutrition, a sedentary lifestyle, hormone imbalances, and/or sleep disturbances. 

With binge eating and chronic dieting, I can work with you on a variety of things - helping you relearn how to eat based on internal hunger and fullness cues using attuned eating, mindfulness strategies, and emotional regulation strategies, explore how past traumas may affect you trusting your body, work on challenging "all or nothing" thinking patterns about food/weight/movement, and explore how the societal and cultural messages (from social media, our families, etc) personally impact you, and support you in identifying things you can do to not let these messages impact you as much. Outpatient therapy for an eating disorder may be appropriate if you:

 ○ Are medically stable 

○ demonstrate good insight 

○ are fairly motivated to change eating patterns 

○ Are either self-sufficient in establishing structure needed to make changes with regards to eating (restriction, binge eating and or/purging, weight gain if appropriate) or you are motivated to become self sufficient in this arena 

○ Are willing to be assessed by and coordinate with treatment team (physician, RD).