Our Approach

Psychotherapy is a journey into understanding and healing. It is a journey of conversations together and time shared.

The first steps in therapy are getting to know you and understand you. At Empire Minds, we believe that we need to understand your life if we are to help you. This means understanding your stories, your life experience, your families, your cultures, where you come from, and where you want to be.

Once we have a shared understanding of what this journey should look like, we will talk about how we will be getting there.

We know that it takes your courage and insight to take this journey. At Empire Minds, we are committed to hearing your voice, listening with honesty, sympathy, and with a willingness to have challenging conversations with you. Through this process, we will offer strategies and support even when solutions seem so hard to find.

We believe that our expertise will be needed on your journey. At Empire Minds, our expertise and our knowledge is grounded in current evidence-based practices like CBT and DBT. We are proud of our expertise, and will be honest and humble with it. The truth is, everyone needs individualized support and we will work with you to find the therapist, team, and approach that will best support you.

CBT

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based treatment for depression, anxiety, trauma and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). CBT helps you to recognize the link between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and helps you adapt your thoughts and behaviors as a mechanism for positive change.

CBT is recognized as a “gold standard” treatment for many disorders, with a rich evidence base. We will help individualize an empirical treatment for you.

While engaged in CBT, your therapist will assist you in recognizing thinking patterns (thoughts, cognitions, assumptions, ways of thinking) that contribute to your symptoms and will work with you to challenge these thoughts and reframe your thinking.

Additionally, CBT involves supporting you in developing stronger, healthier behaviors and resisting avoidance behaviors that serve to maintain symptoms. This can be scary. At Empire Minds, our clinicians will guide and support you in gently confronting your fears.

DBT

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based treatment developed by Dr. Marsha Linehan. It was initially designed for clients managing chronic suicidality and self-harm behaviors (such as cutting). DBT has been adapted to adolescents, children, and other populations including clients struggling with emotional lability, self-injury, eating disorders and substance abuse.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based treatment developed by Dr. Marsha Linehan. It was initially designed for clients managing chronic suicidality and self-harm behaviors (such as cutting). DBT has been adapted to adolescents, children, and other populations including clients struggling with emotional lability, self-injury, eating disorders and substance abuse.

At Empire Minds, our clinicians have experience working in the field of DBT. We provide DBT-informed therapy which involves integrating the principles of DBT to address an array of presenting issues including impulsivity, difficulty tolerating intense emotions, and interpersonal difficulties.

For some clients, we may recommend full DBT services including individual therapy, group therapy, and skills coaching.

Positive Behavior Management

At Empire Minds, we know that difficult behaviors in children deserve to be addressed with compassion for both the parents and the children. Positive Behavior Management Therapy (PMT) is an approach used to address childhood externalizing disorders (e.g. oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).

This approach is grounded in evidence-based treatment and is focused on teaching and supporting parents around addressing their child’s behavioral challenges more effectively. It is not easy. But it helps both children and their caregivers.

PMT is time-limited and highly structured and involves teaching parents positive parenting strategies that are proven to be effective in increasing compliance and improving parent-child relations.

Supportive and Insight-Oriented Therapy

Life’s journey is full of challenges, trials, tribulations, and vicissitudes. At Empire Minds, our clinicians can help you think through what you need to make this journey thoughtful, mindful, and insightful.

Supportive therapy is focused on problem solving and working towards your strengths. This is the kind of therapy for when you’re having a tough time and just want to talk to someone, to reflect, to grow, and to figure out how to make the most of it.

Insight-Oriented Therapy is for when you want to understand yourself in a more challenging way, where the clinician can help you gain increased awareness into your thoughts and feelings through open ended exploration. One goal is to bring your unconscious patterns of behavior into conscious awareness.

Insight-oriented and supportive therapy can be helpful for an array of presenting concerns including relationship/adjustment challenges, some forms of depression, identity struggles, and life transitions.

If this is the kind of therapy you would like, we may want to offer strategies and techniques from other types of therapy, including CBT and DBT strategies, along the way. As always, every recommendation for therapy will be grounded in the evidence and based on our shared decisions.

School Consultation

Kids spend so much of their lives in schools—and at Empire Mind, we believe that helping kids almost always means helping them in school. Usually this is done through the child or adolescent and their parents, but sometimes a more comprehensive and intensive school consultation is required.

School consultation can involve a number of interventions including your child’s therapist attending an in-school observation to gain greater insight into your child’s behavior at school as well his/her/their interactions with teachers, other students, and/or academic material. The therapist will also collaborate with school staff on developing individualized behavioral plans and other recommendations to more effectively address your child’s unique challenges in the classroom. The therapist may also provide psychoeducation to school personnel to support them in viewing your child’s struggles through a therapeutic lens. School consultation can take place through in-school meetings or in an ongoing as-needed phone consultation with school staff.

Group Therapy