Feeling tense, a sense of dread, agitated, keyed up, and/or having repetitive worried thoughts about the past, present and future. Individuals with anxiety have difficulty enjoying their experiences because they are consumed by worry and apprehension over future or past happenings.
Feeling down in mood for 2 or more weeks. Down mood includes feelings of worthlessness, guilt, irritability, tearfulness, lack of interest and lack of pleasure from usually enjoyable activities. Depression often involves repetitive negative thoughts about the self. Depression may also include the loss of or increase in appetite as well as interrupted sleeping cycles (either excessive sleep or difficulty falling and staying asleep).
Dr. Weber sees individuals who struggle with their sense of self. Clients often report long-term feelings of inadequacy, on-going self-criticism, and not feeling ‘good enough.’
This is a behavior often associated with Borderline Personality. Although a harmful and maladaptive behavior, the individual involved feels some sense of emotional relief from the act of cutting. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) has been shown to be highly successful in reducing cutting behaviors. Concrete strategies are given to reduce cutting behaviors, and to develop alternative ways for managing negative emotions.
A therapeutic approach developed by Marsha Linehan to help individuals cope with impulsive behavior, self-harm behavior, and intense emotional instability. This is a highly structured approach that gives clients concrete skills around mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation, and distress tolerance. It involves a considerable amount of both validation as well as active problem solving. DBT is a well-researched approach that is highly effective in treating both emotional dysregulation and also Borderline Personality.
Panic attacks are episodes of intense fear and can often result from a chronic overload of anxiety. Panic attacks are terrifying for the individual and involve a series of physiological symptoms (including rapid heart beat, sweating, chest pain, shaking, shortness of breath, nausea, feeling dizzy, increased pulse), as well as thoughts of dying or of not being safe in one’s surroundings. Panic is often associated with an overwhelming urge to flee a situation. Dr. Weber helps individuals to understand the underlying beliefs involved in the panic and to develop alternate ways to cope and manage panic symptoms.
Many individuals report difficulty managing interpersonal distress. Sometimes a mental health diagnosis can make managing relationships more difficult. In addition, some clients present with difficultly expressing their feelings or managing conflicts in relationships. Others report difficulty keeping or finding the types of relationships that they want.
Parents and teenagers must navigate a difficult process as the teenager begins to separate from the parents and form his/her separate identity. Dr. Weber works with both parents and teenagers to help in this process in terms of developing strategies for communication, conflict resolution, and ways to begin connecting more effectively. Dr. Weber helps the teenager and the parent to finds ways to better understand and to develop greater tolerance for one another.
Some clients present to treatment with Dr. Weber in order to process a past or present trauma. Trauma is exposure to a stressor that involves actual or perceived threat, danger, serious injury, or emotional injury to the self or another person. The response to the event may involve fear, helplessness, and can manifest in persistent avoidance of triggers associated with the trauma, and/or hyper vigilance to events surrounding the trauma. Some traumatic experiences can lead to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder where the event is relived in various ways and causes intense emotional distress and arousal. Clients who have trauma in their backgrounds often have both trouble relaxing as well as trouble connecting to their immediate ‘here and now’ experience.
Some individuals enter psychotherapy without serious mental health symptoms but are managing a difficult life transition, i.e. divorce, family changes, death/dying issues, moving, job changes, medical issues. These folks are often looking for a place to process this transition and to gain support for the life change.
Individuals who manage serious medical diagnoses (including diabetes, multiple sclerosis, cancer, hyper/hypo thryroidism, alopecia, scoliosis, and a host of others) often report mood changes and changes in their sense of self, resulting from the diagnosis. Serious medical issues can drastically impact a person’s life and functioning. Dr. Weber helps these individuals to process their diagnoses and to go on to have fulfilling lives while managing possible medical limitations.
Some clients report that, although they want to have relationships and connections with others, they are bombarded by chronic and acute anxiety when faced with new social situations or people. Dr. Weber works with social anxiety by helping individuals to understand their underlying beliefs and fears about these situations, and to develop increased confidence in social situations.
Dr. Weber helps clients to develop strategies and techniques for managing feeling chronically overloaded by work and personal stress. These techniques include talk therapy, mindfulness, and limit setting.
Dr. Weber helps clients to develop strategies and techniques for managing intense anger or aggressive explosiveness. These techniques involve learning ways to cool off and validate underlying feelings so that they may be communicated more effectively.
Some clients report difficulty with their attention span and trouble concentrating. Dr. Weber helps these individuals to develop strategies and techniques (often with the addition of medication as prescribed by a psychiatrist) to help with executive functioning, planning, and accomplishing goals.
Dr. Weber helps individuals move through the stages of grief as well as to understand and process grief that becomes complicated or contributes to depression. In addition, some individuals present to treatment with a sudden grief reaction to a death that occurred in their past. Dr. Weber helps individuals to understand their sadness and to process the loss, as well as how the loss may impact their future.
