Our techniques:

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is based on the premise that a person’s mood is directly related to the person’s thoughts.

The goal of CBT is to help people recognize negative thought patterns, assess the accurateness of those thoughts, and alter those thought patterns with healthier, more accurate thought patterns.

Trauma Focused CBT (TF-CBT) is an evidence-based treatment for children and adolescents impacted by trauma. This treatment model has a strong emphasis on parent/caregiver participation in co-joint sessions.

Research has shown that TF-CBT successfully resolves a broad array of emotional and behavioral difficulties associated with single, multiple and complex trauma experiences.

DBT is a combination of cognitive and behavioral therapy that focuses on four main skills:

1. core mindfulness

2. distress tolerance

3. interpersonal effectiveness

4. emotional regulation.

DBT helps to increase coping skills for individuals who struggle with regulating their emotions, coping with stress, or have dysfunctional relationship patterns that interfere with maintaining a healthy connection with others.

Strength-based therapy is a type of positive psychotherapy that focuses more on your internal strengths and resourcefulness, and less on weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings.

When focusing on strengths, a positive mindset helps to build on a persons best qualities, identifying strengths, increasing resilience and changing worldview to one that is more positive.

A positive outlook can help expectations become more reasonable.

Motivational interviewing is a counseling technique/intervention that helps people resolve feelings and insecurities to find the internal motivation they need to change their behavior. It is practical and short-term that has a strong awareness on how difficult it is to make life changes.

It is often used in therapy to address addiction and the management of physical health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and asthma.

This intervention motivates people to identify changes in their behaviors that are preventing them from making healthier choices.

Research has shown that this intervention works well with individuals who start off unmotivated or unprepared for change.

Play therapy helps children process a variety of emotional or personal issues that may be affecting their behavior and/or mood through art and play.

Play is an important way for children to process emotions or experiences through make-believe in a way that they cannot in real life.

The therapist’s office is a safe space that gives a child a neutral environment to process. The therapist also helps give words to the child’s emotions, helps interpret the symbolic meaning of their play, offers the child new strategies for approaching the problem, and helps build self-esteem and coping skills.

EMDR is a trauma-based treatment that is used when someone has a history of a trauma that continues to negatively impact their life. It was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories (Shapiro, 1989a, 1989b). Shapiro’s (2001) Adaptive Information Processing model. EMDR therapy facilitates the accessing and processing of traumatic memories and other adverse life experience to bring these to an adaptive resolution.

EMDR therapy uses a three pronged protocol:

(1) past events that have laid the groundwork for dysfunction are processed, forging new associative links with adaptive information;

2) the current circumstances that elicit distress are targeted, and internal and external triggers are desensitized;

(3) templates of future events are incorporated, to assist the client in acquiring the skills needed for adaptive functioning.

EMDR is most used for treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but can also be used to treat: Anxiety disorders: Generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, phobias and social anxiety/phobia.

Faith-based or Spiritual counseling refers to counseling or psychotherapy that involves spiritual and/or religious components. This type of counseling is likely to be of interest to people for whom spirituality or religion play a major role in their lives. People who recognize their faith-based values to help them to make decisions, understand suffering, set priorities, and to create purpose and meaning in their lives.

Here at Mountain Top Counseling, we know that faith plays an important role in many people lives, whatever their religious background. We are proud to offer therapeutic services to clients of any religious or spiritual background.