What to Expect
Psychotherapy is designed to help individuals better understand their experiences and make meaningful changes to improve their quality of life. Psychotherapy helps people understand current behaviors, reactions, and experiences. Initiating therapy can be intimidating and it is important to feel like your provider is down-to-earth, compassionate, and can offer meaningful treatment.
Dr. Keaschuk provides psychotherapy to children, adolescents, and adults. She also knows that psychotherapy is not a “one size fits all” approach and uses her training and 20 years of experience to customize treatment to the person. At the same time, she ensures that evidence-based treatments are used to provide maximum relief in a reasonable period.
In addition to general training in mental health and health psychology Dr. Keaschuk has specialty training in the following areas:
- Chronic Disease Management
- Acute Illness
- Weight Management
- Parent-Child Conflict
- Parent Based Therapeutic Interventions
- Emotion Based Therapeutic Interventions
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Learning Disorders
Dr. Keaschuk is experienced with a variety of evidence based therapeutic options including:
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
At the core of ACT is the goal to increase psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility is the ability to be fully present in the current moment, accepting the situation as it is, while choosing and committing to actions that move you towards your own values. ACT incorporates mindfulness and self-acceptance. It is an active treatment and is empirically-based.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
This approach comes from an understanding that psychological problems are based, in part, on unhelpful ways of thinking and learned patterns of unhelpful behaviors. Learning ways to challenge unhelpful thoughts and problem solving around unhealthy behaviors, can help people learn better ways of coping with their problems and become more effective in their lives.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
This approach integrates mindfulness, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotional regulation to help clients engage effectively in their lives and with the people around them. The focus is on helping individuals identify and build on their own strengths, exploring thoughts, feelings and beliefs that may be making an individual’s life more challenging and working in a collaborative manner within the therapy sessions
Interpersonal Therapy
This approach explores current relationships and their impact on psychological health or distress. By working on relationship patterns it is able to target symptom resolution, social functioning and interpersonal support.
Emotion Focused Skills Training (EFST)
This approach is typically used with parents and/or caregivers to help them learn ‘Advanced Skills’ to support their loved one (even an adult child or spouse) through mental illness. It is based on interpersonal neurobiology and emotion-focused therapy and focuses on skills of emotion regulation, boundaries and relationship repair.