Depression Counseling in Highlands, NJ.

Social anxiety and shyness can easily lead to feelings of depression. If you feel depressed because you feel alone, isolated and have trouble making friends, you might be glad to know that there is a way to learn and practice the social skills you missed learning as a child. You can learn and practice new skills, meet new people, learn how to start conversations and create your own social circle. Life can change and it takes just one step to start the process rolling in the right drection.

I have extensive experience working with depression, from mild forms to severe, cripplling depression. Sometimes depression can seem like the world around you has changed, leaving you isolated and feeling all alone. At times some may feel unable to go on with their daily life. I help you identify the root causes of depression and can provide strategies to move through and onwards with life.

My approach attacks depression by quickly focusing in on the primary cause of depression. I show people how their current beliefs about their adversities, past and present, are the primary cause of depression. I teach people how it is well within their power to adopt, without delay, alternative beliefs that help them cope with and prevail over these adversities. I also show my patient how to feel worthwhile and adequate even if she is depressed and performing poorly in life. Often self-downing goes with feelings of depression and makes for depression over being depressed. REBT tackles the rut of depression by attacking both the original and the secondary feelings of depression.

Depression doesn't always look the way people expect. Sometimes it's not sadness so much as numbness, disconnection, or just going through the motions. I work with clients experiencing depression using CBT, EMDR, and interpersonal therapy to help you understand what's driving it, shift the thought patterns keeping you stuck, and build coping skills that actually hold up. We'll also look at the relational pieces, because depression rarely exists in a vacuum. This isn't about putting a positive spin on things. It's about doing the real work so you can start feeling like yourself again.

Our work starts by acknowledging the social, cultural, and environmental conditions that may contribute to the problems that affect your quality of life and capacity to receive or engage in mental health care. Therapy is tailored to your preferences to minimize stressors and build skills for interacting more effectively with the outside world. The behaviors, emotions, relationship patterns, or self-beliefs that no longer work for you can be transformed, rather than pathologized by identifying external power imbalances that impede quality of life and highlighting the good intentions behind difficult interactions.

Clients struggling from feeling emotionally hurt, isolated, selfish, helpless, or hopeless can gain insight into symptoms and treatment of depression. Clients can learn emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal relationship skills and heal from past painful experiences that may influence current thoughts and belief systems in an unhealthy way.

I help my clients learn how to let go of their depression and replace it with acceptance and joy. Depression often occurs when we take situations and others' behavior personally. When we think they mean something about our self-worth. You can learn how to define your own self-worth and not allow anything outside yourself to determine your mood. I can help you learn how to take better care of yourself by learning to heal the deeper feelings underneath your depression like sadness, helplessness and loneliness.

Hal helps clients understand depression and better cope with the nasty and persistent erosion of hope. Hal encourages his clients to understand the reason(s) for their depression and unique ways to climb out of it. He also encourages clients to connect to, express, even write about their depression. Hal believes that only by facing it head are we able to effectively disarm depression, while increasing self-esteem.

When you are depressed, you lack energy and motivation, and want to isolate, which is one of the worst things you can do. Negative thinking drags you further into a hole, and staying alone with your thoughts can make the depression worse. I will help you evaluate your thoughts and your situation more objectively, and give you ideas about how to begin to pull yourself out of the darkness. Trying to do it alone can just prolong it. Sometimes you just need a hand to pull you up. I can do that.

Depression rarely looks the same twice. For some it is sadness; for others it is numbness, exhaustion, or going through the motions while feeling invisible inside your own life. As a licensed therapist in Manhattan, I work with people whose depression has roots in trauma, loss, or long-standing patterns that talk therapy alone hasn't reached. Using EMDR and IFS, we work at the level where those roots actually live. If you are in New York City and looking for depression treatment that goes deeper than symptom management, I would love to hear from you.

Depression is often controlled by our unconscious feelings, thoughts, memories, and dreams. Drawing on Positive Psychology and other therapeutic models, I help clients to understand how we relive early experiences unconsciously, and I coach them on behavioral techniques they can use to overcome the vicious cycle of negativity and change their present. These include a blend of empirically based techniques clients can use at work or at home to overcome depression, end self-sabotage, and get unstuck.

You did not choose depression, and it is not something that can simply be “shaken off.” Depression is real, life-altering, and can convince you that happiness or peace will never return. Yet depression does not define you. Together, we can acknowledge its weight while also challenging the painful story it tells. My role is to walk with you through the heaviness, to hold space for the difficulty, and to help you discover that hope and healing are possible. You do not have to face this alone.

You can find a way to eliminate depression, get depression help with depression counseling, and jump start your life. Depression is not just emotional it is physical as well. The exhaustion and fatigue can be the hardest part. We will work on becoming more connected to your life and your loved ones. When this happens you will get a renewed sense of energy and begin to feel good once more.