Depression Counseling in Riverdale, NJ.

While implementing a cognitive behavioral approach, I have extensive experience in helping clients improve their mood and quality of their life. I utilize evidence-based methods that can relieve emotional pain and aid clients’ recovery from debilitating symptoms. Treatment can bring back positive feelings, allowing you to improve your connection with yourself and others, achieve fulfillment and help you to function at your best.

Depression often occurs when when we are only able to imagine a future governed by our past. The depression is held in place by memories, and beliefs acquired in the past that have been misfiled in projections of our future. Therapy, properly conducted, helps us place the past where it belongs leaving plenty of empty space and freedom in which to imagine invigorating possibilities for the future. Medication may or may not be needed to get the process started. When one gains the ability to imagine engagement in that which beckoned but seemed impossible, depression dissipates.

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.

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 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.

Depression comes in differant forms, sometimes people become depressed because of situations in thier lives, be that losses or traumatic life events. Situational depression is real and can be treated very effectively through psychotherapy. Chronic depression is a more organic condition that can be a long term condition, however, good psychodynamic psychotherapy can be extremely helpful. With either situational or chronic depression, psychotherapy is an important part of part of the path to recovery.

I work with many people with depression whether as individuals, or in the context of couples therapy. I help people to become aware of their thoughts, feelings, and the experience they have in their bodies around their depression. I work cognitively and behaviorally to help them understand distorted thinking. I also work to "externalize" the feeling of depression, and help people understand that, "you are not your thoughts." Depression may be visiting you, but you are not depression. Mindfulness is a tool I use with depression to help people understand what is happening to them in the moment, and to begin to open to emotions that may be blocked.

Depression is exhausting and isolating, but it’s also highly treatable with effective psychotherapy. My approach is collaborative and gentle, and I believe that healing happens when we feel connected and supported. I integrate a variety of therapeutic techniques including CBT, mindfulness and insight oriented interventions. I help my clients alter thoughts and behaviors that exacerbate depression, improve their relationships, and address underlying and unresolved feelings that lead to depressed mood. Together, we can help you through and out of your depression to live a balanced and happy life.

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.