Depression Counseling in South Amboy, 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 is widespread and can also serve a function that allows one to move on in life. The catalyst such as PTSD or loss, when explored appropriately, can enliven a depressed individual. Although depressive feelings and thoughts are debilitating, the process of Working through these feelings can serve as a catalyst for personal growth.

Dr. Marty has developed his own approach to handling depression he calls Focused Short Term Therapy (FSTT)* It combines new cutting edge therapies in the field of energy psychology as well as short term focusing on the depression. When appropriate Dr. Marty uses hypnosis and self hypnosis as well. To learn more about this approach you can go to: http://drmartytashman.com/focused-short-term-therapy-fstt-2/

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.

Children and adolescents who act out due to symptoms of AD/HD, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Autistic Spectrum Disorders, and School Underachievement constantly receive negative feedback from parents, teachers, and peers. This results in underlying feelings of helplessness and hopelessness leading to depression. I motivate such children to develop self-control which leads to improved academic and social skills. This leads to social acceptance and academic achievement and self-esteem rises. Helplessness and hopelessness dissipate and depression and anxiety lessen.

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.

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.

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.

I help people who are depressed and need thhelp getting to a better place. Common issues I help with: unhappy in your marriage or relationship and don't know what to do about it, depressed and having trouble eating, sleeping or getting out of bed, you're feeling very isolated and alone, feeling very sad about your relationship, divorce, feeling rejected or abandoned, low self-esteem, you're not even sure why you feel depressed, you're feeling very irritable, stressed, overwhelmed and miserable most of the time. I'm easy to connect with and genuinely interested in help you find better coping skills and make positive changes.

Depression is a mood disorder where it is important to seek out a professional. Chris has treated many people with depression and other mood disorders. Millions of Americans are effected by Anxiety and Depression with various symptoms of low mood, irritability, loss of pleasure. As a veteran psychotherapist who has treated many clients with depression, proper assessment is essential that can include coordinating care with a physician. While not all individuals need medication, having a therapist who can identify symptoms and offer empathy and understanding to individuals who suffer from a mental health disorder is beneficial. Chris uses a cognitive behavior therapy approach to help clients.

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 will determine the severity of depression and the need for medication. We will figure out if depression is an acute response to a crisis or situation. We will look at the causes, your experience of depression, what are triggers for depression, and ways to cope with it and give you better control of it. If it is a recurrent depression we will find ways for you to cope, and develop good support networks if you don't have them.

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.